“Your love is a one in a million… it goes on and on and on.”
Brooklyn-born, Detroit-raised singer Aaliyah released three studio albums, two compilation albums, and 32 singles in her short lifetime. The anniversary of her death is approaching, and Brooklyn is coming together to celebrate her life. BRIC is scheduled to host an event at the iconic Lena Horne Bandshell in Park Slope, and Adanne Bookshop on Ralph Avenue is hosting a listening party, spinning her self-titled final album.
I fall into nostalgia when thinking about her life and legacy and somehow, although I was only a teenager when she passed, I keep landing on the same uncomfortable thought: we let her down. Somewhere in there her safety net could have stepped in, right? Maybe after hearing of her illegal marriage to Robert Kelly ( R. Kelly) at the age of 15? Or perhaps they didn’t know. Maybe she hid that from the adults who were supposed to be watching. Unfortunately, her life ended at 22 with a suspicious fatal plane crash August 25th 2001.
She would have been 47 years old and I can’t stop thinking about how many times her “safety net” was compromised in order to push the music forward and about the safeguards that never existed, not because no one could have built them, but because of how the world perceives young Black girls. Their immediate response is rarely to protect and shield this particular group of children. It should be. It wasn’t for her, and it often still isn’t.
This specific manifestation of racial and gender bias shapes how Black girls are seen, and whether they’re supported at all. It’s not incidental. It’s documented.
A study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, titled Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, found that adults believe Black girls, particularly between the ages of 5 and 15 need less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort than white girls of the same age.
Oh, and it has a documented name: Adultification bias.
A room full of adults in their supposed right mind decided that young black girls, pre-pubecent and pubecent, did not need to be nurtured. Should not be protected and comforted. How could it be that no one thought maybe withholding nurture is what creates the “damage” that gets used to justify the withholding? I mean, you starve a dog and it’ll eat its tail, no? and so it goes with a childhood starved of care and protection.
What happened to Aaliyah was this same bias, amplified on a national stage.
Of course, there’s a larger conversation here and that is the ongoing assault on Black women in this country, in the industry, & in the culture at large. The discord around this subject has been trending online for sometime now and was recently highlighted by Youtuber and journalist Isaiah Carey on the Isaiah Factor: Uncensored page. But that conversation is bigger than this one article, and it deserves its own space.
So, as Brooklyn gathers this week to sing along at the Bandshell and spin vinyl on Ralph Avenue, let the celebration hold both things at once: the joy of her music, and the reckoning we owe her. Let it push us to look at the girls in our own lives a little differently.
That’s the legacy worth building. Not just remembering a voice we lost, but making sure the next one gets to grow up.