Kitchen Table Talks: Reading Texts and Black Girlhood

The authors in this section gathered around a virtual kitchen table, using the online platform Zoom, to engage in conversation around shared ideas and guiding questions about Black girls’ digital literacies practices. They participated in a conversation where they talked across their respective work as children’s literature scholars and literacy educators who foreground Black feminist/womanist epistemologies in their personal, social, and professional lives. Genius poet Gwendolyn Brooks, considering the great actor Paul Robeson, wrote, “We are each other’s business; we are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Black women have taken that quote to heart, and use it to express our responsibility to each other. We are each other’s business, harvest, magnitude, and bond. That “magnitude and bond” extends to reading texts, including the representation of Black girls in literature for children and young adults, as well as in school curriculum, media, and the Web. While most research and scholarship on Black girls rightly focuses on the experiences, needs, and outcomes of living Black girls, past and present, in this kitchen table talk, we focus on Black girl readers, as well as the mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors into their storied experiences. For how Black girls show up on the page and on the screen matters for the ways that Black girls are treated in real life.