Universal_Discoveries

Universal Discoveries Patricia Smith’s “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t)” is a poem about a young, black girl growing up. This poem describes what it is like for a young girl who is discovering different things going on with her body. This black girl in the poem is 9 years old and in her pre-puberty stage of life. She feels “like [she’s] not finished” (Smith, 766). She feels out of place because she is in between the stages of being a child and becoming a young adult. She also “[finds] a disturbance at [her] chest” (766). At the age of 9, I was in the 4th grade. All of my friends were beginning to wear training bras and I was still without enough breasts to fill one. I did not understand that everyone’s body changes differently until then. I felt like I did not belong. She “[drops] food coloring in [her] eyes to make them blue and … [pops] a bleached white mophead over the kinks of [her] hair” because she wants to have that all-American look of blond hair and blue eyes (766). girl, because, young, poem, black, [her], about, 766, things, same, it’s, hair, words, woman, one, now, man, long, knows, feels, different, curse, become, without, white, whistles, way, until, through, stages, smith, skin, pretend