By Angel C. Dye

Mahogany L. Browne writes poems for Black girls and women at the intersections. Her poems sing for those of us at the crossroads of knowing and loving ourselves and unpacking the unwanted luggage we are given to define us. She is an award-winning poet, playwright, curator, organizer, and activist—among many other titles. Her work has ranged from writing and editing books to leading poetry organizations to teaching and more. Currently, Browne is Executive Director of JustMedia, described on their website as “a media literacy initiative designed to support the groundwork of criminal justice leaders and community members.” Her recent publications include a young adult novel titled Vinyl Moon, a novel-in-verse titled Chlorine Sky, and a poetry collection titled Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood. Along with writing and publishing, Browne leads poetry and spoken word programming for an array of organizations. She continues to redefine and demonstrate in real-time what “Black Girl Magic” is and can be. Her popular poem of the same name meditates on the prescriptions that are constantly thrust upon Black girls and women and flips these reductive, uninformed, and often racist, stereotypical boxes on their heads. Though the poem is certainly meant for a “Black Girl” audience, it has also reached audiences far and wide, including on PBS NewsHour’s Brief but Spectacular segment, read by Browne herself back in 2016. That appearance, now archived on YouTube, has amassed 35,000 views from the network’s 4.5 million subscribers and beyond. Browne has performed “Black Girl Magic” for poetry slams and television appearances around the world, and in 2018 it was published as a book by Roaring Brook Press with illustrations by Jess X. Snow.

In “Black Girl Magic,” Browne defines Black Girl Magic as ancestral and enacted through self-definition—it is a flowering that defies all the “ain’ts” aimed at us and that begins to encompass our multitudes. Mahogany L. Browne not only embodies the Black Girl Magic she writes about; she theorizes the ways that this magic ties Black women and girls to a deeper knowledge of themselves and the worldmaking/remaking they do by living unapologetically in an increasingly hostile world.4.5 million subscribers and beyond. Browne has performed “Black Girl Magic” for poetry slams and television appearances around the world, and in 2018 it was published as a book by Roaring Brook Press with illustrations by Jess X. Snow. In the poem, Browne defines Black Girl Magic as ancestral and enacted through self-definition—it is a flowering that defies all the “ain’ts” aimed at us and that begins to encompass our multitudes. Mahogany L. Browne not only embodies the Black Girl Magic she writes about; she theorizes the ways that this magic ties Black women and girls to a deeper knowledge of themselves and the worldmaking/remaking they do by living unapologetically in an increasingly hostile world. 

“Black Girl Magic,” as Browne engages it, is a Black Feminist politics around liberation and purpose. In an interview with tech organization Crescendo, Browne explains, “Black Girl Magic stands for resilience. It is all the ways in which a Black girl, Black woman, Black trans person, Black femme, can be unequivocally unshakeable.” The phrase “#BlackGirlMagic” is a shortened version of the phrase “Black Girls Are Magic,” coined by educator and “cultural pioneer” CaShawn Thompson (@MsCaShawn) on X (formerly Twitter). The phrase gained major traction on social media beginning in 2013 and has since become a mainstay in Black vernacular and beyond, especially in discussions and celebrations of Black girls and women and their achievements and contributions to the world. Thompson drew on her experiences “growing up with her mother, grandmother, and aunts” to create the popular phrase, and Mahogany L. Browne’s writing is an extension of the phrase’s connection to Black girlhood and community. Browne writes: 

The “They” that gives the poem’s litany of prescriptions is unnamed but resoundingly clear. The antagonistic force that Browne’s speaker gestures toward is an amalgamation of people, systems, societal tactics, and expectations that relentlessly mandate who and what Black girls get to be and to what extent they are allowed to be anything. From beauty standards to taking up space to building families, Black girls are constantly policed and punished for living life on their own terms. And what Browne elucidates in her “Black Girl Magic” poem is the truth that while Black girls endure constant battering, they “ain’t posed to have nothing to say” about it unless their responses are entertaining or profitable for their adversaries. They certainly should not voice their pain or displeasure—if they are even allowed to feel it at all. The presupposition in Browne’s repeated “ain’t posed to” is that it is subversive and revolutionary when the “you” in the poem does any of the things she is told she cannot or should not do. According to Browne’s words both on and off the page, embodying Black Girl Magic includes having the freedom to do as a girl or woman pleases, to live unabashedly loudly as herself in whatever forms she decides to. It is impossible to not hear echoes of Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech in Mahogany L. Browne’s “ain’ts.” And because Truth’s past “ain’t” and Browne’s present ones are emblematic of intrusive claims about what Black women certainly are not, they resound even more melodically in their reclamation of the magic that we absolutely are. Browne elaborates on the meaning of Black Girl Magic in her Crescendo interview saying, “Your being is unfettered. Your brilliance is un-wavered. Your integrity is unquestioned. You belong in every room you decide to go into.” There is a universality in Browne’s use of “you” and “your” in the interview as well as in the poem that encompasses the vastness of Black girls and women while making space for our individuality and uniqueness. Her meditation on “Black Girl Magic” offers the belief that when we fully embody and act on the magic within us, we are free to be all that we are, wherever and whoever we are. 

