Last night, I had the privilege of attending the book release for She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip Hop Feminist. (I’ll bless y’all with a review when I finish it).
We let pioneer voices of women in Hip Hop: Joan Morgan, Michaela Angela Davis, and Kierna Mayo, Dr. Yaba Blay, moderated by Emil Wilbekin, take us on a trip through politics, tabloids, and a whirlwind of emotions from August 25, 1998 and beyond. I sat in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium of the Brooklyn Museum with a dark caesar, juxtaposed to a black t-shirt signed: “woman”, tucked into Ankara pants, garnished with statement, long, tassel, red earrings. There, I jammed to Lost Ones, Doo-wop (That Thing), Everything is Everything, and To Zion, songs released when I was all of three years old, with a room full of pre and post #BlackGirlMagic women.
As we celebrated our sister, Lauryn, whose “ … fire was what we needed culturally to fill this room today” (Dr. Yaba Blay, Book Release: She Begat This, August 9, 2018), I couldn’t help but have a Buggin’ Out moment. In Hip Hop, the brothers are always up on the wall, but why aint no brothers show up at the Brooklyn Museum for Lauryn Hill?
As a transplant from The Black Belt of Long Island, over the past two years, I’ve taken full advantage of the many rich Black cultural experiences that call Brooklyn home. As a twenty-something, SINGLE, pan-sexual woman, I admit, these cultural experiences are what I thought would be the perfect opportunities to not only find myself, but potentially an equally woke mate. To my dismay, the brothers at events like First Saturdays, Soul Summit, and Curlfest, tend to fit into one of four categories: taken, gay, hotep, or absent all together.
Now personally, I know a few brothers who would’ve enjoyed this event. I also know there may be more brothers at other Black cultural events that I haven’t heard of or maybe wasn’t able to attend. However, I have noticed a very particular trend over the past two years, and it makes me ponder the idea that in a community (The Black Community) where the women have become overwhelmingly more educated, we are rapidly losing Black male peers.
