Praise for Girl

‘Enlightening, relatable, warm and witty, Girl is a must-read.’ Sunday Times Style

‘Girl is an essential, vital and urgent exploration of Black womanhood that should be on everyone’s reading list. Every page is meaningful and a call for empathy, hope and change. There is such power in the stories that are told, from Kenya’s own experience – as a mother, as a journalist, as an American in London, to Ebele Okobi’s essay on the unspeakable loss of a brother to police brutality. If any book should enrich – and disrupt – your life, let it be this.’ Harper’s Bazaar UK

‘Powerful, intelligent and thought-provoking. A must read for our times and beyond.’ ELLE UK

‘Kenya Hunt provocatively threads cultural observations through relatable stories that illuminate our current cultural moment while transcending it.’ Refinery29

‘An essential book to help in becoming an anti-racist ally.’ Dazed

‘A provocative, heart-breaking and frequently hilarious collection of original essays on what it means to be Black, a woman, a mother and a global citizen in today’s ever-changing world.’ Glamour UK

‘Girl speaks to the Black woman of today.’ Bethann Hardison, model and activist

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First Published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Kenya Hunt 2020

Kenya Hunt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008371999

Version 2020-10-06

Note to Readers

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008371975

For Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland,

Atatiana Jefferson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones,

Tanisha Anderson, Oluwatoyin Salau,

Gynnya McMillen, Korryn Gaines, Riah

Milton, Joyce Curnell, Dominique Fells…

Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Introduction

1 Girl

2 Notes on Woke

3 Wakanda Forever

4 An American in London

5 In My Feelings

6 Sally Hemings and Hidden Figures

7 Upon Reflection

Funmi Fetto

8 Motherhood

9 Skinfolk

10 Make Yourself at Home, but Not Here

11 I See Black People

12 Loss

Ebele Okobi

13 So We Don’t Die Tomorrow

Jessica Horn

14 The Lord’s House, a Queen’s Soul

15 Inferno

16 On Hair

Freddie Harrel

17 The Front Row

18 Modern Activism

19 On Queenie

Candice Carty-Williams

20 Bad Bitches

Epilogue: The Way We Grieve

Thank Yous

About the Publisher

Introduction

When I started this book, I was on maternity leave with my second son. The freedom of being home all day, every day, and the disorientation of an on-demand breastfeeding schedule oddly suited my writing. It meant that I was awake and journalling during those quiet moments in the night when everyone else was sleeping. I liked the solitude that came with being housebound for large chunks of time with a newborn. After years spent hopped up on adrenaline, it felt good to be off the work treadmill for a moment and to have an opportunity to reassess my life and recalibrate. Not to mention I appreciated having a break to just focus on my family and my writing, uninterrupted by morning commutes, extended work travel and deadlines.

But now, as I complete the book with this introduction more than a year later, I’m housebound for a different reason. We’re more than four months into a global pandemic, as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) steamrolls its way through the world, and eight weeks into a nationwide lockdown. The experience of working from home all day, while in a government-enforced quarantine, feels much less like a freedom, though it is most certainly a privilege.

Small acts we once took for granted like shaking a stranger’s hand, hugging a friend, visiting loved ones or having dinner in a crowded restaurant, are not possible for the foreseeable. Now, we walk down the street wearing face masks, paranoid about who might have coughed just steps before. And we scrub and disinfect our groceries (purchased in a whirlwind of panic after waiting in socially distanced queues that stretch for blocks outside stores) with a rigour that just months ago would have been declared a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder.

The basics — our health, the food on our tables, a walk outdoors, a deep inhale of fresh air — now feel like life’s ultimate luxuries. But luxury’s meaning changes with context and the pandemic has made the divisions that separate race and class painfully clear.

When the virus hit, a popular line began circulating that 2020 was the end of identity politics, that COVID-19 was the great equaliser that didn’t see race or class. People of colour knew better. And the opposite turned out to be true as the news was confirmed. Black, Muslim, Latin and Asian communities were the hardest hit, and women (who make up the vast majority of ‘essential workers’) were shouldering the brunt of the load. The virus wasn’t wiping the slate clean, it was deepening pre-existing inequalities.

I’ve watched close friends lose their loved ones, jobs and mental health to COVID-19. I’ve also watched dear friends, forced to reimagine their lives in the face of disruption, begin exciting new jobs, launch innovative new projects, and enter new romantic relationships. Throughout it all, I saw my friends and family more than we had in years, checking in on each other throughout the week on Zoom, FaceTime and Houseparty to make sure we were holding up okay in isolation as sickness, death and a crippled economy inched closer.

And just when it seemed like the news cycle and our collective angst couldn’t get worse, we found joy, laughter and solidarity in the most unexpected places. At an enormous, spontaneous Instagram Live party put on by the American DJ D-Nice, I bumped into old friends I hadn’t seen in years (old media colleagues, music industry mates and nightclubbing buddies) and the imaginary ones I had only ever followed from a distance (Michelle Obama, Janet Jackson, Rihanna and Tracee Ellis Ross to name a few).

Each one of our circumstances were uniquely different and yet we were all there, 100,000 of us united in isolation and our need for human connection. Weeks later, over 700,000 of us tuned in to a live stream music battle-turned-mutual appreciation session between two women responsible for soundtracking multiple generations of Black lives, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, and then bonded for the next twenty-four hours over the endless stream of feel-good memes the evening produced. It was a night of sisterhood and healing. A celebration of us, and all our nuances. ‘Most of the time, I’d prefer, I like to be a lady. Sometimes, I’m not. I’m a lot of things. Aren’t we a lot of things?’ Jill Scott said. We were all alone, together.

