From the Editor »

Greet­ings!

It’s been a while…Babygirlz has been under­go­ing major changes to the inter­face and the struc­ture of the sto­ries to be writ­ten. That takes more time that I thought it would, and all of the plan­ning has had me very busy — in a good way! One of the changes has a theme of “Miss­ing but not For­got­ten” and is in response to the many Black women that go miss­ing, with no press — no resolve.

As many of you know from watch­ing the news, there are many times when a Black girl goes miss­ing and the media atten­tion that sur­rounds her dis­ap­pear­ance, is lit­tle to none. In honor of that, and in sup­port of, Baby­girlz will high­light a miss­ing girl with each issue.  I wish I could do more. I wish I could get out there and help look for these girls. I wish I could make the media real­ize that our girls are just as impor­tant as the next. I wish I could con­vince them to put their faces ‘out there’ each and every night until they are brought home to dev­as­tated loved ones sad­dened by their absence.

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In the Spotlight »

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“I whip my hair back and forth! I whip my hair back and forth!”

We’ve all heard the song, right? Lit­tle Ms. Wil­low Smith, the beau­ti­ful daugh­ter of Will and Jada Pin­kett Smith. She had peo­ple all over the world, up and out their seats, danc­ing and singing the lyrics to her song. I remem­ber when I first heard it, I couldn’t believe she was only 10 years old! Sup­pos­edly, your vocal range is not fully devel­oped until around the age of 23, so I think we can expect BIG things from Wil­low in the next 13 years.

From where I’m stand­ing, it seems that Ms. Wil­low is liv­ing the dream — all the while remain­ing focused on her grind:

Don’t let haters keep me off my grind
Keep my head up i know I’ll be fine
Keep fight­ing until i get there
When I’m down and i feel like giv­ing up i think again.

In her own words, ‘giv­ing up’ is nowhere in her future!

Recently, there has been talk of Wil­low hit­ting the big screen to recre­ate the role of Annie (also known as Lit­tle Orphan Annie), the story of a young orphan girl’s adven­tures in find­ing a fam­ily that will take her.  There are many that take issue with Willow’s par­ents’ approach to this celebrity sta­tus she is climb­ing to. They feel that at only 10 years old, her pri­mary con­cern — and the con­cern of her fam­ily, should be the focus on education.

Though I don’t know Will and Jada per­son­ally, by all accounts they appear to be solid indi­vid­u­als, who are extremely involved with their children’s lives. I just don’t think they would set their daugh­ter up for aca­d­e­mic fail­ure. The pic­ture I get is Wil­low hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with her par­ents where she promises them that this is really what she wants and that she will make sure to com­mit to her stud­ies as well. They are allow­ing her to embrace, and express her indi­vid­u­al­ity so that she can grow beyond bound­aries. Isn’t that what Baby­girlz are all about…exploring tal­ent and being unafraid to be your greater self?

My hats off to Wil­low! I wish her con­tin­ued suc­cess on her way to superstardom.