The Web Series That Celebrates ‘Professional Black Girl Moments’

Ahead of season two, “Professional Black Girl” creator Yaba Blay describes her goal of celebrating the everyday experience of Black girls and women.

Joan Morgan is a cultural critic and Black feminist writer who penned the bookWhen Chickenheads Come Home to Roost. She’s also a fanatic about her lips. In 2016, rocking a short, natural cut, large gold hoops, and bright purple lipstick, Morgan was featured in the web series Professional Black Girl, a project that aims to elevate the everyday experience of Black girls and women.

Being a “professional Black girl,” she said, is characterized by “these unspoken behaviors that Black women universally understand and can speak. The one thing that I know is definitely ‘professional Black girl’ about me is my lip game. Being a professional Black girl means you can enter any space with Black women and you will have a common conversation about this particular practice.”

She added: “And I love the fact that I can be anywhere in the diaspora and wear RiriWoo MAC Red, and some Black woman will say to me, ‘RiRiWoo, girl!’ And we’ll know what we’re talking about.”

Launched in September 2016, the first season of Professional Black Girl featured Black women and girls, ranging in age, style, and profession, talking in North Carolina beauty salons about what connects them to the larger community of Black women: the way they dress, do hair, and, as one subject put it, other “Black girl rituals.”

The response to the series, creator Yaba Blay tells Broadly, was so positive and uplifting; now, she’s ready to take on season two. Thanks to a fully funded Kickstarter campaign that ended earlier this month, Professional Black Girl is finally slated to return later this year, this time set in New Orleans. Taking the show there was her way of showing her hometown some love, Blay says, and give women the opportunity to explore how their city impacts their identity and culture.

Professional Black Girl “is about being more inclusive and celebrating all of us,” says Blay, a professor who teaches race and gender politics at North Carolina Central University. When #blackgirlmagic became mainstream, she says, it felt “elitist.” In a teaser for her fundraising campaign, Blay offered this example: “While we’re out here celebrating the Michelle Obamas and Serena Williamses of the world,” she said in the video, “we were forgetting just who they were before they became who they are. Michelle’s feathered hair in that Huey Newton chair? Black. Serena Williams’ braids with the entire pack of beads? Black. And they were consciously repping for Black girls …

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