Mahogany L. Browne situates herself, her work, and her Black Girl Magic ethos within a tradition of Black Feminist “pillars” who came before her including Ida B. Wells, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Jayne Cortez, and June Jordan. Their works, she explains to Crescendo, guided her toward a deeper understanding of herself and her place in the world. Citing Shange’s often quoted “Where there is woman there is magic” and Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Browne builds on a longstanding politics of Black women’s self-expression to center their lives as important and complex. Shange offers relatedly salient words in her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf: “i found god in myself & i loved her / i loved her fiercely.” Audre Lorde writes, “My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you,” and “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.” And June Jordan declares, as Mahogany L. Browne references in her introduction to the Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic anthology, “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name / My name is my own my own my own.” Browne joins this chorus of foremothers with “Black Girl Magic,” a potent elixir that has been brewing in her bloodline and those of her poetic predecessors for decades. Keenly aware of this, Browne uses her poem to acknowledge the ways that Black girls possess a deep inner knowledge about who they are and what they are capable of: 

The speaker of the poem justifies the serial “ain’ts” preceding these two stanzas with more “ain’ts,” more echoed prescriptions of what Black girls should not do. The intrusive outside voice proclaims that someone like “you” should not love themselves or find their voice or find beauty in their complexion or see themselves in exemplars like Nina Simone, Beyoncé, Tina Turner, Cecily Tyson, or Shonda Rhimes. What this voice is really saying is that Black girls and women should not be proud of their beauty or intelligence. They should not have the capacity for caring and nurturing—especially since they themselves should not be cared for or nurtured—and they should not be adored or admired. But Mahogany L. Browne does admire and adore us.  

Browne demonstrates her fervent commitment to loving “up on” us not just with her poetry but also with her work as a mentor, educator, and founder of initiatives like the Woke Baby Book Fair for diverse literature, which she organized while serving as the Lincoln Center Poet-in-Residence in 2021. This event was part of a slate of public facing programs that Browne led promoting art, literacy, and justice with the call to action “We Are the Work.” Browne uses her art to uplift and inspire families and communities in true Black Girl Magic fashion. She continues to work across media, having released an album with Sean Mason titled CHROME VALLEY in 2024, an album titled I Remember Death by Its Proximity to What I Love in 2022, a series of young adult books (which have been adapted for stage), children’s books, poetry collections, visuals, and more. She defies every “ain’t” in “Black Girl Magic” by applying her own magic to her artistic practice and by loving up on herself while letting us inside her mind. 

“Black Girl Magic” is resonant because it is at once a proclamation, an affirmation, and a reclamation. In the Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2 introduction, Browne asks repeatedly, “Where in the world do they love a Black girl for being herself?” She answers this provocation with an anecdote about her sister-in-law “T,” who she says is what people might call a “‘firecracker.’” Instead of agreeing with this assessment of her sister-in-law as a volatile, boisterous woman, she writes about how she sees her as vibrant and dynamic. From her own journey of being called too much and too loud, and being told she takes up too much space, Browne is able to recognize the gift in her sister-in-law’s outspoken, unapologetic personality. She encourages T to continue speaking up—responsibly and considerately—and to never internalize the “folktale” that she is somehow “hard to love” because it is the same affirmation she has had to give herself. Browne reclaims Black women’s voices as our own and projects them even louder into the atmosphere. She writes, “A Black woman is often asked to lead (silently), to be the symbol of civility while everyone else plays from a different playbook, mocking her existence the entire time.” This sobering truth about the ways we are silenced is a reverberation of the “ain’t” stream in “Black Girl Magic.” The poem lingers on the cultural and societal burdens Black women are expected to “carry” including “babies…weaves…felons…families…confusion…silence…a nation,” and it emphasizes the one thing we are “never” permitted to carry: “an opinion” (13-17). The words in “Black Girl Magic” read as a careful acknowledgement of the prescriptions that “T,” Browne, and so many of us are at odds with by just being. Our one salvation is that, in answer to Browne’s question, the place in the world where we are loved for being ourselves is in the pages of her writing and the praxis of her activism. 

After all the opposition and the seemingly never-ending stream of prescriptions and “ain’t posed tos” that Mahogany L. Browne lays out in “Black Girl Magic,” there is a shift driven by Black girls’ voices, minds, and beauty. The poem’s volta appears beginning with a line that starts, “But you tell them…” It could end there because this conjunction and reframe moves the external, imposing voice that has been telling “you” what not to do and who not to be from the center to the margins. The line places “you” in charge of speaking and deciding, continuing on to say, “you are more than a hot comb and a wash and set / You are Kunta Kinte’s kin / You are a Black Girl worth remembering” (Browne 29). Referencing the semiautobiographical neo-slave narrative turned television miniseries Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, Mahogany L. Browne’s speaker clarifies that the “you” who has been silenced and devalued is descended from African ancestors who are rich in culture and history. She is living, breathing history herself, even while fortifying herself against everyone’s demands of her. She is memorable. 

