When I was 19 years old…still so young and so impressionable as a sophomore in college…the big sisters of the sorority I was pledging taught me a valuable lesson…that I am only just now beginning to fully comprehend some 20 years later.

They taught me that as Black women, members of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., we must embrace the way of the duck and allow adversity to roll off our backs as ducks do - that having that kind of built in resistance must become part of our magic. Black girl magic.

And over the years, I have perfected that craft. The ability to tread through waters of doubt, fear, and uncertainty - allowing those droplets to bead up on my back unable to weigh me down or water-log me with drippings of white supremacy.

And I have cultivated an epistemology - a way of knowing that lives both inside of me and beyond me - that connects me to the ancestors and generations of daughters foretold. This Black girl magic empowers me to know what is unknown to others. See what the eye cannot see. And become an ontological expression of the supernatural - that moved within the expansive infinitudes of the deep Black universe to create beauty from nothing. 

Black girl magic…not just a trait or a term…but a telos to remind us from whence we’ve come and tell us where we are going. Black girl magic…a rhetoric, a language…both already written and yet unfolding and enveloping the creases of time that mere mortals cannot explain. It is the essence that imbibes and moves from the very hands of God and into our veins like a royal Bloodline. A godly priesthood that connects us more firmly to destinies of liberation, love, and light.

And as it is written, as it is spoken, may it always and ever be - so.