Every girl needs to know who she is. She needs to recognise her strengths and weaknesses, understand what matters to her, develop healthy self-esteem and learn not to measure her worth entirely through the opinions of other people.
For Black girls, this can carry an additional importance.
A girl does not form her understanding of herself in isolation. She also receives messages from family, school, peers, culture, media and the wider society about who she is, how she should look, how she should behave and what she is capable of becoming.
For Black girls, some of those messages can be shaped by racial stereotypes, colourism, hair and beauty standards, assumptions about behaviour or intelligence, adultification, gender expectations or narrow ideas of what a successful woman should be.
The messages a girl receives about herself are not always harmless. In the UK, Girlguiding found that more than half of girls aged 7–21 had received negative comments about their appearance. For Black girls, judgement can also be racialised. The safeguarding review into Child Q found evidence of adultification bias and racism in the treatment of a Black British schoolgirl who was strip-searched at school. These are very different experiences, but both illustrate why a girl needs an understanding of herself that is not built entirely from how others see her.
The answer is not to teach a girl to ignore everyone around her. Nor is it to tell her that every outside judgement is wrong. It is to help her develop enough self-awareness and inner stability to examine what she hears rather than simply absorb it.
Knowing myself before others define me
Self-awareness means beginning to notice what is happening inside us: our thoughts, emotions, values, strengths, weaknesses, behaviour and automatic reactions.
This matters because without self-awareness, it is easy to live according to expectations we have never examined.
A girl may begin changing the way she speaks, looks, thinks or behaves because she wants acceptance. She may pursue a particular future because others expect it. She may believe something negative about herself simply because she has heard it repeatedly.
Knowing herself gives her somewhere from which to think.
It allows her to ask: Is this really who I am? Is this what I value? Is this something I need to change, or something I have been made to feel ashamed of?
Dignity does not depend on approval
Healthy self-worth does not mean believing that we are perfect. It means recognising that our dignity is not something another person awards or withdraws.
A girl can acknowledge a weakness without believing that she is worthless. She can learn from criticism without allowing every criticism to define her. She can develop and change without having to become someone else in order to deserve acceptance.
This is why Becoming Me is one of the foundations of Black Eve.
The skills involved are not unique to Black girls. Self-awareness, identity and healthy self-esteem matter for everyone. But when a girl may encounter messages that define, judge or reduce her before she has had the opportunity to understand herself, helping her know who she is becomes especially important.