The show of numbers throughout these moments reminded us of our own agency and collective power, especially when the world erupted in protests over the videotaped murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man suffocated under the knee of a white police officer. We mobilised on both small local and sprawling global levels. We raised money for bail funds for protestors, called government officials and demanded arrests, and circulated petitions to defund the police. We protested, both in the streets and virtually. And we called out racism as and when we saw it. We said their names: George. Breonna. Ahmaud. Tony. Aiyana. Eric. Michael. Sandra. Tamir. Tony. Tanisha. Yvette. Rekia. Natasha. Kindra. Kimberlee. Joyce. Ralkina. Kayla. Gynnya. Korryn. And we did all of this in a matter of weeks, with black women powering much of the action, from organising marches and conducting justice work trainings to creating social media campaigns and assets that mobilised millions around a range of action plans. Throughout it all, we asserted our beauty and humanity in the face of tragedy, while continuing to go to work, mother our families and support our friends and relatives. We showed up, together.

So while the world looks radically different from how it did when I first began writing these essays, reflecting on a decade’s worth of personal and cultural touchstones, the issues at its heart — belonging, connection, resilience and identity — remain. And as we re-evaluate our lives during one of the most pivotal years in modern history, and move forward towards a future that will be different from the one we imagined, I hope this book reminds you that even in the midst of chaos, we’re here, loving, persevering, growing and finding the meaning in life as we go.

1 Girl

Girl! GWORL. Gorl. Guhl. Gurl. Grrrrrlll.

‘Mommy, why is it that every time you’re on the phone or with your friends it’s always girl, girl, girl, girl?’ my son asked me two years ago, as I was tucking him into bed for the night. I was amused. Mostly at the sight and sound of myself through my five-year-old’s eyes and ears — he had gotten my animated pacing and high-pitched intonation just right — but also at the idea that I used the word enough for him to pick up on it.

‘I hadn’t realised, sweets. Do I really say it that much?’

‘Girl! You do,’ he said with a childish smirk, before turning over and closing his eyes. I tried to swallow my laughter as I turned off the light and tiptoed out of the room.

In my life I’ve used many pet names for the people I know and love: sis, luv, beauty, lovebug, babes, hon, pumpkin, doodlebug, sweets, bae, dumpling and peanut among others. But throughout my evolving networks of friends — and especially so among my Black chosen sisters — one term of endearment remains: girl. Equal parts greeting, exclamation and rallying call all at once.

As long as I can remember, girl was the root word in the unique love language between Black women, regardless of age. ‘Girl, you got it. Just go out there and do your best,’ my mom, Precious, would say while giving me a pre-dance recital peptalk during my childhood in Virginia. ‘Babygirl, you crazy,’ my aunt, Gloria, all gregarious joy, would tell my little sister, April, scooping her up in a hug, upon discovering that the child had piled on her hair pieces, blouses and bangles in a game of dress-up.

‘Hey, girl, hey,’ my dorm-mate at university would say in a conspiratorial, hushed voice, unveiling a box of caffeinated soft drinks and Krispy Kreme donuts as we prepared to pull an all-nighter for one upcoming exam or another. ‘Guuurl,’ my friends and I would sing along to Destiny’s Child’s ‘Girl’ as we got dressed for a night out, placing extra emphasis on the vocal runs every time Beyoncé, Michelle and Kelly would hit the title word. ‘Guuuuurl,’ we would sing along, imploring our imaginary friend to let a philandering man go, adding a vocal run or two and a fluttering hand for extra dramatic effect. Girl was a one-word lingua franca that transcended class, generations and geography. A word we used with each other to show affection and acknowledge shared history, experiences and aspirations.

When I entered the working world as a graduate, I became conflicted about the colloquialism. On the one hand, I was steeped in feminist culture as an assistant editor at Jane magazine, an iconic title in the feminist publishing community. Girl was a polarising word. Some viewed it as an infantilising condescension (that’s ‘womyn’, please and thank you), others as an empowering subversion (hey riot grrrls).

And then there was the hipster racism I’d inevitably encounter at dive bars after work. Bearded white boys in flannel shirts telling me, ‘You go girl’, in an annoying mimicry of an equally annoying, old imitation of Black women that comedian Martin Lawrence popularised in his eponymous sitcom years before. Or young white gay men on the fashion party circuit who mistakenly thought their queerness excluded them from buying into cultural stereotypes, and who caused me to stiffen with their awkward greeting: ‘Hey girl, I like your hair. Is it yours?’

I didn’t recognise myself in any of the pantomimes, though this was clearly how many envisioned Black women — one neck-rolling monolith. I refused to play to type and fit in with a narrow idea of what Black women were supposed to be.

I felt more kinship with the plethora of girls in the Black and brown ballroom scene. Yes, the icons in Paris Is Burning popularised the now commonplace social media age lexicon that includes ‘yassss’, ‘girl’, ‘read’, and ‘honey’ to the mainstream. These expressions — essentially innocuous, everyday words given entirely new meanings — originated with us, Black women (cis and trans), and can be traced back through generations to our hair salons, kitchens and churches. So, I’d code switch, limiting the love language to conversations with my closest Black women friends and family members back home.

I hadn’t quite realised the Americanness of this, though, until I moved to London from New York in late 2008 and felt the need to build up my own network of Black women friends after tiring of always being The Only in my work and social life. I befriended Ghanaian, Nigerian, Jamaican and Black British women with sharp opinions, bold voices and thriving careers. Women who didn’t dot their anecdotes with a loud ‘girl’ for emphasis, or use it as an affectionate preface to a warm hug or effusive compliment. ‘Girl, you did that.’ So it dropped out of my daily lexicon, only coming out for marathon phone catch-ups with Stateside girlfriends.

But as a new wave of racial discourse and Black consciousness rolled in with the Obama administration in the late aughts, ‘girl’ took on a new life of its own, crossed the pond and worked its way through the entire diaspora. We became, in a word, magic.

