President Kennedy once said "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." 

The United States is known for its creativity and innovation, but somehow when it comes to things that benefit Black girls, the things that would guarantee their wellbeing are too costly. Too unrealistic. We are reminded time and time again that our lives are simply not valued.

And yet, Black girls hold in them the power to imagine a better future. To craft ideas about what a world that values them could look like. To imagine how the spaces they inhabit  could be transformed.

In describing Afrofuturism, sociologist Eve Ewing defined it as: "the basic notion that black people will continue to be alive and exist into the future — which sounds like a really simple premise until you think about how much sci-fi you have consumed in your life where there are just no black people."

Using Black futurism as well as the "Black radical imagination," the young women I interviewed spoke joyfully about better future. They can see it, taste it and see it coming


“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”- Arundathi Roy

"I just want more rights like I want us to have more freedom on [campus] because a lot of people feel like they can't do that much because... we're people of color and we feel like we're restricted, But if we gave them a safe space then i feel like people would participate." - Ida

Students often offered us a vision of what the university could look like if took the needs and wants of Black and other women of color seriously:

• "I think that this is a moment where the administration is going to have to change even if they don't want to.... [I want] a university that is free. A university that doesn't necessitate like mass amounts of debt to go to it." -Emely

"Without it being like a "We're all one thing" I kind of want the day when there's not even a diversity category where it's automatically taught, it's automatically integrated into different curriculum." -Jasmine

They also spoke about how important imagining and rethinking power is to their activism

"How can we all work together to overthrow this system? Cause we're here. It's not like we're useless because Donald Trump is president. "
-Ida

"So for me it's always about 'what can I do?'. Right. I've always had this In my mind... I can do it."
​-Ida

​Therefore, I ask us to to think critically about the labor that young women of color, and especially Black women, are doing to make higher education a little bit more justice. Their work reflects that scholar Venus Evans-Winters describes as Black girl resilience. Using this frame work when analyzing the experiences of student activists is important because it doesn't glorify their struggle. Too often, scholarship about Black girls is caught up with questions of grit and ignore the very deep structural inequality that these girls face. No one wants to be a hero, we want to be human.

Evans-Winters therefore asks us to think of the particular ways in which Black girls exhibit resilience, even if it doesn't look like what past scholarship centered on white communities tells us resilience looks like. Instead, I take up her analytical framework to contextualize the activism of the young women in my study and call it resilience. 

In the words of Kira "we do this because it's the only way to survive."

But what then is the institution's responsibility to Black girls' survival?