For Harriet

For Harriet is a youtube channel that is part of an effort to create a community of Black women (hence, it is *for* Harriet). Kim posts intermittently, going through periods of lots of posts then long stretches of not posting, and it’s a combination of live streams, interviews (like an interview with a Black community organizer to discuss the voting turnout efforts in Georgia) and more traditional video essays. I’m definitely an outsider to the community she’s addressing, but that’s part of why I find her perspective so valuable. In this video she runs down the music Top 40 lists to explore how successful Black women musicians have to rely on more explicit expressions of sexuality than their white women counterparts (think about the difference between Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish and Nikki Minaj). In the discourse that happened after WAP, it’s important to see such music not just as one individual’s expression, but as part of bigger patterns.