Like most cultural touchpoints in the 2010s, it began with a Tweet. #BlackGirlsAreMagic was created by one CaShawn Thompson to counteract a wave of bad PR in the form of tired stereotypes and lies. No, of course we’re not shrill, unmarriageable, ugly and uneducated. We are strong, beautiful, originators of movements and culture the world over. As I write this, I’m listening to the official #BlackGirlMagic playlist on Spotify, filled with music by women of colour from across the world: London, Los Angeles, Lagos, New York, Ekiti, Chicago and Atlanta, among others. There are Black Girl Magic T-shirts, books, book clubs and websites. Not that we needed the hashtag to tell us who we are — we don’t need a hashtag as validation. But the shortened #Blackgirlmagic and the like, including #Blackgirljoy and #carefreeBlackgirl, took off, broadcasting to the world what we already knew: when it comes to excellence, we’re not new to this (to quote Drake, vocal appreciator of Black women), we’re true to this.

Some people are validation junkies, addicted to the likes and shares, the digital pats on the back. But I get my highs from the hit of underestimation. Give me a ‘meh’ and I’ll make you eat it. Disregard me and I’ll show you. I get a rise out of proving people wrong. During the many interviews I’ve given as a fashion editor about the lack of diversity in the business, people sometimes ask me, ‘What does it feel like to make it in an industry filled with people who don’t look like you?’

It’s being 19 years old and told by a university professor in Charlottesville, Virginia to manage my expectations and try a career in teaching high school when I expressed a desire to move to New York and work in magazine publishing. It’s being told to go back to the drawing board during a staff meeting at my second magazine publishing job in New York, when the editor dismissed my pitch about a story on teenage moms with the nonchalant and wholly inaccurate logic that it ‘was no good because the story would just be about Black girls, and no one wants to read that.’ It’s an editor sitting next to you in the front row during New York Fashion Week and showing you a photo of the African tribeswoman who will be her toddler’s nanny during an extended winter stay at a national reserve in South Africa. It’s to be repeatedly asked to go on television to comment about why there are so few of you in media, television and fashion, as if it’s the only subject you’re qualified to speak about.

It’s to be seated next to a model agency owner at a work dinner, who tells you you’re pronouncing your name wrong. ‘I know the most luxurious lodge in Keenya. Where do you like to stay when you’re there? Surely you’ve been to the country before, no? Not even Nairobi? Then why did your parents name you Keenya? You pronounce it “Kehn-ya” you say? Not “Keenya”? Hmmmm, are you sure?’ It’s to restrain yourself from using the other kind of ‘girl’—’Girl!’ — as admonishment and verbal eye roll. The kind of ‘girl’ I use for women who test my patience, no matter what their race. As in, ‘Girl, stop! Old white colonialists pronounce it this way.’ It’s to sit in a staff meeting and suggest a Black pop star for the cover only to be told, ‘But we just had a Black woman on the cover last month. And it would be too weird to have two in a row.’

But that was then. And this is now, the age of Black Girl Magic in which we’re owning the expansiveness of Blackness at its cross-section with womanhood, tracing its myriad shapes and textures, during a time when what it means to be a Black woman has permeated every level of public discourse from the unbelievably tragic (Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, and a tragically long list of others) to the tragi-comical (Rachel Dolezal).

What and who is Black Girl Magic? She’s Solange Knowles dressed in white, dancing on the streets of New Orleans. It’s my favourite photo of Malia and Sasha Obama, with girlfriends, trailing behind their dad, as they deplane Air Force One. It’s Black Lives Matter founders Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi galvanising a global movement against the brutalisation of Black bodies. And Bernardine Evaristo winning the Booker Prize, the first Black British author to do so. It’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interviewing Michelle Obama about her record-breaking book in front of a sold-out theatre in London. And a video clip of Michelle Obama congratulating Beyoncé on her record-breaking Netflix special, Homecoming — a rich, rousing, and very Black, tribute to historically Black universities. It’s nineteen Black women being elected to judgeships in Texas, a longstanding conservative state, during the American midterm elections. And five Black women, their backgrounds spanning South Africa, Jamaica and America, winning the world’s five most iconic beauty pageants, Miss America, Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, Miss World and Miss Universe. It’s Black actresses, singers and models dominating UK and US women’s magazines for the first time in history, in September 2018. And South African two-time Olympic 800m champion Caster Semenya declaring herself ‘supernatural’ as she sought to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics. It’s Kamala Harris running for President. And all of us avowing our solidarity in the face of global pandemics and tragedy. Women, girls, daring to be true to the gradations of ourselves in a world where anyone not named Beyoncé, Rihanna or Lupita tends to get depicted as chronically angry, perennially overlooked, forever victimised, unfailingly ratchet, and more. That’s not how I view myself. That’s not how anyone I know views themselves.

The world expects the more familiar, stereotypical image of us as the server of side eyes and roller of necks. But Black Girl Magic is a celebration that frees us from the confines of narrow expectation or subtext.

Girl!

I began hearing the call-out beyond my network of Black girlfriends. ‘Girl,’ Kim Tatum said, greeting fellow trans activist Rhyannon Styles during a podcast episode I hosted during my time as an editor at British ELLE. We were discussing what it meant to be trans, an idea that had entered the mainstream for the first time through global headline makers such as Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox and writer Janet Mock.

‘Damn, girl, you look fabulous,’ an Instagram post by the body positivity activist BodyPosiPanda read, inviting women to embrace their most authentic, unfiltered selves and learn to love the back fat, stretch marks and acne scars.

‘I’ve got your back, girl,’ I overheard a middle aged white saleswoman say to her co-worker, hair streaked with grey, as she fixed a frozen cash register during a shopping trip.

In a way, the word had become a positive affirmation and a vocal show of unity in our age of outrage. Yet there is little written about its use in this way.

