Jennifer S. Roberts—Executive Director—Girls of Color Liberation Lab
The Colored Girls Liberation Lab creates healing spaces for Black women to “play” and dream with their lives.
by Joseph Williams
Word in black
Jenn Roberts had done everything right. But it all seemed to be going wrong.
“I was one of the first in my family to go to college,” she says. “I found a good guy in college, got married early, and did everything I was supposed to do. And then I woke up one day: “This doesn’t feel good. I’m not happy, my (soon to be former) husband is not happy, now we have children. Everything started to fall apart, everything I had worked so hard for.
So she started dancing – something she had done throughout school but gave up when she became an adult. It reinvigorated a feeling, she says, “when I didn’t care what people thought, when I just did the things that made me feel good.” And then my friends were watching and they were like, “We want to do it too!” You look peaceful, you look happy, you look free.’
This feeling of freedom inspired Roberts to start hosting get-togethers for her friends and friends of friends, creating a space where they could talk, share and be themselves. These gatherings quickly evolved into the Colored Girls Liberation Lab, a community of creativity, education and self-care designed to empower Black women to cast off the twin chains of racism and patriarchy, in a supportive environment.
“Black women can come in and say, ‘Hey, I just need a space to break down a little bit with people who are going to take care of me, hold me, help me and pick me up.’ “, she says. “‘And once I get to that space, I need people who will tell me that everything I dream for my life is possible and who will be there to encourage me.’ And that’s really the goal of the laboratory: to help women be happy and free in life.
Although space to breathe and heal is its primary mission, Roberts emphasizes the “laboratory” element of her organization’s title. Alongside self-care classes, she encourages members to “play” with their lives: be imaginative, think big, envision a limitless future, and dream of what they can do without anything holding them back.
“This lab has become a space for me where I can combine all these things: art, creativity, fraternity, Afrofuturism and design,” she says. In the lab, she says, she encourages participants to “really play with the idea of what it looks like to have my own toolbox of liberation.”
For example, “Every Monday at noon we get together – it’s called ‘Dreams and Plans,’” says Roberts. “It’s a place that’s inspired by Bell Hooks’ ‘Sisters of the Yam’ space, where it’s really the time to tell the truth about your life, to share your story: ‘OK, this thing doesn’t not working the way I thought I wanted it to.’ ” and no one will shame you for it. “
Rather than a fixed curriculum, Roberts says, the lessons and gatherings vary; the same goes for leading group discussions.
“Right now we’re doing one around ‘All About Love’: New Visions,” Roberts says. “We made some about pleasure, we made some around plant medicine. And we come for three to four weeks, every week. And whether it’s me or another woman in our community who has this knowledge to pass on, they’re able to bring us together and have us explore this topic in a way that doesn’t feel like they’re trying to tell us what to do. , but in a way that we can figure out how we want to incorporate it ourselves.
Living at the intersection of two major “-isms” — racism and sexism — is a unique and traumatic burden that black women must bear, whether they like it or not, Roberts says. The Colored Girls Liberation Lab, she says, can help heal that trauma.
“One of my beliefs is that sometimes we don’t know what freedom feels like until we feel it,” she says. “I love creating spaces that feel good and that make Black women feel like, ‘Oh, this is what freedom looks like, this is what joy looks like.’ Let me recreate this at home.
She continues: “I really think our liberation lies in our imagination and our ability to reimagine what systems look like, what our communities look like, what our self-care and love look like. I think sometimes we don’t realize that just stopping, pausing, and thinking is also doing. And I think what we learn in this space is that the pause and reflection in the healing part is an action.
(This story was produced in partnership with the WK Kellogg Foundation. For more stories focused on racial healing, please visit wordinblack.com.)
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