I Speak Fluent Black Girl LOUD and clear

Speaking Fluent Black Girl is a way in which Black women and girls flavorfully express our distinct beliefs, thoughts, feelings and emotions. Speaking Fluent Black Girl exists because Black people have always had “a way with words” and Black women and girls language is no different –our special idioms, phrases and more; both verbal and nonverbal.

Speaking Fluent Black Girl is also dynamic in the way Black women use their voices. This is not just about checking people - as media only tends to portray us - but also as truth tellers and change agents. For many years, Black women have led organizations, movements and this country toward the truth by speaking Fluent Black Girl.

Speaking Fluent Black Girl means taking terms that are commonly used, and remixing them into colorful, widely used statements of power that can be applied to anybody who thought they could try us. It’s statements like, “I reclaim my time,” by Maxine Waters; “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” by Jenifer Lewis; Fannie Lou Hamer’s “Sick and tired of being sick and tired;” and statements like “First, of all…” or, simply voicing our thoughts and refusing to be silent or silenced when something is disagreeable to us.

Speaking Fluent Black Girl also disintegrates tired tropes that describe passionate, outspoken Black women as “ignorant,” “ghetto,” “loud,” “sassy,” “angry” and “bossy.” Instead, through Speaking Fluent Black Girl and The LOUD Girl Movement, we encourage and uplift one another and modify the lens through which the world views us by recognizing the ingenuity of what it means to be “imitated but never duplicated,” “LOUD, “On Fleek” women who ROCK and are also MAGIC.

LOUD Girl Movement celebrates the voices of Black women and girls in all the ways that we speak Fluent Black Girl.

We Speak Fluent Black Girl LOUD and clear.

LOUD and all,

Thysha M. Shabazz + LOUD Girl Movement Team