I’ve watched ‘girl’ come full circle, just as my relationship with it has. I now openly use it to show sisterly affection, shared cultural experiences or not — as do many Londoners I know. When I checked in on a pregnant friend in south London who had birthed a baby boy after three days of labour, her reply, a single word sent via text, spoke volumes about joy, exhaustion, relief and perseverance: ‘Girl…’

She didn’t need to say anything more.

At a women’s festival at the Saatchi Gallery where I appeared as a speaker, the green room was a joyous din of loud laughter, chatty group hugs and enthusiastic ‘hey girls’ between authors, journalists, models, activists and athletes. On stage, I asked Halima Aden, the Kenyan-born woman who made history as the world’s first hijabi supermodel, if she ever felt a weight of responsibility as A First. ‘Well, girl, when you put it that way,’ she laughed before admitting she does.

Here, ‘girl’ wasn’t tied to any specific country of origin. Just as it wasn’t during the London Women’s March months later where protestors of all ethnicities and ages walked with placards featuring such ballsy messages as ‘Girls just want to have fun-damental human rights’ and ‘Girls doing whatever the fuck they want.’

Girls! Girl. Gurl. Girl, hey. Girl, bye. Girl, stop. Girl, go. Girl, we see you, and feel seen.

2 Notes on Woke

‘Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.’

– BALDWIN

Few things in the Internet age have not been named. And many things, even if they have been named, have been rechristened, and rebranded again and again.

Healthy food, sleep and exercise combined to become ‘wellness’ and ‘clean living’. Down-time became ‘self-care’. Role models were repackaged, simply, as ‘Goals’ (with a capital G). And goals (lower case ‘g’) in the traditional sense became ‘intentions’. The practice of making those goals happen, meanwhile, is now called ‘manifestation’.

On the more sober end of the spectrum ‘racism’ was sugar-coated to read ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white supremacy’ became ‘white nationalism’. On the Internet, no person, place or thing is exempt from rebranding. And in the process, the meaning evolves, twists and turns, and at times, gets lost. One of the biggest examples of this is the very old idea wrapped in thoroughly modern packaging called ‘woke’.

As I write this, I’m staring at a fashion magazine with the coverline ‘woke bespoke’. Next to it, a newspaper supplement featuring a dating diary on the search for ‘Mr Woke’. On my desktop, a guide to a ‘woke Christmas’, and in the adjacent tab, an Internet rant in response to said guide demanding people and publishers leave all writing about wokeness to Black writers. In another tab, an article bemoaning the Great Awokening of American politics. Meanwhile, on British television, a debate rages between royal correspondents and pundits about whether the royal family’s most polarising members, Meghan and Harry, have in fact become too woke for their own good.

But what is woke? Most online dictionaries define it as an awareness of inequality and other forms of injustice that are normally racial in nature — as in, Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X. A few describe the term as merely being ‘with it’ — as in every cool kid you knew at uni. And increasingly, these days, many use it as a pejorative term to describe someone who is a slave to identity politics. How can all three possibly be the same? It’s a sensibility, a quality, a state of being, a feeling backed up by a set of actions, sometimes all those things at once.

I can’t think of a word that reflects the era as well as ‘woke’ does. There’s its relative newness (woke was born and grew up alongside social media), its popularity as a hashtag and its political implications and activist leanings. And then there are its many definitions — the word’s nature changes with each rotation of the news cycle. There’s also its journey crossing over from Black culture to the Internet and mainstream news. Appropriation! All qualities that are extremely particular to this moment in time.

Confession: I’m allergic to the word. (An affliction I first developed in 2016, when MTV declared the term the new ‘on fleek’.) Ironic, considering I am textbook woke. I identify with what it was. But cringe at what it’s become. And bristle at the way the word is now weaponised. The disparity compels me to interrogate the term and its evolution. As Susan Sontag said in Notes on Camp, which inspired this very study, ‘no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyse it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.’ So let’s consider what woke is, and what it isn’t.

1 Woke extends to conversations around art, politics, economic and social class, gender inequality, trans rights and environmentalism. But woke in its original incarnation rests on activism and Blackness.

2 The essence of woke is awareness. What you are newly aware of (a pay gap, systemic racism, unchecked privilege, etc) and what to do with that newfound knowledge is the question. And the answer keeps changing depending on who you talk to. But regardless, you’ve answered the wake-up call, pushed your way out of bed, and are now listening.

3 To be woke, in the original sense, is to understand James Baldwin’s declaration that ‘to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ It’s to understand the unique kind of exhaustion that comes from being perpetually attuned to discrimination. It’s to be weary and wary. To be woke is to long for a day when one doesn’t have to stay woke.

4 Woke blurs the lines between politics and pop culture. You can’t have one without the other; the latter is how woke culture entered the public consciousness and is the thing that sustains its relevancy, for better and for worse.

5 Most date woke’s origins back to the American singer songwriter Erykah Badu’s anthemic political medley, ‘Master Teacher’ from her album New Amerykah, a work she released in 2008, two years after the birth of Twitter and eight months after Apple released a thing called the iPhone, two facts that are pertinent here because woke is a term that owes its popularity to both. Badu sings over a psychedelic collage of samples about a quest for what sounds like a new plane of enlightenment:‘I am known to stay awake(A beautiful world I’m trying to find)’She then imagines a world in which there are ‘no niggas, only master teachers’ and reminds the listener, repeatedly, that she stays woke.This is woke at its most pure: unapologetically Black and cryptic (only the woke recognise the woke). A word conceived by Black people for Black people. A word reminiscent of Spike Lee’s famous cry to ‘Wake uuuuuuuuup!’ in his seminal film School Daze, as his character, a student at a fictitious historically Black university, demands his light-skin-worshipping, good-hair-seeking, sex-addicted peers wake up from self-hatred and materialism and become aware of the injustices in their community and, ideally, do something about it.

