In an period the place digital areas form how we study, manage, work, and construct neighborhood, the web is way from impartial—particularly for Black ladies. On-line platforms will be websites of connection and creativity, however they’re additionally environments the place surveillance, harassment, and systemic bias are deeply embedded. Towards this complicated backdrop, two students are reframing the narrative, insisting that Black ladies will not be merely surviving digital areas, however actively remodeling them.
On the forefront of this work are Dr. DeLisha Tapscott and Dr. Nardos Ghebreab, co-founders of Black Lady Narrative, a research-driven storytelling collective devoted to reimagining how Black ladies expertise security, pleasure, and energy on-line. Their collaboration sits on the intersection of rigorous analysis and cultural perception, mixing information, lived expertise, and Black feminist thought to inform fuller, extra correct tales about digital life. Reasonably than centering hurt alone, their work illuminates the creativity, resistance, and care Black ladies domesticate—typically in areas by no means designed with them in thoughts.
Their groundbreaking report, The Love We Code: Black Ladies, Digital Secure Havens, and Resistance, affords a strong examination of how Black ladies construct and maintain on-line communities regardless of dealing with disproportionate charges of digital harassment, job precarity, and structural exclusion throughout the tech trade.
Drawing on qualitative analysis and Black feminist methodologies, Dr. Tapscott and Dr. Ghebreab present that digital security is just not merely about safety from hurt, however in regards to the freedom to exist, create, and manage with out fixed risk.
What units Dr. Tapscott and Dr. Ghebreab aside is the depth and vary of their mixed experience. With backgrounds spanning digital fairness, schooling, expertise coverage, and Black feminist analysis, they carry a multidisciplinary lens to questions many establishments wrestle to reply. Their work speaks concurrently to students, technologists, educators, and cultural employees—providing language and proof for experiences lengthy understood however hardly ever validated at scale.
By way of Black Lady Narrative, they place storytelling as each methodology and intervention. Tales develop into information. Lived expertise turns into proof. And Black ladies’s digital practices are acknowledged not as anomalies, however as improvements born from necessity and imaginative and prescient.
Already, their work has sparked essential conversations throughout tutorial, tech, and cultural communities, influencing how organizations take into consideration on-line security, illustration, and energy.
Mo Clark: What impressed the identify Black Lady Narrative, and the way does it replicate your mission at this time?
BGN: Black Lady Narrative began from a have to reclaim the tales individuals typically take from us or flatten. The identify displays our dedication to constructing an area the place Black ladies’s experiences are centered with out apology or translation. We’re pushed by 4 pillars that form every little thing we make: analysis, advocacy, schooling, and storytelling. Collectively, these pillars enable us to assemble our tales, analyze the methods surrounding them, and construct public areas the place Black ladies really feel held, understood, and mirrored again with depth.
Mo Clark: If you think about a digital protected haven, what does that area feel and look like for Black ladies?
BGN:Â A digital protected haven looks like a nook of the web the place Black ladies wouldn’t have to brace ourselves earlier than we go online. It’s a area grounded in care, readability, and neighborhood. A spot the place we wouldn’t have to overexplain our experiences, the place our pleasure is just not questioned, and the place our vulnerability is just not weaponized. Our analysis confirmed that many Black ladies retreat to non-public areas as a result of hurt is so frequent. A protected haven is the other of that. It feels spacious. It feels intentional. It looks like exhaling.
Mo Clark: How did your private journeys as students and storytellers form The Love We Code report?
BGN:Â The Love We Code was led by DeLisha, rooted in her tutorial work on digital relationships, misogynoir, and algorithmic bias. Nardos is deeply related to its imaginative and prescient, as a result of the findings converse on to the realities now we have lived on-line as Black ladies. We approached the report with two understandings. First, that the digital world is just not a separate world for us; it’s woven into our each day life, identification, work, and neighborhood. Second, that information with out narrative can not clarify the total fact. Our aim was to create analysis that displays the lives, feelings, and reminiscence work Black ladies carry on-line.
Mo Clark: What shocked you most throughout your analysis about how Black ladies construct neighborhood on-line?
BGN:Â What shocked us most was the extent of intentional care Black ladies lengthen to at least one one other in digital environments that always don’t defend us. Even within the midst of misogynoir, harassment, and surveillance, we noticed Black ladies constructing group chats, therapeutic areas, and assist networks that operate like digital sisterhood. Ladies advised us that their on-line communities have held them by grief, pleasure, transitions, motherhood, breakups, and the quiet moments of on a regular basis life. That kind of care is just not unintentional. It’s cultural. It’s generational. And it exhibits up even in essentially the most unpredictable digital areas.
Mo Clark: How do you steadiness data-driven analysis with the emotional depth of storytelling?
BGN:Â We don’t see them as two separate practices. Information reveals patterns, however tales reveal the reality behind the sample. Our work holds each. We lean on analysis to grasp the size of what Black ladies face on-line. We lean on storytelling to grasp the human affect. Collectively, these items enable us to create work that’s rigorous with out being indifferent and emotional with out changing into sentimental. Black ladies deserve each accuracy and depth, not one or the opposite.
Mo Clark: What function do pleasure and relaxation play in your digital technique and community-building work?
BGN:Â Pleasure and relaxation are a part of our methodology. They information how we present up digitally and what we create. As a result of the digital world can drain Black ladies, we deliberately construct area the place we are able to decelerate and be greater than our reactions to hurt. That’s the reason our Substack typically explores the quieter components of life: sleep, frustration, boundaries, care work, humor, grief, mushy moments with household, and the tempo of our days. These items sit alongside our analysis as a result of pleasure and relaxation will not be separate from our work. They’re a part of what retains Black ladies entire sufficient to inform the reality.
Mo Clark: How do you hope individuals really feel after they first go to your platforms?
BGN:Â We would like our platforms to really feel like a house with a number of rooms. Substack is the lounge, the place the place you sit down, breathe, and skim one thing reflective. Instagram is the porch, the place the neighborhood gathers, shares what’s on their thoughts, and feels held in a public but grounded area. Threads is the bed room, the quieter dialog the place we converse extra freely and share what we would not say out loud wherever else. Throughout all three, we would like Black ladies to really feel welcome, seen, and unburdened.
Mo Clark: What legacy do you hope this new chapter of BGN leaves for the following technology of Black ladies creators?
BGN:Â We hope they inherit greater than inspiration. We wish to go away them infrastructure and language. A blueprint for storytelling that honors nuance and complexity. We would like the following technology to have a digital ecosystem that doesn’t deal with Black ladies as content material however as tradition. We would like them to inherit archives that bear in mind us, reviews that defend us, neighborhood areas that uplift us, and the liberty to construct work that doesn’t compromise their identification or voice. If something, we would like them to inherit proof that their tales need to take up area with out permission.
What BGN Has Coming Up in 2026
In 2026, Black Lady Narrative is specializing in defining our archive and increasing our cultural manufacturing work. We’re constructing the dwelling archive web site to take a seat alongside our short-form movie, Pricey Black Lady Who Stayed On-line Anyway, and launching the total 2026 BGN Report within the fall. We’re additionally planning archival initiatives to construct a dwelling, digital ecosystem that holds the tales, recollections, and cultural manufacturing of Black ladies throughout generations. As well as, we’re laying the inspiration for a BGN Scholarship that can award scholarships to Black ladies constructing within the arts and tradition by archival and storytelling-based initiatives. For us, this subsequent chapter is about constructing a physique of labor that honors reminiscence, storytelling, and the evolution of Black womanhood.
