Girlhood Unfiltered: A Milk Honey Bees Essay Collection

This non-fiction collection of essays has a very interesting concept. All the authors are teenagers with the oldest being eighteen. They are all self-titled black girls who are writing about their experiences of growing up black in Britain.  They might also be described as troubled as they have come from difficult circumstances including homelessness, disability either themselves or a family member and most of them having disengaged from the traditional education system.

A particularly interesting concept this reviewer has not encountered before is that of adultification. This is when the education or the justice systems view a black child as older than they are and therefore expect adult behaviour from them. This concept is mentioned in many of the essays as being deeply harmful and distressingly often experienced.

If you are looking for an honest, raw and hard-hitting approach to understanding the many facets of black girlhood and how white people should respond, read this book. There is one criticism I have to make. One of the essayists describes her sister as ‘suffering from cerebral palsy’. This language is unhelpful. Only the disabled person should say whether they ‘suffer’ or not.