![]() Karyn eventually left Greater Grace to attend Western High, a mostly black, all-girls public school that educates more students per grade than the former’s entire population. “I remember both of us being very unaware of what it was that was going on at the time, just understanding that we didn't like it.” So, we felt like we were never good enough to get with white guys and we thought that there was a stigma for the black guys, like they wanted us to have this long hair.“ “There were a lot of white guys and not a lot of black guys. “Karyn and I would talk a lot about boys,” she tells me. "It was a majority white school, so as young minority girls we kind of found each other and we became best friends,” she explains. There, she met Nieshia Watts, a childhood best friend who exudes warmth when we meet in a Baltimore coffee shop. Coleman Washington, Karyn’s half-brother, describes it as “50-50.” “You've got the violence out there, but the neighborhood they're in is really good.”ĭuring her elementary years, she attended Greater Grace Christian Academy, an insular private school with approximately 200 students in grades K-12. She grew up in a modest single-family house in Belair-Edison, a blue-collar neighborhood and one of the largest row house communities in the country. The daughter of Rip, a disability support examiner at the Social Security Administration, and Gloria Yancey, who went by Jean, a social worker for Baltimore city, she was one of eight siblings, four full and four half. Karyn Leslie Washington was born and raised in Baltimore. And in our minds, she was never meant to be broken. As a young black woman and online activist, Karyn wasn’t an exception to this she was the rule. This is even truer if our presentation of ourselves is scrutinized under stereotypes of gender and race. It’s a curious paradox: In an age where tweets, texts, pictures, posts, check-ins, and updates allow us to express ourselves online in more ways than ever before, we are more beholden to - and, in ways, stifled by - what we choose to share. Online, Karyn projected what seemed to many an unwavering air of happiness and security, while her reality was far more complicated. Karyn’s death highlighted a number of social taboos: suicide, mental illness, the way the two intersect with and can be silenced by race, gender, and class. For Brown Girls had a few thousand followers on Twitter and Facebook combined and her original posts on FBG’s Tumblr were usually reblogged a few dozen times. And yet, the steady beat of coverage on Karyn’s death seemed out of sync with the modest scale of her online presence. She was two years younger than me, but she seemed self-assured in ways that I’ve only grasped for. "Brown Girls, Receive Love!” read the command on my Chrome tab.įor days, Karyn - always beautiful, almost always smiling in that same grid of photos - flowed in an endless stream on my TweetDeck, her name on outlets as varied as the Washington Post, BET, Madame Noire, Cosmopolitan, The Grio, Bustle, Clutch, the Huffington Post, The Root, Essence, The Frisky, and Salon. Here were Jet magazine covers circa the '90s, India Arie, Serena Williams, mothers and daughters pulling wide-tooth combs through one another’s hair, Chimamande Adichie, women holding signs as reminders that “Black Lives Matter,” and so on. For Brown Girls had accompanying social media channels and a Tumblr, continuous scrolls of photographs featuring black women of all ages, shades, and sizes. She was the founder of For Brown Girls and, later, the #DarkSkinRedLip Project, online movements for black women that fought against colorism - discrimination based on how dark the particular shade of one’s skin is. I hadn’t heard of Karyn before then, but I quickly wished I had. She was stunning, she was slim, and, at 22, she had just committed suicide. Her hair was piled high atop her head in a mass of braids and everything about her seemed to glow. The woman, wearing a black tank top, smiled in various poses on a white background. In the preceding days, a grid of photos of a young black woman rippled across the web. On a narrow table against the wall, a guestbook fills steadily with signatures. Some mingle outside, hugging friends, relatives, and acquaintances from present and past, while others make their way up the steps, passing through the Greco-Roman columns into the foyer. On Saturday, April 19, dozens of people gather in front of the Faith Community United Methodist Church in Baltimore.
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