Ruva- SOLHOT "Doing Digital Wrongly"

5. Why did SOLHOT and We Levitate form? In what ways did they engage the concerns and lives of young black women? (395-398) 

SOLHOT means Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths. This organization was developed by Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006. SOLHOT represents a movement to create a space for African American girls to celebrate themselves as well as nurture each other. Through SOLHOT, African American girls and women found a platform to express their life experiences through music. Through the musical beats and catchy hooks, they collectively found an environment to talk freely about the racialized and gendered encounters and emotions of Black girlhood. The platforms gave them a chance to create solutions and awareness for themselves. Coming together and talking about the complicated, nuanced, and unwieldy conversations about Black girlhood gave the women and girls a sense of unity and community. 

We Levitate is an extension of SOLHOT into the digital space. It is a digital portal for sounds by black girls, a platform where they get to replay and listen to each other voice, rhythm, and beats when they cannot physically meet as a community. We Levitate present "space-time personal and collective experiences, critique, our families who raised us, heartbreak, movement, and fiction" (405). The title doing digital wrongly suggests that they were not following the mainstream digital scholarship norms. By not following the mainstream standard, We Levitate can "reimagine the collective, resound complex black girlhood, remember relationships, and reverberate love for self, each other, and the new galaxies we are creating" (406). The scholars argue that doing digital wrongly did digital wrongly because they lacked access to do it right.  

My Question 

How much has the black girls' representation in digital space improved since 2006, and do they now have access to do it right? I have a contention with the phrasing doing digital wrongly because there should not be right and wrong in the ways different groups and scholars utilize the digital space. I argue that the saying doing digital wrongly underscores their innovative use of the digital space with fewer resources. They say that their descriptive analysis of doing digital wrongly suggests "another way to think about the relationship between Black girlhood, music, technology, sound, and sustaining progressive inner and outer actions among and with Black girls and women" (407). Is it really doing in wrongly or a new innovative way of utilizing the digital spaces with limited resources and technical knowledge? 

By

Ruva