We at ESSENCE have become increasingly concerned about the degrading ways in which Black women are portrayed and spoken about in popular media, particularly in popular urban music and music videos. Aware that these images may be having a negative impact on our children, we realized that, as Black women, it was up to us to take a stand.

Our staffers, after much discussion about the imbalance in popular culture’s depiction of Black women’s sexuality and character, decided to form a committee to deal with the issue. In January of 2005, the ESSENCE Take Back the Music Campaign was launched to help raise awareness of the subject in our communities. Our goal is to:

• provide a platform for discussion about popular music’s more extreme images of Black women;
• explore the effects of such imagery on our children, especially our girls;
• seek greater balance in how Black women—and Black men—are portrayed in popular music and culture;
• encourage readers to examine their own attitudes on the subject;
• promote artists who deliver positive alternatives so that readers can vote with their dollars;
• give readers a blueprint for how they, too, can get involved in our campaign in whatever ways make sense for them.

We understand that not all of us see this issue in the same way, and that many of us are card-carrying members of the hip-hop generation. Those of us who aren’t abhor censorship in any form and cherish artistic freedom even when we find the art personally distasteful.

For these reasons, we want to make clear what our initiative is not. It is not a blanket condemnation of hip-hop nor an attack on cultural liberalism. It is not a boycott of any particular artist or venue for artistic expression. It is not a lashing out at Black men in front of or behind the video camera, for we recognize these men as our brothers and understand that we all have a common stake in raising awareness of how we are individually and collectively portrayed.

Indeed, the editors shaping our Take Back the Music initiative hold complex and diverse views on the subject of popular music, but we all have one thing in common: We’re deeply concerned by the pervasiveness of negative images of Black women and its effect on our girls. Each of us is charged with finding our own personal response to the negative imagery, and not all of our responses will be the same.

But respond we must. As Michaela angela Davis, our campaign spokesperson explains, “We’re not trying to tell people what to think about this; we simply want to encourage them to think.”