Local book review: 'Black Girl Dangerous'
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
More widespread understanding of what it means to be marginalized — and, in tandem, what it means to be privileged — is certainly a sign of progress.
Black Girl Dangerous: On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender
Mia McKenzie
(self-published, 2014, 180 pp.)
Certain narratives, relegated to niche publications before the emergence of online media, have risen in visibility in the past 15 years. More widespread understanding of what it means to be marginalized — and, in tandem, what it means to be privileged — is certainly a sign of progress.
But many writers still desperately need platforms to advocate their positions. Philadelphia-born writer and activist Mia McKenzie (currently based in the Bay Area) acutely understood this need when she founded Black Girl Dangerous (blackgirldangerous.org), an online forum for queer and transgender writers of color.
Now this forum is a robust nonprofit with contributors regularly exploring racism in popular LGBTQ movements, sexism within advocacy organizations, and every intersection in between.
Black Girl Dangerous: On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender is an anthology of several of McKenzie’s best-known essays. Regular readers of the BGD blog will probably recognize some of these pieces.
But this is more than a compilation of McKenzie’s greatest hits. The book also explores the controversies of contemporary microaggressions (including CNN’s mishandled coverage of the Steubenville rape verdict, the post-mortem condemnation of Trayvon Martin and a handy list of “8 Ways Not to Be an Ally”). It is proclamatory, a crash-course in an emergent discourse of which McKenzie is the most visible figurehead.
Fans of McKenzie’s work will probably purchase this book. Anybody who cares about strengthening progressivism, principally by empowering those who are often unintentionally silenced, should get it as soon as they can.
