YA fiction is supposed to be about possibility. It’s about first loves, complicated friendships, figuring out who you are, and imagining who you might become. But what happens when the girls who look like you are rarely at the center of those stories? What happens when you keep consuming stories, but struggle to find characters you see yourself in?
Representation goes beyond whether Black women appear in the media. It’s about how we’re portrayed, which of us get to be seen and who gets the opportunity to tell our stories in the first place.
Representation Isn’t Just About Having a Black Character
Sometimes, the presence of a Black character is treated as proof that a story is inclusive, even when that character lacks the depth and development given to everyone else. Instead of being allowed to exist as complex individuals, Black women are often reduced to familiar tropes that serve someone else’s story.
The sassy Black friend, the Angry Black Woman, and the disposable Black girlfriend are examples of these recurring archetypes. While none of these character types is inherently problematic, the repeated reliance on them limits the roles Black women are allowed to occupy.
The sassy Black friend often exists to deliver one-liners and support the usually white protagonist, with little attention given to her own experiences. Characters like Chastity in 10 Things I Hate About You and Fareeda in Tall Girl illustrate how Black girls can become supporting characters in someone else’s coming-of-age story rather than the center of their own.
Similarly, the Angry Black Woman trope becomes harmful when Black women are repeatedly portrayed as aggressive or unreasonable without receiving the emotional complexity afforded to other characters. Prudence in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina offers an example of how a Black female character’s anger can be emphasized while the story gives greater sympathy to its protagonist.
The disposable Black girlfriend trope takes the lack of investment a step further. Black women may be introduced as romantic interests, only to be pushed aside when the protagonist’s preferred love story takes precedence. Their relationship becomes a temporary plot device rather than stories worth developing in their own right. Notable examples are Amber from Invincible, Simone from The Good Place, and Ola from Sex Education. This trope is an ever growing issue as it raises questions such as who the media allows to be the love interest and who is seen as desirable.
These portrayals have something in common: they limit the kinds of stories Black women are allowed to have. And even when Black women are given the opportunity to be represented, not all of us receive the same visibility.
Which Black Women Are We Seeing?
Colorism is another part of this conversation that cannot be ignored. Black women are not a monolith, yet representation often fails to reflect the diversity of our complexions and experiences. Dark-skin Black women and girls, in particular, can struggle to find characters who look like them in roles where beauty, romance, and desirability are central.
In Norbit, Rasputia, a dark-skin, fat Black woman, is portrayed as aggressive, gluttonous, and undesirable. Her appearance and body size become targets of the film’s humor. This contrasts with Norbit’s love interest, Kate Thomas, a light-skin, biracial, thin woman positioned as gentle, sweet, and the ultimate object of desire. The contrast reinforces a troubling hierarchy: one woman is presented as someone to laugh at and reject, while the other is framed as the ideal woman to love.
This pattern also deserves attention in contemporary teen media. In All American, light-skin Black women occupy prominent roles as romantic interests and popular girls, while dark-skin Black women receive less comparable visibility in these roles. The issue isn’t that light-skin women shouldn’t have these opportunities. It’s that when the same types of roles repeatedly go to light-skin women, dark-skin girls are left with fewer examples of themselves being celebrated as beautiful, popular, and desirable.
The problem extends beyond characterization to casting itself. Recent criticism surrounding Amandla Stenberg’s casting as Zélie in the film adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone reflects these concerns. Stenberg, a light-skin biracial actress, was cast as a protagonist described in the novel as having “dark copper” skin, whose complexion is connected to her experiences with colorism. Critics questioned whether the casting adequately reflected the dark-skin character readers had come to know.
When dark-skin characters are repeatedly portrayed by light-skin actresses, dark-skin Black girls can be left without the visual representation that stories like these could have offered them. Even in fictional worlds where Black characters take center stage, not every Black girl gets to see herself reflected in the same way.
Let Black Girls Be Girls
YA and teen media matter because these stories often explore the experiences of growing up: first crushes, friendship breakups, insecurities, self-discovery, and the desire to belong. These experiences shouldn’t be reserved for characters who fit a particular beauty standard.
Dark-skin Black girls deserve to be the girls who get the love interest, the popular girls, the princesses, and the complicated protagonists who make mistakes and still get happy endings. We deserve stories where our skin tone doesn’t determine our desirability, where our anger doesn’t define our entire personality, and where our existence isn’t limited to teaching other characters a lesson.
Representation shouldn’t mean simply inserting a Black girl into a story and considering the job finished. It should mean allowing her to be a fully realized person, with experiences and aspirations that extend beyond her race and appearance.
Who Gets to Tell These Stories?
Better representation also requires more Black women to have opportunities behind the scenes. Writers, directors, producers and casting teams help determine which characters are created, whose stories receive attention, and which portrayals make it to the screen. Including more Black women in these decisions can help challenge familiar stereotypes and create characters that reflect the diversity of Black womanhood.
Of course, no single Black woman can speak for an entire community, and representation alone won’t solve every problem. But Black women deserve meaningful opportunities to shape the stories told about us, rather than simply having to accept the portrayals others create.
YA fiction is supposed to let young people imagine who they could become. Black girls deserve that same possibility. We deserve to see ourselves as beautiful, complicated, loved, and worthy of being the main character.
So, where are the Black women? Where are the dark-skin girls getting the love stories, the happy endings, and the chance to be more than a stereotype? Where are the Black women writing these stories, directing them and deciding whose experiences deserve to be seen?