Let Black Girls Be Girls Edition
Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show
Slate Audio
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2020
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode: Dan and Jamilah are joined by poet, performer, and activist Staceyann Chin to field a question from a mom who’s worried she should give her son a year to grow before he starts kindergarten. Scott Brown, author of the YA novel XL and short guy, calls in to help. The hosts also discuss disproportionate expectations of maturity placed on black girls during childhood. For Slate Plus: a question from a mom wondering if she is can worry about her white son’s experience at a school that has predominantly black and Hispanic students. Sign up for Slate Plus here.
Recommendations:
Jamilah recommends The State of Black Girls: A Go-To Guide for Creating Safe Space for Black Girls by Marline Francois-Madden LCSW.
Dan recommends the Newbery-winning comic New Kid by Jerry Craft.
Staceyann recommends Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty.
Additional Reading:
XL by Scott Brown.
Why Won’t Society Let Black Girls Be Children? By A. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez.
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. By Monique W. Morris.
Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood by Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake and Thalia González.
End Adultification Bias by Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Join us on Facebook and email us at momanddad@slate.com to tell us what you thought of today’s show and give us ideas for what we should talk about in future episodes. Got questions that you’d like us to answer? Call and leave us a message at 424-255-7833.
Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson. Audio engineering by Chau Tu.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:06.0 | Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting, Slate's Parenting Podcast for Thursday, February 6th, the Let Black Girls Be Girls Edition. |
| 0:14.6 | I'm Jamila Lemieux, a writer and cultural critic and a surrogate for the Elizabeth Warren campaign. And I am on the road this |
| 0:22.0 | week touring a few HBCUs down south on behalf of the campaign. I'm also mom to Naima, who is six, |
| 0:29.7 | and we live in Los Angeles, California. I'm Dan Cois. I'm a writer at Slate and the author |
| 0:34.8 | of the book How to Be a Family. I am in New York this week, although usually we live in Arlington, Virginia, and I'm the dad of Lyra, |
| 0:41.5 | who's 14, and Harper, who's 12. |
| 0:43.9 | And we're joined by a special third guest host today. Hit it. |
| 0:46.8 | Stacey Ann Chin. I am the mother of Zurichin. |
| 0:50.7 | I'm a writer, a poet, a rabble rouser, a dissenter. |
| 0:54.6 | And I love Elizabeth Warren as well. |
| 0:57.5 | I think she's kind of cute, especially when she does that little run. |
| 1:01.2 | How old is Zuri? |
| 1:02.4 | Zuri just turned eight. |
| 1:03.6 | Happy birthday, Zuri. |
| 1:04.9 | So, yes, the first thing, obviously, we need to talk about Jamila, is you and your amazing road trip and you getting tweeted by Elizabeth |
| 1:13.2 | Warren. Yeah, I've been talking to some folks with the campaign for a few months about coming in. |
| 1:19.2 | I was one of about 100 black women who signed on to a letter of support for Elizabeth Warren's |
| 1:25.7 | candidate to see her a couple months back. And it's really excited |
| 1:28.7 | to get invited to come to Texas and Tennessee. I got to visit with students at Texas Southern |
| 1:35.5 | University yesterday. I'm currently on the campus of Prairie View A&M University. So I'm always excited |
| 1:42.5 | to go to college campuses, super excited to visit HBCUs. And |
... |
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