How Black girls can reclaim their voice in music

In this book, I traced the relationship between Black girls' musical street play and the emerging hits of male artists that demonstrates a gendered bias toward male dominance in music entertainment and media. I trace a similar pattern in online musical apps in my next book, tentatively titled Played: How Music and Tech Orchestrates Violence Against Black Girls Online.

While we often overlook how our exposure to musical entertainment hides the patriarchal dominance of men and their musical mansplaining that lives in the recording studio, this 2022 report upends any fallacy about women's equality in the music business. It's time to educate our daughters about the numbers.

Plenty of books focus on young people's fixation on phones, cultural appropriation of Blackness or hip-hop as music and pedagogy. Renegades tackles all that with a "Woah!" tagged on. Boffone confronts whiteness, anti-Black sexism and even COVID-19 with his insights about digital dance trends.

Morris gave a TED Talk in 2018 and later published this book. It reimagines what education might look like if schools (and institutions like music and tech) placed the thriving of Black and Brown girls at the center of communities that nurture girls' agency, particularly around their voice.

A third of women have been assaulted or violated sexually by a trusted male by the time they are 18. Women are underrepresented in every sector (including music and tech) that require a willingness to speak in strong declarative sentences, assert their opinions clearly, step into the limelight and engage in verbal conflict resolution. How do these facts correlate? This TEDx Talk help us understand how women's relative reluctance to be "out front" often stems from past violence.

The chapter "Don't Be a Fast Girl: How Hitting Your Daughter Can Trigger Early Puberty" is a lesson in the slow violence done to Black girls who are disciplined for online musical play that sits at the intersection of misogyny in hip-hop and among audiences of online twerking. Parents and teachers interested in protecting Black girls from the emotional and psychological abuse they encounter online will be moved by the research and writing in this book.

While my talk is as much about music and the mobile media dating back to cassette players in girls' bedroom play, the other entity online is the interface that signals search results, recommendations and view counts offering a feminist reading of the consequences of big data. (Data Feminism is a must-read for interpreting the biases that accompany the numbers behind apps and the monetization of creators' content on YouTube and TikTok.