It’s no secret that at AllBright, we’re huge fans of the deputy editor of Grazia Kenya Hunt. For many reasons (keep reading) but one of them is her new(ish) book, which she’s just published in paperback and should be on every woman’s reading list.

Girl: Essays on Black Womanhood, is a collection of original essays on what it means to be black, a woman, a mother and a global citizen in today’s ever-changing world.  In her must-read debut book, she looks at how black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated. But for every new milestone, every magazine cover, every box office record smashed, the reality of everyday life remains a complex experience. Kenya is also the founder of R.O.O.M. Mentoring, which advocates for greater diversity within the fashion industry by providing a supportive network for some of the many talented aspiring designers, journalists and image-makers of colour London has to offer. She also sits on the British Fashion Council’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee and is a mother of two.

Want to find out more? Let’s meet Kenya! 

Your book, Girl: On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic, has just launched in paperback and is a collection of essays on what it means to be black, a woman, a mother, and a global citizen in today's ever-changing​ world. In your own experience, what does it mean to be all of these things?

It means a number of things. One thing that I wanted to drive home with the book is that black womanhood has always been a very nuanced experience. I really wanted to just look at black womanhood through the prism of my experience as an American expat living abroad in the UK, because I feel like I have come of age professionally and as an adult with the rise of identity politics, watching that conversation pick up steam, and seeing it centred and oriented around like certain places and corners of the world.

My experience living abroad really impacted my understanding of my blackness and womanhood and the intersection of those two things. I also invite some of the women who I know and admire or women I’ve admired from a distance to contribute to that conversation. It was really an interesting experience because it covers the past decade.

Go back to 2010, so much has happened since then. We’re looking at the rise of social media, the dawn of Brexit, the Obama years that then transitioned into Trump and the Brexit era. There was a lot happening in the background and throughout it all, we saw black women becoming more visible, particularly towards the end of that decade, where we’re seeing all of these incredible milestones and wins. At the same time, there were just so many hurdles and roadblocks. I really wanted to explore how we consistently advocate for ourselves. We’re consistently in this position of having to advocate for ourselves and celebrate ourselves in a world that consistently does not.

You wrote the book before the Black Lives Matter movement came to the forefront of every single news feed around the world, following the tragic murder of George Floyd. How did it feel to publish the book?

We were all watching it unfold and living it and responding to it in our own ways offline and online. I just remember, I kept going back to the book and revisiting bits and calling my editor and my agent, because I had this strong urge to keep adding to it. I ended up writing an epilogue that largely looked at the idea of parenting a child in the age of Black Lives Matter, and also my personal reaction to it.

There’s a lot of beauty that’s coming out of this moment. It’s also just one of incredible heartbreak as well. We’ve never seen anything quite like this and so many people from all over the world recognise the brutalisation of black lives and engaging with it and discussing it, but also engaging with it on social media so publicly. The downside of that is that it can oftentimes feel like a box ticking exercise, very performative and quite hollow. As someone who is naturally an optimistic person, I’ve spent the vast majority of these past few months viewing it with a real feeling of hope and optimism, but then also there is a sinking feeling that even in this conversation, black women are still having to fight twice as hard, to keep ourselves visible in that conversation, advocate for each other. It has been more than 150 days since Breonna Taylor was murdered in her bedroom and we’re still having to fight so hard to keep her name present and out there. We still haven’t seen justice for her.

You're the founder of R.O.O.M. Mentoring which advocates the greater diversity within the fashion industry by providing a supportive network for some of the best and brightest, aspiring designers, journalists, and image-makers​ of colour London has to offer. Tell me more about what you felt was missing in the fashion industry when you arrived in London and the work that you're doing through R.O.O.M…

When I moved to London, I was immediately struck by how homogenous the fashion industry is here, like just spectacularly so. There has definitely been real progress, but there is still a way to go. When I moved here and I first began covering fashion shows, I was struck by the fact that there were so few people of colour in the room. And I’m not just speaking about black people, but I’m just meaning anyone of colour, whether that person be black or Muslim or Asian or indigenous descent.

