Black Woman's Truths

As my final project for the Women and Media class, I will create a platform for black females allowing them to relate to each other and form an understanding about today’s perceptions of beauty and the black woman. The foundation of the platform will be a series of interviews conducting with women of various ages.

The first group will be of young black girls, around the age of 8-12. It will not be a large group of girls but it will provide an insight on how young black girls view themselves, their skin, their hair, and other physical features and its relation to how people act with them. A few questions that will be asked are “In what ways do their parents/family affect their perceptions of beauty? Do you have any role models that you see as pretty? Why do you think you are pretty?” It is extremely difficult for young black girls to find well rounded role models in media, is it possible for them to have that in their daily lives? Another important question to ask is whether media is so pervasive, has it affected the young girls thoughts surrounding beauty and the black female body. It is important to create a way for young girls to actually speak about this because it is imperative in the development of their thought process and how they interact with society. It is also important that a young girl can see herself on the screen as a beautiful well spoken being.

The second group of young women will range from the ages of 20-27. the main focus of the questions will mainly be concerned with beauty. Questions such as the standards of beauty, ideas internalized, messages portrayed by mass media, and how that particular female was/is she able to attain? Was it important for her to challenge the American standard of beauty? And to aid future generations are there ways that she can help someone else?

The last group that will be interviewed is a group of older black women, perhaps 30 and above. As the eldest group, these women will provide insight into how they attained their confidence and kept it throughout the years, or even if it was recently attained. Having role model for women to just look up to is important to create a well-rounded image of actual beauty in the real world.

The platform creates a transition for black girls and women of all ages to create a narrative of how they see themselves. The world around them, and their interactions with  it.

The interviews will be placed on a website. My intention is to create a website in which each woman that I interview will have her own profile that stems beyond her discussion of beauty, but what actually makes her beautiful. I will take photos of what is important in her life, have a quote that she bases her life around, her family, anything that helps define her. It complicates the images that presented by media, challenging the simplified nature of women and adding complexity. The interview will be just a snippet on the webpage, but the entire, edited, interview will be linked to YouTube. I will also post snippets of the interview of Tumblr, as gifs and as video.

I intend to use an iPhone to capture the footage. The ease of caring it around and the technology it has enhances the ease to capture the footage.

One of issues that I am still confused about is how I will incorporate academic information into the project. I am thinking that I can use one of the pages on the website to have academic information, maybe portions of documentaries, or links to information that increase knowledge of the black women and their lives. I can insert into the interviews, but that is one of the challenges that surrounds the project.

I want to work on this project updating it regularly so I can have an extensive amount of black women that complicate the images of the black woman. I believe adding this to my portfolio will display my dual majors in college, Africana Studies and Media. It really gives me an upper hand when explaining my passions concerning the world, and how I want to help change that.