Black Girls Matter: Letter to My Fourteen-Year-Old Self

This chapter is a letter to the author’s teenage self, which proffers the radical black feminist “ten commandments” she wishes she and all other Black girls knew. Namely, that she and they matter and are lovely, powerful, autonomous, beautiful, and worthy of childhood, safety, support, pleasure, decision-making, mutuality, subjectivity, and love. More, they owe no one their body, sex, silence, activism, or respectability.