6 You can find a pocket guide to the essence of woke in the chorus of Childish Gambino’s single, ‘Redbone’, a Funkadelic-esque R&B song released in 2016 that warns, ‘you better believe in something’. Equal parts lustful slow jam and cautionary social commentary, the lyrics implore listeners to resist the comfort of complacency and ignorance or pay the consequences:‘Now don’t you close your eyes’The last line best conveys the high-stakes urgency of wokeness. The sense that something terrifying lurks in the shadows.It’s an idea Jordan Peele expanded on in his horror film, Get Out, which famously uses the song in its opening scene. Because as the movie made clear — its protagonist slowly becoming aware of an elaborate plot to co-opt his body and trap his mind in an abyss called the sunken place — the consequences of sleeping are indeed horrific.These examples in tandem solidified woke as the mood of a new era, rising in the aftermath of the modern-day horror story that was the EU referendum and election of Donald Trump, a time when our freedoms can very much feel like they are on the line and in peril. Stay woke. Don’t get caught. Don’t get hypnotised. Don’t close your eyes.

7 Despite what the likes of MTV and Twitter would have you believe, it’s impossible to depoliticise woke. Woke, by its very nature, is engaged.

8 The goal is to wake up and then stay that way. As in, be aware and on guard, ready to recognise, call out and actively resist the biases, fake news and inequalities as they come, like the countless members of the Black Lives Matter movement do on Twitter and Facebook, posting smartphone footage of unjust killings, assaults and arrests, sometimes with the hashtag #StayWoke, and campaigning for legislative change. Woke is righteous indignation, backed up by a set of actions as resistance. Woke is serious business. Often said aloud with a raised closed fist reminiscent of Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s famous Black Power Salute at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

9 Despite its changeable nature and twistable journey, woke is inextricably linked with the rise of Black consciousness, which has never ever really gone away but rather has had surges and swells. This latest wave is most defined by its relationship with social media — specifically, and thrillingly, how Black people have used Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like to amplify Black pride and call out systemic oppression. In short, being woke was originally tied to the experience of being Black. But can you be woke and not Black?

10 If you believe BuzzFeed, woke is also the much-needed awakening of the privileged to all manner of societal ills and the willingness to call them out — usually in the form of a white, cisgender, heteronormative man recognising that others who are not white, cisgender, heteronormative and male are often denied equal rights, treatment and pay. See the website’s infamous love letter to Orange is the New Black star Matt McGorry, a self-proclaimed feminist and BLM supporter. Titled, quite literally, ‘Can We Talk About How Woke Matt McGorry Was In 2015?’, it was an article remarkably redolent of and created for Internet culture, and one that birthed the phenomenon, #wokebae. And while the hashtag had an expiration date, the meaning had value. Because privileged allies waking up to inequality, speaking out and working to end it is ultimately a good thing.

11 Woke is also actress Anne Hathaway speaking out against the killing of Black teenager Nia Wilson and challenging white people to check their privilege and recognise that ‘Black people fear for their lives daily in America.’

12 Woke is also Tarana Burke setting the hashtag #MeToo viral and inspiring hundreds of thousands of women to recognise and voice their experiences of sexual assault.

13 Woke is also a punchline. The wink of an ending to an online joke making fun of the perceived worthy righteousness of woke culture. The stuff of satire, usually said aloud with accompanying gestured air quotes.

14 One must always distinguish between woke as an earnest state of mind and woke as satire. The latter almost always pokes fun at the former. The latter is also the most grating due to its smugness and therefore it is usually unsatisfying. Example: Maroon is just navy red. #staywoke

15 Woke often susceptible to cultural appropriation. Tragically ironic, considering this is one of the very things the act of staying woke would be on high alert against. See woke’s journey from Black political circles to white Internet slang via headlines in mainstream media. Also see the Evening Standard’s ‘woke-ometer’, which measured people on a scale of ‘asleep’ (Theresa May) to ‘woke’ (JK Rowling)… and included no persons of colour.

16 Woke is not limited to righteous political types. In the Twitterverse, woke has become an awareness of not just racial, political and social injustice, but an awareness of just about anything.

17 Woke, a study in three Tweets, from the earnest to the sardonic:

Another reminder that Trump’s campaign is under FBI investigation. Nothing has changed except the media’s attention span.#staywoke @RepMaxineWaters

Wake up, sheeple. Bowling Green was an inside job! (inside Kellyanne Conway’s head). #staywoke @StephenAtHome

Bill Cosby is just a distraction from Arizona Tea being sold for $1.25 now instead of .99 cents. #staywoke @Phil_Lewis_

1 Not only is woke a political state of mind. Woke has also been commodified. There are woke books and woke movies, woke T-shirts and woke clothing brands. Woke songs and woke dating sites. Woke neighbourhoods and woke vacation destinations. Woke has commercial currency. When Nike featured Colin Kaepernick, the NFL star who protested against police brutality by refusing to stand for the National Anthem during his nationally televised games, many accused the brand of woke-washing, the act of cashing in on social justice. But sales increased and socially and politically progressive people began proudly wearing and showing off their Nikes on social media out of solidarity. And other brands quickly realised you can be political and profitable.

2 Woke also became a form of social currency, a virtue signal on Facebook or Twitter by members of the ever-growing tribe of socially and politically conscious. But, woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived, and not performed. The likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists. They didn’t have to. Their actions did. Woke people know not to and need not describe themselves as woke.