Two final stanzas introduced with conjunctions close out the poem. In these stanzas, the speaker’s language shifts again to juxtapose the earlier list of serial “you ain’t posed to” and “you posed to” prescriptions. Nothing about Black girls’ identities is abstract or prescriptive in these lines. Instead, our personhood, power, and magic are definitive and fully realized: 

The language in these final lines changes into declarative statements and then into outright absolutes. “You are,” “You are,” “You are” becomes just “You” and a “black girl” attribute. These vernacular movements signal a confidence and pride in the “black girl” who is described. The speaker has gone from telling their Black girl audience who they are being told they are allowed to be to telling them who they truly are. Ultimately, the speaker’s insistence on who Black girls “are” wanes in the abandonment of the word “are” leading to an openness that lets them “bloom” into anything they want to become. The confirmations in the poem drown out the outside voices until the only ones “black girl black girl” maturing into “black woman” can hear are her own and those of the Black women cheering her on. We see her and admire her with “OUR eyes.” There is a collectivity and heft to the capitalization of “OUR” that underscores just how many of us there are and how much more our gaze, the gaze of her peers, matters than anyone else’s. We are not just watching her; we are witnessing her. We are holding space for her and loving who we see. We see ourselves reflected in her eyes the same way that we create a space nurturing enough for her to see herself reflected in ours. 

Mahogany L. Browne’s theorization of Black girlhood and womanhood in her poem “Black Girl Magic” is representative of her vast oeuvre as an artist, educator, and activist. What she manages to capture in the poem is what she lives out through her engagements with the communities she builds and sustains. As a fierce advocate for Black women’s wellness in all forms, she recognizes the liberatory power of self-expression. Unafraid to name the ways that we are bombarded with misnomers and narrow categories, her words roar louder than any voices attempting to tell us who we are and what we can be. Browne says it best in Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2: “We are so easy to love. Our resilience and expansion are proof that magic exists. We are magic. We are Black girls grown into women, growing men and women…” Mahogany L. Browne is certainly magic, but she is also a careful magician whose linguistic and cultural alchemy helps us Black girls better know and love ourselves.  

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Works Cited 

“Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977).” Buried In Print, 2 Nov. 2022, http://www.buriedinprint.com/audre-lordes-the-transformation-of-silence-into-language-and-action-1977/. 

“Bio.” MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, mobrowne.com/bio.html. 

Browne, Mahogany L. A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe. Crown Books for Young Readers, 2025. 

——— . Black Girl Magic: A Poem. Roaring Brook Press, 2018. 

CaShawn Thompson – The Mother of #BlackGirlMagic, cashawn.com/. 

Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of An American Family. Dell Publishing Company, 1977.  

Jordan, June. “Poem About My Rights.” The Poetry Foundation, 31 Oct. 2023, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161357/poem-about-my-rights-651df23f84683. 

“Mahogany L. Browne Reads “Black Girl Magic”.” The Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, http://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/black-girl-magic. 

“Mahogany L. Browne: Healing, Organizing, Parenting and the Movement for Black Lives.” Crescendo, crescendowork.com/mahogany-l-browne-healing-organizing-parenting-movement-for-black-lives. 

Mahogany L. Browne, http://www.mahoganylbrowne.com/. 

“Mahogany L. Browne.” UNSSC | United Nations System Staff College, http://www.unssc.org/about-unssc/speakers-and-collaborators/mahogany-l-browne. 

PBS NewsHour. “Poet Mahogany L. Browne on ‘black girl magic’.” YouTube, 25 Feb. 2016, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ4CPUufrIQ. 

Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Simon & Schuster, 2010. 

Truth, Sojourner. “Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I A Woman? (U.S. National Park Service).” NPS.gov (U.S. National Park Service), 17 Nov. 2017, http://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm. 

Jamila Woods, et al. The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic. Haymarket Books, 2018. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=569d13e1-1be9-3fab-8a61-c2566ee24a63. 

“Woke Baby Book Fair · Lincoln Center.” Lincoln Center, July 2021, www.lincolncenter.org/lincoln-center-at-home/show/woke-baby-book-fairandnbsp. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Angel C. Dye (she/her) is a poet, researcher, and author of two chapbooks: BREATHE and My Mouth a Constant Prayer. Angel is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin/Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas. A graduate of Howard University, she also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared in publications such as Callaloo and the Langston Hughes Review, among others. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Rutgers, writing on the rent party phenomenon in Harlem Renaissance literature and culture. She aims to discover, as Audre Lorde explains, “the words [she does] not yet have.”