Black Girl, Other

Growing up Black in America, church wasn't just a Sunday tradition; it was often the center of gravity for the whole family & its community. For generations, the Black church has been more than a place of worship; it's been a source of community, mutual aid, and political organizing, especially in eras when few other institutions were built by and for Black people. In many ways, the church is integral to the Black experience in America. 

But that picture is shifting. Today, 22% of Black adults are religious "nones" aka not affiliated with any religion, including a small share who identify specifically as atheist or agnostic. And among younger generations, that number climbs even higher; roughly a third of Black Millennials and over a quarter of Black Gen Z now say they're unaffiliated. So where are those women on our screens?

For all the strides Black women have made in television and film, the nonbeliever, the skeptic, the woman who's walked away from the church is nearly nonexistent. 

In this episode of Black Girl, Other, Dom, a writer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, discusses what it was like growing up with a Baptist mother and a grandmother who practiced Voodoo, and how that upbringing shaped her path to becoming non-religious. The conversation then opens into an illuminating discussion about being demisexual in a hypersexual world.

It’s not surprising to learn that neurodivergence in Black communities has historically been misread, misdiagnosed, or missed entirely. Conditions like ADHD and autism are often underdiagnosed in Black children compared to their white peers, not because they occur less often, but because symptoms get filtered through racial bias, mislabeled as "attitude" or "behavioral issues" instead of being recognized for what they are. And for Black women specifically, there's an added layer: the pressure to embody the "strong Black woman" archetype often masks traits like sensory overwhelm, executive dysfunction, or social exhaustion because there's little cultural permission to name them.

So when it comes to media representation, the gaps aren't surprising. Neurodivergent characters are rarely written as Black women, and when Black women are neurodivergent in real life, that part of their story is rarely told.

In this episode of Black Girl, Other, I am chatting with my good friend Jasmine about what it means to be a neurodivergent Black woman and whether, and how, that experience ever makes it onto our screens.

Of the roughly 490 LGBTQ characters GLAAD counted across TV last season, only 17% were Black, and that number’s actually shrinking, not growing. Additionally, when we think of queer representation on screen, it still leans male. So when we talk about Black queer women in media, we’re not talking about an oversaturated category. We’re talking about characters who are still fighting to exist past the sidekick, the punchline, or the one-episode arc. 

But offscreen? The story’s different. Black queer women have been building rich community, culture, and language way before Hollywood tapped in. 

In this episode of Black Girl, Other, I chat with my longtime friend Kai, an actor, artist, and comedian from Harlem. She candidly — and comically — shares with me the evolution of her queerness. We discuss everything from the complexity of labels to feeling comfortable in your sexual identity, even if it conflicts with how the rest of the world may identify you.

In this episode of Black Girl, Other, I'm speaking with B, who grew up biracial in Texas, raised by her white mother and disconnected from her Black father's heritage. In her youth, her relationship to the church felt transactional, but eventually she found deeper meaning by studying scripture.

Then 2020 changed something. Watching how her community responded to COVID and then the murder of George Floyd cracked something open. The institutions she'd always leaned on didn't hold up the way she needed them to. So she started looking elsewhere.

That search led her away from religion altogether and toward something different: a connection to the earth itself. Nature as the thing that actually feels sacred. Dirt under her feet instead of a pew beneath her. Sun instead of stained glass.

We're talking about what it looks like to be Black and anti-religion, when so much of the Black community and culture is built around the church, and what it means to find grounding, literally, outside of it.

In a Pew Research Center survey of adults under 50 who say they're unlikely to have children, 57% gave the same top reason: they just don't want to. Not finances. Not their career. Just an absence of the desire for parenthood. Interestingly, in a study led by the CDC, they found the number of births declined 4% for Black women from 2023 to 2024, the steepest decline of any racial group.

But turn on the TV, watch a film, or scroll social media, and Black women are still cast almost exclusively as the mother figure. The matriarch. The caregiver. The one holding everyone else together, whether she's raising her own kids or everybody else's.

So what does it look like when motherhood isn't part of a Black woman's story?

In this episode of Black Girl, Other, I'm sitting down with Emonie, who's chosen a child-free life, to talk about what that choice actually feels like, the joy, judgement, and the identity that exist outside of motherhood, and what she wishes the media would get right about it.