I wanted to do what I could with the platform that I had to help change that, because I grew up in New York having witnessed the power of grassroots action and change. When I started in New York as an editorial assistant, fashion was just as homogeneous there. Diversity was a real problem, it still is, which is obvious based on all the conversations happening on both sides of the Atlantic and the fashion industry. When I started in New York, most magazines only had one or two people of colour on their staffs, if any, and the runways were the same. If you saw one or two black models on the catwalk, it was quite a big deal.

When I moved to London, I started the mentorship program when I was at Elle. I joined Elle as acting content director on a mat leave contract. Then I became fashion features director all in my first year there. During that first year, I just remember thinking, “Okay, I’ve got this position and this great title, so I want to use that to help pull some other people up with me and also help nurture people who might be in similar circumstances in which they’re the only person, the only black woman or black male, or Muslim person or Asian person in the room, and just need some extra help navigating these circumstances.”

We’re a tight group. We number about 56, and that’s as big as we can afford to be right now. We meet via Zoom. I don’t promote it much. I do it because it’s important to do, and I just want to meet a need. It has been great to watch the students and graduates who have come through progress and thrive and do really well on their own. I hope it ultimately leads to these young talents getting jobs and actually moving up the career ladder and staying there, because oftentimes we see students entering the schools and schools with staffs that are overwhelmingly white and then getting on the career ladder and joining companies or navigating industries that are incredibly white and then dropping off after a certain point and having trouble progressing and getting to the senior ranks and higher. I just hope that we get to a place where we’re mentoring, but then we’re also giving people jobs and promoting them and paying them fairly and helping them achieve real equity in these industries.

What does it mean in your words to be anti-racist?

I was interviewing Clara Amfo about a month or so ago, and she said something that really stuck with me. She said this whole conversation around Black Lives Matter… She said she doesn’t care so much about what people post on social media in terms of white people and people who are not black, it’s more so about what happens when we’re not in the room. When you hear someone say something that is discriminatory or wrong or out of place, or you see something that’s wrong, well, how do you respond then? What do you say then?

That’s very much how I feel. I think that’s a good way of thinking about what it means to be anti-racist. If you’re sitting at the dinner table with your extended family and you hear a relative say something that’s just completely not right, how do you respond? Or if you’re in a shop and you see someone treated unfairly or being profiled or being followed, how do you respond? Or if you see a woman being profiled by the police on the street, what’s your response there? Or someone being treated unfairly at work?

It’s great to engage and pay attention and to post things on social media, but there has to be more than just a hashtag or a black square because that’s definitely not going to do anything. It’s really just about your actions. What are you doing to help achieve equal rights for black people in your life? What are you doing to recognize the privilege in your own life and the ways that you have benefited from racism, essentially, or that you’ve benefited from inequality? It’s very much about your action in what you’re doing offline not social media.

I want to finish by asking you what your favourite chapter in the book is?

That’s so hard to nail down as it changes all the time, but my favourite chapter in the moment might be the last one where I talk through the notion of the ‘bad bitch’ and really make a case for just allowing ourselves to just be. We put so much pressure on ourselves to slay, or to knock all these balls out of the park and to be firing on all cylinders. As black women, a lot of the language that’s used to celebrate us, even, puts pressure on ourselves that can be so unhealthy.

I write about the experience of living in the age of black girl magic, but also looking at the trajectory of the term, and how it very much originated as a way of celebrating and shining a light on black women and allowing black women to feel visible in all aspects of their life. Then it very much became this thing that was associated with the superlative. The very famous, the ones who were just achieving these milestones and these wins and successes that were worthy of the kinds of headlines that you see on People Magazine, or in the news, or women who have hundreds of thousands of followers, or who are on the cover of September issues, or who are being elected into office, like major, major, incredible achievements worth celebrating, that we began to lose sight of the magic of the everyday and the “regular degular”, as I say in the book. The fact that every day that we wake up and manage to get our kids out of the house and to their summer camp on time or to school on time or every day that we manage to get up and get dressed is a win too. I love that chapter because I think there’s definitely a case to be made for allowing yourselves to just be, and to just be content with that and to free ourselves from the weight of subtext.