Since the age of three, I have had the wildest imagination. I have always been concocting potions for healing others and painting worlds rosier than my own. As a Black young woman, I have faced many obstacles throughout my life due to my race, gender and social positionality. I often retreated to my imagination when the reality of my own life felt too difficult to bear. The older I got and the more I became involved in movement work the more I realized that what sustained my ability to continue was the fact that I was still envisioning a world behind my own life circumstances where all Black girls can truly be liberated and free. In my own musings, I have found that it is difficult to imagine being a Black Girl without the harm, without whiteness and the anti-Blackness structuring it, because this is the only reality the world has shown us for centuries. I created this digital project because I wanted to convene a space for Black girls to realize that their dreams are more than just the nightmares that white people have already dreamed up for us because when Black imagination is limited to what whiteness has laid out, to the possibilities whiteness allows, what could be is already out of reach.  In a world that devalues, under appreciates and vilifies Black girls there is a desperate need to create dream spaces and statements that helps us to reimagine what could be. In the following pages you find my personal annotations on The Combahee River Collective Statement, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship by Dr. Aimee Cox, Queer Mobile Homecoming by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Each webpage will provide my interpretation and videos from the authors themselves so that users may interact with us both.

Picture Caption: Revolutionary Dreams, Nikki Givonnnai 

Uh, I asked a question like this
Are we a lost generation of our people?
Add us to equations but they'll never make us equal
She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel
So why ain't the stealing of my rights made illegal?
They keep us underground working hard for the greedy
But when it's time pay they turn around and call us needy
My crown too heavy like the Queen Nefertiti
Gimme back my pyramid, I'm trying to free Kansas City
Mixing masterminds like your name Bernie Grundman
Well I'm gonna keep leading like a young Harriet Tubman
You can take my wings but I'm still goin' fly
And even when you edit me the booty don't lie
Yeah, keep singing and I'mma keep writing songs
I'm tired of Marvin asking me, What's Going On?
March to the streets cause I'm willing and I'm able
Categorize me, I defy every label
And while you're selling dope, we're gonna keep selling hope
We rising up now, you gotta deal you gotta cope
Will you be electric sheep?
Electric ladies, will you sleep?
Or will you preach?
- Janelle Monae

Section Author/Text Annotator: Loren S. Cahill, Scholar Activist, PhD Candidate at CUNY Graduate Center