I grew up in a pretty great era of television for Black girls. We had ‘That’s So Raven’ (yes, it was and still is a BLACK show, thanks!), ‘True Jackson, VP’, ‘Ant Farm’, ‘Shake It Up ’, and even in animation we had ‘The Proud Family’, and representation in shows like ‘Total Drama Island’ and more. Back then, we had a whole lineup of Black girls who made it feel normal to see ourselves on Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and even Cartoon Network. They got to be funny, dramatic, awkward, talented, and everything else that comes with being young; Sometimes they were the leads, sometimes they weren’t, but they were there.

Now I’m 25, and I’ve started to notice a gap between the television I grew up watching and the television available to the generation coming behind me. Black women lead adult dramas, thrillers, and romance series (and we know they still struggle to get those greenlit or renewed), but where are the stories for Black girls still figuring out who they are?

Apparently, I’m not the only person asking either.

Since August 2024, X user @jasimisinclair has maintained a thread documenting young adult television and film projects that didn’t have a Black actress in a leading role. Using the hashtag #WhereAreTheBlackGirls, she began tracking casting announcements across upcoming projects, including productions from major streaming platforms. Her list eventually caught the attention of Teen Vogue, which reported on the lack of Black actresses in the YA pipeline.

What started as someone noticing a pattern became a running record of just how often Black girls are missing from the conversation.

One of the projects highlighted in her thread was Ballerina Overdrive, which had Yara Shahidi in the early casting announcements. She eventually dropped out of the project, leaving it with a fully white cast, once again. And as much as I enjoy Yara Shahidi, we can’t keep slapping her and Amandla Stenberg on every project as ‘The’ Black girls.

Amazon Prime has been getting the most flak, which I completely understand. The platform continues to invest in YA stories like ‘ The Summer I Turned Pretty’ or ‘Off Campus’ and more, but for some reason, Black actresses remain pretty absent from these projects and the ones they are announcing for the future. I guess Black people don’t exist in the Amazon Prime multiverse :D! The industry seems perfectly comfortable treating white characters and their experiences as the default when telling stories about growing up, while Black girls are nowhere to be found. 

The contrast becomes even harder to ignore when the reboot of ‘A Different World’ arrived on Netflix on September 24, 2026, and was renewed for a second season by October 2nd. The celebration of the series was endless: the cultural depth, the important and timely political and cultural conversations, and the abundance of Blackness, and most importantly, the fact that the characters were complex and actually relatable. The reaction was telling; people were excited not only for the reboot but to see young Black people at the center of a story for once.

Which brings me back to Amazon. Why does a platform that can repeatedly find the budget to tell another white-led coming of age story, seem to struggle to greenlight the same thing for Black girls? I often find that Black-led stories bring a cultural specificity and richness that some of these more formulaic projects miss. That doesn't mean white-led stories can't or don’t have depth or that Black stories are automatically better. It means that the industry has a habit of investing in familiar stories about white characters while treating stories rooted in Black experiences as a much bigger commercial risk.

When a white-led romance gets greenlit, it can simply be a romance. When a Black-led romance gets pitched, there is often an additional conversation about whether it will appeal to a broad enough audience, whether people will relate to it, and whether there is a market for it.

Why do Black stories have to keep proving they deserve to exist?

We talk a lot about how Black girls are forced to grow up too quickly, how they're perceived as older than they are, and how little room they're given to be vulnerable. The concept of adultification describes part of that problem. Black girls are often denied the innocence and protection afforded to other children.

Why should a 15-year-old have to turn to the same adult dramas as a 25-year-old to find compelling stories about Black women? Where are the shows about Black girls dealing with their first relationships, falling out with their friends, making questionable decisions, getting their feelings hurt, and figuring out what kind of person they want to be?

Television isn't responsible for fixing all of that, but it does help shape the kinds of stories we tell about people. If Black girls rarely get to be the main characters in age-appropriate stories, what does that say about the kinds of childhoods we're willing to imagine for them?

There are young Black girls making their mark on television right now. Leah Sava Jeffries plays Annabeth in ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’, and Janice LeAnn Brown just wrapped leading ‘Wizards Beyond Waverly Place’. They get to be brave, clever, powerful, and central to fantastical worlds. That's worth celebrating, but notice how there isn’t anyone else I’m listing? It’s because there literally is no one else representing us on screen currently. Still, there's a difference between seeing a Black girl in a story and seeing a story make room for the everyday experience of being a Black girl. We need both.

Take ‘Forever’, Netflix’s 2025 adaptation of Judy Blume’s book, reimagined by Mara Brock Akil. The series follows two Black teenagers navigating love, family expectations, and growing up. Netflix reported 19 million views during the first half of 2025, and I am part of the audience eagerly waiting for the second season of Justin and Keisha’s story.

Then there’s ‘All American’, which just recently wrapped its final season at The CW; they spent years telling the stories of Black teens in high school and expanded into college with the ‘All American: Homecoming’ spinoff.

These shows are all amazing, but they can’t represent the variety of experiences Black girls have growing up; we need more than a handful of shows to tell these stories. Even if Black viewers made up the entire audience for a particular show, what's wrong with that? Why does a story have to appeal to everybody to be worth telling? There is value in making something that speaks directly to an audience that has spent so much time searching for itself on screen.

Black authors are creating young adult stories that could give television the range of Black girlhood and young adulthood that’s currently missing from the lineups that are getting greenlit.

Tia Williams’ ‘Audre & Bash Are Just Friends’, Tiffany D. Jackson’s ‘Grown’ or ‘The Scammer’ (Even though these books stressed me out!), and even ‘Legendborn’ by Tracy Deonn are the few that I think could give us a wide range of Black stories. We need romances, thrillers, mysteries, fantasy, and everything in between. Black girls aren't a monolith, so why should their stories be limited to one kind of character or plot?

The source material is there, and many of these authors have already been approached to be adapted for either a TV show or movie, but they are all currently stuck in development hell. I'd love to see networks actually invest and publish these stories instead of continuing to ask whether stories about Black girls are worth the risk.

I think people who aren't Black sometimes underestimate how important these stories are. They might see a television show as entertainment, but seeing a Black girl at the center of a story can change what another Black girl believes is possible for herself.

When ‘That's So Raven’ and ‘True Jackson, VP’ were on television, all I knew was that I wanted to be creative. I wanted to work in fashion, and watching Raven and True helped me see that being creative was an actual option for a Black girl like me. I didn't become a fashion designer and don’t consider myself super fashionable, but that early belief in my creativity still matters.

They also showed me that I could be funny, opinionated, and audacious. I could have something to say and take up space while saying it. Those qualities helped shape the woman I became and are part of why I ended up working in the media.

In the 90s and early 2000s, there was a renaissance of Black coming-of-age television like ‘Moesha’, ‘The Parkers’, ‘One on One’, and more. These shows weren't all about the same age group, but together they gave Black characters room to exist across different stages of life.

I want the girls coming behind me to have that same opportunity. I want them to see themselves as dancers, artists, scientists, troublemakers, best friends, and the main characters in stories that let them make mistakes and figure things out.

There are plenty of stories left to tell about Black women when they're grown, and they have plenty of time before they need to see those stories. I want to see more stories about Black girls while they're still becoming who they are.

Growing up is complicated enough, but finding yourself on television shouldn't have to be.