Viewpoints

Blogging About a Black Girl’s World

By Tyler Newman

Spectrum staff

Since kindergarten, I’ve attended a private, predominantly white, all-girls school.

I’m a black girl.

And, at first, that didn’t make me feel much different than anyone else of my classmates. In 8^th-grade, though, a white teacher stuck her hand in my cork-screw curly, natural hair. Without asking. I was sort of shocked, but only for a moment. This is normal, I told myself. This is the reality of being a black girl in a predominantly white school.

In middle school, most kids are just trying fit in. That’s part of the reason I rarely wore my hair natural in the first place. My mother thought flat-ironing my hair straight made it easier to manage than my kinky hair. I thought flat-ironed hair made me look prettier.

It also kept me from standing out. Once, when I wanted to be friends with a circle of rich white girls who wore Tory Burch flats and designer clothes, I begged my mother for a pair of those flats. After months of begging, I got Tory Burch shoes for Christmas. My classmates complimented me on my flats. But that didn’t make me one of them. Those girls didn’t let me in their circle.

By 9^th grade, something in me started to change. Mainly, I started seeing more people who looked like me by watching them on Youtube and hearing them talk about how black is beautiful. I heard about “the big chop,” black girls growing out their natural hair and shearing away the strands that had been chemically straightened and, in the process, damaged. The Saturday that I sat in Robert’s chair at Deva Curl in Manhattan, he gave me my chop and plenty of tips to carry on my natural hair journey.

My blog, Afro Puff Chronicles, results from the work I’m doing to feel confident in my blackness and everything else that I am. It’s for other black and brown girls—all girls of color, actually—who are trying to navigate spaces where they feel different, unaccepted and, perhaps, unloved. Afro Puff Chronicles is a hub for females of color with their own questions to ask and answers to give.

The blog is for girls like Lauren Liu, an Asian American classmate of mine who battled depression and killed herself on October 30, 2017. She was 14. She was one of a handful of Asian girls in our mostly white school. At her funeral, her parents read a note Lauren had left, saying her suicide was no one’s fault. Still, I do wonder why she hurt and how I and others could have helped her.

Not long ago, I and a black girl, who recently graduated from my school, discussed our shared experiences. We described our younger selves as “docile Negroes.” We said we regretted not initiating conversations with our white classmates about relevant topics—anything having to do with black lives and living in our shoes—so that we didn’t draw too much attention to ourselves or stir up trouble.

I’m 16 now and preparing for my final stretch of high school. Writing about my life and my experiences, including the anxieties that used to weigh me down, will help me go the rest of the way.