black nerds

I love the Black Girl Nerds community. Jamie has developed a major support system for black nerds (mostly women, but also the guys who support the community) and I am very glad to be apart of it. I’ve written several posts, attended NYCC with the BGN crew twice, and co-hosted quite a few podcasts (more than I had even remembered when I compiled them all!) and now I’m carving out a new space for myself in the community. I am now the BGN TV Editor!

I want to help Jamie make BGN even bigger than it is. With BGN’s strong Twitter presence, especially as a live-tweeting platform, BGN could be as big as Buzzfeed or Vulture with the amount of TV coverage that we do. So with the idea of creating a Black Girl Nerds TV vertical on the site, I’m curating TV meta content. There are a lot of sites that cover TV recaps and reviews (I write for a couple of them already), but there can never be too much content by black female voices.
As we’ve seen with #OscarsSoWhite and especially Julie Delpy’s comments (she wishes she were black because apparently black people get less hate than women? haha okay sure. & what about black WOMEN though?), black women’s voices are often ignored. The more of us out there, making ourselves heard, the better. So we want to amplify black female voices, especially the nerdy ones.
There are 11,000 (pronounced eleventy-hundred) shows out there for nerd audiences and there are maybe 3 or 4 black female characters (top of the list: Iris West on The Flash, Abbie and Jenny Mills from Sleepy Hollow, and soon Vixen and Misty Knight from Arrow & Luke Cage) currently on the air right now. It’s abysmal that I can count them all. And their characters are constantly suffering from marginalized writing and a misunderstanding of what it is like to be a black woman. So if our voices are heard, if execs and creators and producers realize that we will not let this stand, maybe we can make a change. Better writing, more characters, more LEAD characters.
So we’ll recap. We’ll dissect. We’ll point out the criticisms. But we also just fangirl as a community. That’s my favorite part. Being able to love a show and talk about it smartly and with a community that is going to accept your voice.
I love that Jamie has created a community where people can get started. We can experiment with ideas and present them to each other as a community. BGN is growing and evolving and I’m excited to be apart of it all.
It’s also great for me personally. I pitched the idea and had it accepted. That’s a confidence boost. Plus it puts me in a position I’ve never been in before, but one that I can shape and learn from. And I know the BGN community will support me and will teach me and I will only grow from here. I can put BGN TV Editor on my resume with receipts to back it up. Then I can apply for writing and social media positions more confidently and with more experience. The vicious “you need experience to get this job but we won’t give you experience’ cycle might finally come to an end. I create my own experience. I want to step forward into this take charge attitude and finally move past the awful and confusing post-grad part of my life. I hope this takes me there.
So if you want to volunteer TV recaps for Black Girl Nerds, email me! I have a fancy BGN email address now! connie@blackgirlnerds.com And who knows where this will take us — there’s already something in the BGN experience pipeline that could make this position really great. I’m excited!