3 A random sampling, in no particular order, of additional people and things that are in the original woke canon:

Ida B Wells

Shirley Chisholm

The writings of Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin

Black Lives Matter

Barack and Michelle Obama

Sadiq Khan

Erykah Badu

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Rihanna

Stormzy

The film Queen & Slim

The Childish Gambino video for ‘This Is America’

Gina Miller

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Harry and Meghan

The Guardian

Brixton

Harlem

Lagos

Detroit

Grace Jones

Adwoa Aboah

Bob Marley

Vegetarianism and Veganism

The clothes of British fashion designers Grace Wales Bonner and Duro Olowu

The artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Toyin Ojih Odutola.

1 Woke has also been weaponised, used in conservative media circles as the highest insult, often placed within quotation marks, to mean rigid, uptight and socially and politically puritanical. When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex decided to step away from their roles, the Daily Mail complained that Prince Harry went from ‘fun loving bloke to the Prince of Woke’. Meanwhile, the HBO show host Bill Maher implored Democratic Presidential candidates to ‘get out of woke-ville’ or else lose the election altogether.

2 Woke has been just as weaponised in liberal circles as summed up by the BBC’s Gender and Identity Correspondent Megha Mohan’s Tweet: ‘Note to editor; no-one in diverse circles uses the word “woke” anymore. In fact, it’s the clearest indication of the insular nature of their world if they file copy using it in 2019.’

3 Dropping the word ‘woke’ into conversation among strangers in a social setting is a pretty easy way to determine where someone sits on the political spectrum without having to invest too much time in uncomfortable debates. Just watch for the nods, stiffened smiles or eye rolls.

4 As various feminists have done with the colour pink, asserting it and the idea of femininity as symbols of strength and power, rather than sexist marketing and naff children’s toys, some have attempted to reclaim woke away from Internet misuse, punchlines and clickbait in the spirit of Black consciousness.

5 Wokeness is often twinned with youthful indignation and optimism. See the scores of students who populated the People’s Vote March against Brexit in the UK, the March For Our Lives against gun violence in America, and, in reality, the entire history of student protest. Also see the record number of young people who have entered politics in recent years, from Mhairi Black to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

6 Ultimately, wokeness is rooted in love — of self, family, humanity — just as injustice is rooted in hate.

7 Because despite its inherently pessimistic nature, woke is hopeful. To search for Badu’s beautiful world requires the belief that one is out there — or at least, capable of being made.

3 Wakanda Forever

Much has been said and written about the fact that social media can make a person feel lonely. But I’d argue it can do the opposite for those who live chunks of their lives in spaces where they are an Only, an experience many Black people are well acquainted with. Anyone who has ever worked or socialised within a setting in which you are The Only One of One, Two, or at most, Three — understands the distinct sense of relief that comes from finally finding a network of people who have lived through similar experiences and understand the particularity of yours. That unique kind of gladness in finding your tribe, people who can be both a mirror and validation of one’s difference, as well as providing a kind of encouragement to embrace and celebrate it.

And while studies and polls reveal a loneliness epidemic sweeping through a generation of millennials thanks to social media, it’s impossible to ignore how Black Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have heightened a sense of community, connectivity and solidarity for an entirely different demographic, particularly Black people and especially Black women.

In my case, the alternative network I found on social media helped soften the culture shock of moving to a new country until I could find my own tribe on the ground IRL.

As a transplant to the UK, navigating insular, impenetrable circles in publishing and fashion, I have often felt the isolation of life as an Only in a way I hadn’t necessarily Stateside. Back home, during my childhood in Virginia and twenties in New York, if I was an Only in the classroom or at work, the extensive tribe of girlfriends I had outside of it all helped fortify me against any feelings of exclusion.

Not to mention I could wake up in Virginia or New York, walk out the door and dive into any variety of enriching Black experiences according to whatever mood I so happened to be in that day. This was something I took for granted, until I moved to London where I found myself in the position of outsider more than not.

In the UK, where I had moved in the late aughts into a historically white, working-class south-east London neighbourhood in the throes of gentrification, I found myself seeking out sameness, in any form, as a reprieve from Otherness. I knew the city had a rich Black cultural scene, I just hadn’t discovered how or where to tap into it just yet. During those first six months here, I lived alone waiting for my boyfriend (who is now my husband, and, I should point out, an American mix of Irish and Italian) to tie up loose ends back in the States so that he could board a plane in order to move in with me.

I craved the company of other Americans, people who shared my accent and colloquialisms, people who didn’t pepper their spellings with u’s or say ‘sorry’ instead of ‘excuse me’ as they attempted to navigate crowded pubs and rush hour trains. I formed tight, if fleeting, bonds with people I would have probably never gravitated toward back home in the States, over the smallest Americanisms: a guilty affinity for Chick-fil-A and Ben’s Chilli Bowl or subscriptions to The New Yorker and New York magazine. It didn’t take much.

But more than anything, I craved a sense of community with other Black people, specifically Black women, and especially as Black people throughout the diaspora revelled in a new wave of pride and consciousness in the wake of the Obama presidency. I had grown up the product of institutions built to strengthen Black people in the face of systemic discrimination, the child of two graduates of historically Black universities. I understood the power in a strong tribe. And I knew if I was to successfully live in another country, I needed to find a community, even if it meant building one myself. I longed to be in a room where I was one of a loud, rambunctious many — like the greatest of all Black block parties, Sunday dinners, cookouts or family reunions — rather than just the contained, observant party of one.

In the meantime, social media met the need, connecting me with my extended sister circle back home as well as a group of talented Black women writers, early generation bloggers and editors in other cities around the world who I got to know through the Internet. Social media was the thing that tided me over until I could find what I was looking for offline.

I had found small pockets of it in London. At my first Notting Hill Carnival. At the dinner party of a cousin of a friend’s friend later that autumn. And at a string of Afro hair salons I tried. But it wasn’t until January 2010 that I finally found what I had been looking for on a larger scale.

