Sisterhood Is Power: A Day In The Woods With Black Girl Magik

Standing in a circle in the parking lot of the Congaree National Park in South Carolina, Shydeia Caldwell, the founder of the Black Girl Magik collective, is leading a ritual workshop. She instructs us to step one-by-one into the middle of the circle, come up with a short combination of dance and sound — a clap and a yelp, a stomp and a hoot — and do it continuously while the rest of the group joins in, each person with their own invented choreography. Everyone looks around nervously, with fears and memories of middle school dances surging back like a wave. But we all want to be team players; no one will be sitting this one out. And soon, we all join — clapping, singing, saying short words and phrases. We look ridiculous, we know, but we are also impressed by how good we sound together; how good this primal song we have accidentally written is. We keep going until we erupt in laughter and applause. The energy has been lifted. We are a team.

“I started BGM because I was craving to have a space with other women where we could have authentic conversations,” Caldwell tells Refinery29. “I wanted to create a place where complete strangers could be open and vulnerable with one another.” Founded in 2015, Black Girl Magik is focused on creating safe spaces for women of color on- and off- line. They do workshops around the country that include activities like tarot and ritual work, have a website that publishes artist interviews, essays that deal with topics like identity and mental health, and photography and video art. Their content — like this denim shoot collaboration — is all created by, or features, women of color. A physical manifestation of the BGM ethos.

If jeans are supposed to be universal — the great equalizer that everyone rich to poor wears — why is our vision of this all-American fabric still tied to the blonde and the blue-eyed, to the cowboys, to the underage models leering at the camera saying nothing comes between them and their jeans? It’s time to change the very notion of the ideals that were built by the antiquated …

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