 | | Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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"Black girls deserve to be children." |
— A poem by Azariah Baker, a high school student in Chicago |
For the past year and a half, Jamese Logan, a 15-year-old in Lanham, Md., found herself looking after four children. Her aunt died of cancer in May, leaving her children, the youngest just over a year old, in the care of Jamese's mother. |
And when Jamese's mother goes to work, it has been Jamese's responsibility to look after her cousins, juggling their needs with her homework and virtual school. |
For Yanica Mejias, a 17-year-old in Gaithersburg, Md., these last 12 months have been a huge financial strain. Her parents divorced in November, and Yanica, her mother and her 14-year-old sister moved into the basement of her aunt's house. Yanica took on extra shifts at a burger restaurant to help keep the family afloat. |
"It was kind of like we were starting from zero," she said. |
And Azariah Baker, a 15-year-old in Chicago, has been caring for her 70-year-old grandmother, who had a stroke at the start of 2020, as well as her 2-year-old niece. Her grandmother is the legal guardian for Azariah and her niece but since the stroke, which left her extremely fatigued with blurry vision and headaches, Azariah has done the heavy lifting at home. She would wake up every day at 7 a.m., make them all breakfast, then log on for virtual school at 8 a.m. |
When school was out, she'd go to work at a grocery store. Then she'd come back home and cook dinner. She often felt overwhelmed. "I remember one night, I was making dinner and I was having a panic attack. I was crying, I felt like I couldn't breathe, and my heart was racing," Azariah said. |
"But then my alarm went off for something in the oven," she said, and she put her own needs aside. |
These three stories encapsulate the ways in which the pandemic has affected the lives of young women of color across the United States, even if they weren't directly touched by the coronavirus. Black and Hispanic youth were more likely to have lost a parent or a family member to Covid-19. They have fallen further behind in school than their white counterparts, and they had far higher unemployment rates last year than older adults and young white women, even during the summer, when youth employment typically goes up. Some of those who held on to or found new jobs became crucial breadwinners because their family members were more likely to have been laid off. |
Black and Hispanic teenage girls were also more likely than white girls and their male counterparts to shoulder care responsibilities at home, according to a report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. At the same time, they were leading racial justice demonstrations across the country, most notably last summer, channeling their energy into confronting and changing systemic inequities. |
"Black girls were on the front lines of racial justice movements, they were essential workers and they were primary caregivers," said Scheherazade Tillet, a founder and the executive director of A Long Walk Home, an organization that empowers Black girls in Chicago. "There's no other group that was all three of those things at once." |
All of this has taken a psychological toll. In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a sharp spike in emergency room visits after suspected suicide attempts by girls ages 12 to 17 in the first months of 2021 compared with 2019. This is possibly because of "more severe distress among young females than has been identified in previous reports during the pandemic," the report said, though the study didn't break down the data by race. |
A survey of over 2,000 young people, published in June by the nonprofit organization America's Promise Alliance, found that 78 percent of girls ages 13 to 19 reported in the past 30 days at least one sign of decreased mental health, such as feeling distressed or being unable to sleep, compared with 65 percent of boys. A Long Walk Home found in a survey of about 30 girls that nearly 70 percent reported increased anxiety and an inability to sleep in the last year. Twenty-seven percent reported having suicidal thoughts. Crittenton Services, an organization based in Washington, D.C., and Maryland that supports girls of color, found that out of the nearly 400 girls in its network, 63 percent felt stressed, and half had trouble sleeping, according to an internal survey that was shared with The Times. |
"This is the crisis that they have come through," Ms. Tillet said. "So what systems are in place now to support their emotional and psychological needs?" |
Behind the numbers are lives upended, dreams shattered, the burden of suddenly becoming a caregiver or a provider. A Long Walk Home found that many girls in its network felt like they'd lost their childhood, or as Azariah put it: "There was no time to be a child." And as schools and some workplaces open their doors again, the burdens for these young women are still very present. They may even be greater. |
But these are also tales of resilience, of girls who become leaders in their communities and rise to the occasion for their families, with creativity and determination buoying them through crises and chaos. |
Keep reading the stories of Jamese, Yanica and Azariah here. |
Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | A memorial near where the body of Sabina Nessa was found in Kidbrooke, in southeast London.Ian West/Press Association, via Associated Press |
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- "How many more women have to die?" The case of Sabina Nessa, 28, whose body was found in a London park, has renewed national outrage over violence against women in Britain. [Read the story]
- "Truth." Chris Cuomo sexually harassed me. I hope he'll use his power to make change, writes Shelley Ross, a veteran television journalist and former executive producer at ABC and CBS. [Read the guest essay]
- "Not looking like myself any longer." Linda Evangelista, the '90s-era supermodel, said side effects from a fat-freezing procedure caused her to become depressed and turned her into a recluse. [Read the story]
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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Maura Foley. |
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