In The Wake: Black Girl Lessons on Collective Care

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.5.1.0003
• Published date: 14 October 2022
• Date: 14 October 2022
• Pages: 18-27
• Author: Aja Reynolds
• Subject Matter: Black girlhood,antiBlackness,collective care,Black geographies

18 Volume Five, Number One

“In the Wake” — Reynolds

In The Wake: Black Girl Lessons on Collecve Care

Aja Reynolds, Ph .D.

Wayne State University

Abstract: This article centers Black girl leadership as a survival guide in this unprecedented moment

of combating two pandemics, Covid-19 and extrajudicial killings of Black people. I recall lessons learned

during my ethnographic research with Black girls in Chicago in which loss and grieving was often and

premature. This piece is a response to Christina Sharpe’s “wake work” conceptualization that challenges

the collective care Black people specically must engage both with our living and dead.

Keywords: Black girlhood; antiblackness; collective care; Black geographies

Introducon/ Theorecal Framework

Initially when I started working on this project, I could not foresee the severity of Black life being

even more vulnerable and delicate than it already had. I was reecting then on antiblackness and

Black folks’ proximity to premature death as a sentence from the state for surviving. Like the rest

of us, I did not anticipate the timeliness for us, Black people to call on our ancestral wisdoms

and invoke our practices of care to carry us through a pandemic caused by COVID-191, a virus

outbreak and racial uprisings to follow the summer of 2020. Yet I knew we would show up in the

numbers disproportionately of who contracted the disease and those who would die to no fault of

our own. The warnings about who identied as most vulnerable to the virus included people with

underlying health conditions indirectly named Black people, particularly, poor and working class

who move through impoverished communities lacking access to food, healthcare, and job security

in addition to the environmental violence brought on by poor air quality and poisoned water.

Therefore, this paper intends to explore Christina Sharpe’s (2016) concepts about “wake work”

in which she describes it as processes to enact grief and memory through rituals to remember the

dead and our relation to them and “as modes of attending to Black life and Black death.” I center

the lives of Black girls and their pedagogies of care as an oering to Sharpe’s question, “How

might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and

live lives meant to be unliveable? (pg. 22)”

Uniquely, Black girls are seated at the intersections of state and community violence as a

result of racialized gendered oppression. For them, the question about the wake work is more simply

asked by Ntozakes Shange,1974, in her profound play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered

Suicide When the Rainbow was Enu,” which is posed in the monologue as “who will sing a Black

girl song?” Sisterhood, seems to answer the initial question of “who will sing a Black girl song?”

It is the same sisterhood that gathered at a kitchen table as Black women genius led to the writing

1 Covid 19 is a virus that caused a pandemic in 2020. More information here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavi-

rus/2019-ncov/index.html.