A friend, determined to show me that London was just as rich in community and melanin as New York (her words: ‘if not even more so!’), had invited me to be her plus one for an art party. The Tate Britain had just launched a sprawling, mid-career retrospective of the British painter Chris Ofili’s work. Chris Ofili, unapologetically Black and Manchester born, of Nigerian descent. Chris Ofili, Turner Prize-winning member of the famed YBAs. Chris Ofili, the man behind that painting of the Madonna rendered as a Black woman surrounded by big, Black, sexualised asses and actual elephant dung on canvas. The one that offended not just Catholics the world over, but divided the art world and pissed off a fair proportion of the viewing public. The one the mayor of New York tried to ban. Yeah, I’ll be there.

It was the Blackest party I had ever been to in London so far, not quite a sea of melanin, but definitely more Black faces than I had seen in a single gathering thus far, beyond my semi-regular trips to Brixton for hair supplies and goat curry. It was 5 February and damp and glacial outside. But indoors, the rooms were warm and the crowd was hot. A DJ played Afrobeat as guests milled around dressed in their finest.

I was buoyed not just by the Blackness in the room — a photogenic mix that included tall, elegant-looking older men in jackets and kente shirts, young, stylish women in clashing graphic prints with all manner of braids and twist-outs, and lean, straight-backed tracksuit-wearing guys with towering, free-growing dreadlocks — but also the Blackness hanging on the walls. Collaged, painted, beaded and gold-flecked odalisques, Black women in regal and sensual repose. A constellation of Afroed heads. Teardrops containing the image of slain Stephen Lawrence. Cut-out images from Blaxploitation films. Ice T. Don King. Blackness was the star, subject and guest of honour at the show.

Near the gift shop, a line snaked its way through the ground floor as guests waited for the artist to sign catalogues and prints.

The mood was celebratory and dazzling. The night felt glamorous, even if much of the work on the walls was haunting and devastating. The evening was a moment and a rarity — a historically white institution and an enduringly homogenous industry honouring the country’s most famous Black artist.

But this was a different era to where we are now. Instagram had launched but #Blackexcellence hadn’t yet taken off as the natural progression from the Black Power Movement, born in the 1960s, it would eventually become. And I hadn’t yet solidified the network of girlfriends I would go on to build following that night — effervescent, ambitious journalists, artists, stylists and executives with thriving careers who not only lived Black excellence but wanted to create space for other women to join them. Women who did make space for other women, building out teams, publishing imprints and brands that created new jobs and platforms. I had finally found my tribe! And the shared experience helped minimise the isolation I felt in my work life.

No, Black excellence hadn’t yet evolved into a social media phenomenon and cultural sea change. But that was where it had reached by the time Marvel’s Black Panther, perhaps the decade’s most definitive visualisation of Black excellence, beyond the Obama White House itself, hit theatres in 2018.

Like the Chris Ofili exhibition, the Black Panther premiere in London had taken place in February. Not that the cold weather stopped anyone from showing up in their boldest, brightest clothes, accessories and African prints. And not since the Ofili exhibition had an unapologetic study and celebration of Blackness generated such fervent excitement among Black folk and the white mainstream alike. Yes, London had hosted the Basquiat retrospective Boom For Real at the Barbican a year before, but that was largely an American show staged in the UK. There was something about the Black Panther moment that, like Ofili’s evening, felt uniquely British with its cast full of homegrown talent filling both the screen (despite being written and directed by Americans) and the theatre.

My life had changed considerably in the years between the two events. I was no longer a new expat homesick for community, searching for like-minded friends. By that point I had become a part of a large, loosely connected network of Black creatives, many of whom were planning to be at the premiere of Black Panther at the Hammersmith Apollo. And when I arrived at the theatre, I realised I had finally found that sprawling, expansive, loud and proud mass moment of Blackness I had been craving when I first moved to the UK.

Outside, the streets were cold and dark. But inside, the venue was alive, every seat full and the walls vibrating with a mix of loud music and animated voices reverberating throughout the space: speaker-shaking bass, Kendrick Lamar’s flow and high-pitched ‘Ayyyyyeeees!’ The audience doubled as a fashion show — all party dresses and heels, statement jackets and sunglasses, conversation-worthy hair and nails.

I had arrived nearly an hour late to find the movie was nowhere near beginning, despite the 7 p.m. start time listed on the invitation. I fell in line with a string of latecomers, climbing the theatre’s red-carpeted steps behind a boisterous group of fabulous-looking women including the actress and comedian Michaela Coel. From my seat I scanned the audience and could make out the rapper Stormzy and actor John Boyega, as well as a slew of media peers and friends. On stage, stars Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira stunned in beaded dresses.

The opening scene rolled nearly fifty minutes later. The screen went black, white stars gradually appearing to reveal a dark night sky. A young boy’s voice, optimistic and inquisitive: ‘Baba, tell me the story of home.’ A glowing, blue meteorite emerges from the darkness speeding towards the continent of Africa and landing in a field of baobab trees, as the boy’s father explains the history of Wakanda, a technologically advanced African nation, hidden away from white colonialism and powered by the strongest substance in the universe, Vibranium.

Moments later we watch another little boy in Oakland, California playing basketball with his friends unaware that inside his apartment upstairs, his father, an undercover Wakandan agent, is being confronted by his brother, the Black Panther.

Throughout the next two hours and fifteen minutes, the audience whooped and cheered as we watched a film in which Black people are hero and villain, saviour and victim, with complicated paths to getting there. And in between the raucous moments of laughter and applause, we sat in contemplative silence as the film told a story of Africa and Black America, posed questions about Black liberation and Black radicalism and presented the possibilities of gender equity. It was a film for and about Black culture, with a record-breaking $200 million budget.

