In the summer of 2023, 10 Black teen girls gathered at the RiseBoro Community Partnership in Brooklyn to build a first-of-its-kind catalog of the various microaggressions Black girls face because of colorism. Gina Sissoko, PhD—now a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Public Health—put the girls in an unfamiliar role: the driver’s seat. They detailed the ways colorism, a preference for lighter skin tone, operated in their lives and how to measure it. They then developed a plan to research the topic and fanned out across their community to survey more than 100 other Black girls.
From those data, the girls mapped how colorism permeates Black girlhood across seven domains, from family and school to social media—findings the girls then published in a booklet they designed themselves. The result, dubbed the BlackGIRL Project, reflects a growing movement among researchers to engage Black girls as partners in studying their own experiences—collaborators in the science rather than its subjects. As Sissoko put it, this shift acknowledges Black girls as “the main theorists of their lives.”
From the margins to the center
The BlackGIRL Project is one of more than 100 submissions to a forthcoming special issue on Black girlhood that will appear in Developmental Psychology in late 2026. Lead editor Rona Carter, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said the issue aims to reframe “developmental science so that Black girls are not treated as deviations from a norm but as essential to understanding how development unfolds in real-world settings.”
“So much of what we know about development has been built upon assumptions that don’t fully account for Black girls’ lived experiences, social realities, or the ways they make meaning of their self-concepts,” Carter said. “When we build on theory that could explain Black girls’ experiences, we often could end up with maybe stronger, more nuanced theories that improve development of science more broadly.”
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The wounds of colorism
Sissoko’s work with Black girls shows how focusing on research participants’ strengths can produce insight even when the topic is painful. It maps the quiet, insidious ways colorism runs through Black girls’ lives—and one of its most striking findings is how often the harm comes from within their own community. Colorist jokes, slights, and insults often come from family members and friends, and Black boys were frequently identified as the main perpetrators. The hurt ripples outward, too: Lighter-skinned girls described watching colorism directed toward darker-skinned friends and feeling helpless to stop it—a phenomenon Sissoko calls “vicarious colorism.”
In one finding from the BlackGIRL Project that Sissoko called “earth-shattering,” 83% of the girls surveyed said darker-skinned girls are less likely to be believed when they report abuse. The findings point to a cruel paradox—the same skin that marks Black girls as vulnerable renders them less credible when they experience abuse. Sissoko’s experience with the BlackGIRL Project has shaped her core beliefs about how science should work: “Unless we are actually asking the people most impacted and most marginalized, we will never make the advances in science that we need.”
Combating adultification
If Sissoko’s work shows how Black girls are misjudged by their skin tone, Carter’s research reveals how they are misjudged by their bodies—specifically, how early those bodies begin to change, and how the people around them react. Carter, a developmental psychologist, studies the impact of pubertal development on Black girls, who typically enter puberty earlier than their White, Latine, and Asian peers (Child Development, Vol. 90, No. 2, 2019). As a result, research shows that Black girls experience adultification bias, in which they are often viewed as older and more sexualized than their White peers (Epstein, R., et al., Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, SSRN, 2017).
Research shows that once a Black girl enters puberty, she is typically treated more harshly—even though she is still a child cognitively and emotionally (Brissett, D., Pediatrics, Vol. 155, No. 6, 2025). “Puberty matters not because it’s happening earlier biologically, but because of how adults and peers respond to those changes,” said Carter.
To help support girls at this transitional age, Carter developed Double Digits, a community-based program for girls in grades 3, 4, and 5 in Ann Arbor schools. The program brings Black girls together to learn about and discuss menstruation, body and skin changes, and the stereotypes and expectations they may encounter during puberty. Throughout the program, participants work to develop a positive body image, explore their identities, build healthy coping skills, and strengthen their understanding of healthy relationships.
In an activity called Reflect, Respect, and Celebrate, girls anonymously share their thoughts about their bodies and trace where those ideas came from, for example, social media, classmates, or even adults. At the end of the lesson, each girl receives a key chain that says “Message Detective.” The goal is to encourage them to question those external messages and show them they get to define their beauty and body image on their own terms.
Carter also created a technique she calls Pause and Reframe to help parents, teachers, and other caring adults counteract their own adultification bias. Adults are asked to pause their immediate emotional response to a girl’s behavior and consider whether they are reacting to her physical maturity rather than her actual developmental stage, then to reframe by choosing an interpretation grounded in her true emotional and cognitive age. A gesture like eye-rolling, Carter noted, may not be defiance or disrespect but a sign of “emotion regulation,” or a girl “trying to negotiate her autonomy.”
Read the complete article at American Psychological Association
