“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” -Zora Neale Hurston.
I was ten years old when I first saw a fresh faced Jamelia dressed in a mantua literally waltzed across MTV Base declaring she was no prima donna while Beenie Man zaga zow, ziggy zowed his way through his feature. She was a vision I would often don my mother’s net curtains trying to recreate. Jamelia’s visibility in the early noughties was important to me as a dark skinned black girl because I was able to see myself in popular culture and her existence validated mine. During the early noughties, the trifecta of women who I could look to as representations that reflected how I saw myself in popular music were Jamelia, Kelly Rowland and Sabrina Washington in British girl group Misteeq.
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