Few works of pop culture are as widely consumed as the superhero film. Of the twenty-five top-grossing movies of all time, more than half are big-budget, meticulously commercialised blockbuster productions revolving around men with superhuman capabilities. One of the most momentous feats of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is that it takes the globally revered medium and bathes it in Black. It was the eighteenth Marvel film, but the first to star a Black superhero and all-Black cast. The first to be set in Africa. The first Black film of any kind with such a massive budget. It was a movie in which women ran the place, with women warriors and matriarchs saving the day. It was nominated for an Academy Award. And it was the highest grossing superhero movie ever made (more than $1.3 billion globally).

It was also a gift to a global community of people of all races still reeling from the election of Donald Trump two years earlier and the rise of populism — and a gift released during America’s Black History Month at that.

Much has been made of all these things. But I was struck most by how the movie shifted the conversation around Blackness away from America (a place that has long dominated the conversation) and became a rousing phenomenon for people of colour everywhere, with social media serving as the Vibranium that powered it.

In the film, residents of Wakanda showed their solidarity by crossing their arms over their heart in salute, a move the director Ryan Coogler styled after, among other things, the Egyptian Pharaohs’ burial pose. Years later, some would interrogate the film’s mash-up of African references and argue it was a form of cultural homogenizing that did more harm than good. But as we sat in the theatre we were all self-declared Wakandans too — immigrants and expats and homegrown Brits with roots that spanned Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, America, Senegal, Bermuda, Trinidad, South Africa, and more. One big diasporic tribe.

In an interview on The View, Lupita Nyong’o described it like this: ‘Wakanda is special because it was never colonised, so what we can see there for all of us is a reimagining of what would have been possible had Africa been allowed to realise itself for itself. And that’s a beautiful place.’

Wakanda demonstrated to many of us what we already knew, that #Blackexcellence exists on a global scale, on screen and off.

To be clear, Black culture has always had currency and Black excellence has always existed. One need only scroll through centuries of history to see this. But I’m talking about #Blackexcellence, the social media-driven amplification and celebration of Black culture. I’m talking about the rebirth of the Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s — which was itself an advancement of the Negritude movement of the 1930s that been inspired, in part, by the Harlem Renaissance — as an entirely new era that sat at the intersection of ideology, technology and economics.

This directly impacted my working life. In the fashion world, European brands were casting a multitude of Black models of all skin tones to sell their clothing on a scale the world hadn’t seen since the Seventies when designers such as Saint Laurent, Halston and Valentino regularly employed a diverse cast of women of colour ranging from Donyale Luna to Pat Cleveland, Iman and Bethann Hardison.

Meanwhile, fashion magazines began casting Black celebrities as cover stars of big issues in unprecedented numbers, after years of mostly quarantining any woman of colour not named Rihanna or Beyoncé to the smaller ‘low risk’ issues of the year (January, February and August, for example), indicating that publishers finally viewed them as bankable enough to do so. In August 2018, so many magazines featured Black women as their September issue cover stars that it made global headlines and inspired a wave of celebratory memes. The BBC and Sky News called asking me to comment on this new phenomenon. Major media outlets began referring to this shift, as well as any other wave of inclusion in predominantly white spaces, as the Wakanda Effect.

Wakanda became a synonym for Black excellence and represented all of its possibilities, yes. But it also became a qualifier mainstream media used to reduce the idea to a trend, a fleeting ‘moment’ that raised the inevitable question: ‘When will it end?’

To me, the decisions to feature Ruth Negga, Lupita Nyong’o, Tracee Ellis Ross, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Zendaya, Yara Shahidi, Slick Woods and Tiffany Haddish on the covers of magazines ranging from British ELLE, a title I worked for, to Grazia, Harper’s Bazaar and American Vogue seemed like a no-brainer. These are all beautiful and accomplished women with a proven track record of appealing to a mass audience. Women who have the body of work, the major cosmetics contracts, the interest of powerful fashion houses — women who tick all the boxes. It galled me that their accomplishments could be reduced to one superhero film.

The impact of the film’s enormous success could not be denied, but Black Panther was a highlight in a groundswell that had been building for years, rather than the instigator of it. For example, before Black Panther, there was Get Out, which broke records as the highest grossing original debut ever. The actress, director and screenwriter Lena Waithe summed it up well: ‘I think Black people in this industry are making art that is so specific and unique and good that the studio heads have no choice but to throw money at us. They’re saying, “How can we support you and stand next to you?” The tricky part is that they want to be allies and they want to be inclusive, but they also want to make money.’

And like Black Panther, her 2019 film, Queen & Slim, a sumptuous love story and heartbreaking reflection on the politics of Black Lives Matter, written and directed by two Black women, probably wouldn’t have been as successful without a global tribe, connected by social media, supporting it.

I saw the film in a special preview in Shoreditch, hosted by BBC personalities Clara Amfo and Reggie Yates. The theatre was filled with London’s homegrown Black excellence, most of them women including model sisters Adwoa and Kesewa Aboah, photographer Rhea Dillon, designer Irene Agbontaen and more. At the end of the screening, guests, eyes wet with tears, all congregated in the lobby for a group, family reunion-style photo, which made the rounds on Instagram in the following days.

It was a moment, and one that was no longer an anomaly in my life. That’s mostly because I had long bedded into life in London, and connected with the city’s diverse network of Black creatives. What I hadn’t imagined, is that Black creativity on both sides of the Atlantic would be as in demand by the mainstream as it currently is.

When we featured Lena in ELLE magazine several years before, she described it as a new version of the Harlem Renaissance and used the analogy again when talking about Black Panther in an interview with the New York Times. ‘We’re definitely in the middle of a renaissance, make no mistake. In twenty years, people are going to be writing about what you’re writing about. But for me, I want more.’

Who doesn’t? We all want to see more of ourselves in places where we aren’t and deserve to be, whether it be on the walls in a British museum, on a screen in a movie theatre, or in the White House. To find our tribe and rally, arms crossed in salute. Wakanda Forever.

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