March to the Beat of Her Own Drum

My daughter is only four, but she already knows who she is.

For months, her favorite song was "I march to the beat of my own drum." Her first words—I kid you not—were "I know." She said them with such certainty it startled me. Not because she was wrong, but because she did know. She has a twin brother: gentle, analytical, kind. She's been leading him since they were babies, her small hand wrapped around his, pulling him toward whatever adventure she's conjured from paper and light.

The twins — Yonas and Yohanna — at their fifth birthday.

While the rest of us are left-brained engineers and doctors—people who master systems by understanding their architecture—she's right-brained magic. Drawing. Composing. Creating entire worlds from scraps and imagination. She once told me, at three years old, that she doesn't want kids because I "work too hard taking care of them."

She's not wrong.

Whether or not you agree with her decision isn't the point. What matters is her right to make it. What matters is that a personality like hers—bright, bold, independent—wilts under suppression but blooms with freedom.

What matters is that she's a Black girl in America, and even now, that's a hard path to walk.

Malcolm X said it in 1962, and it was true then, true in the time of slavery, and true now:

"The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman."

Here's what the data says about girls like my daughter:

Starting at age five—five years old—adults perceive Black girls as less innocent than white girls. By the time they reach school age, Black girls are suspended at six times the rate of their white peers. To put that in perspective: Black boys—who dominate every conversation about discipline disparities—are suspended three times as often as white boys. The disparity for Black girls is twice as severe.

Black girls are nearly three times more likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system. Once there, they're more likely to be detained than white girls for the same behaviors.

According to Georgetown Law's Center on Poverty and Inequality, adultification is a form of dehumanization, robbing Black children of the very essence of what makes childhood distinct from all other developmental periods: innocence. Negative stereotypes of Black women as angry, aggressive, and hypersexualized are projected onto Black girls—sometimes before they're old enough to read.

Almost all the Black girls and women interviewed in their 2019 follow-up study said they'd experienced adultification bias as children. They overwhelmingly agreed that it led teachers and other adults to treat them more harshly and hold them to higher standards than white girls.

One focus group participant said it plainly: "[A white girl's] tears carry more value than [a] Black girl's."

Another young woman described the core of it: To society, we're not innocent. And white girls are always innocent.

And it's not just the past. It's right now.

The sitting president of the United States—the man who holds the highest office in this country—has spent years calling Black women "low IQ," "dumb," "stupid," "mentally impaired." Kamala Harris. Maxine Waters. Jasmine Crockett. Omarosa. The pattern is undeniable. When he talks about Black women, the words he reaches for are about intelligence. About competence. About worth.

He called Kamala Harris someone who "was born that way"—mentally deficient. He said there's "something missing." He looked at Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett and said she's "a very low IQ person." Meanwhile, he calls Elon Musk "a seriously high-IQ individual." He said his own Cabinet—which had only three people of color in leading positions—had "by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled."

The message is clear: Black women are stupid. White men are geniuses.

Prosecutors are 20% more likely to formally petition in cases involving Black girls than in cases involving white girls. Judges consistently hand down more severe dispositions to Black girls than to white girls, even after accounting for seriousness of the offense, prior record, and age. Black girls are the fastest growing demographic when it comes to arrest and incarceration.

Here's what I see when I look at this data.

I smile.

I look at all this evidence, every nasty terrible thing—the suspension rates and the detention rates and the president calling us dumb and Malcolm X's words still ringing true sixty-three years later—and I kid you not, I laugh out loud.

Because my assessment? We're dope as hell.

I'm sorry, but that conclusion is just wrong.

The curves. The hair. The swag. The wit. The beauty. The strength. The softness. The kindness. The loyalty. The bravery. And did I mention that when most people look sixty we out here looking forty-five? I still occasionally have people ask me how old I am during rounds. I laugh sometimes because often I'm significantly older than they are.

That's not defiance. That's my clinical assessment of the evidence.

When I read this data, I see only the cruelty of others, not the insecurities they're trying to surface. Because I don't share those insecurities. There's no deep down where I know what they're saying is true.

This isn't like a bully highlighting your actual weaknesses, forcing you to confront things you're ashamed of. This is like someone insisting you're terrible at something you're objectively excellent at. The insult doesn't sting—it just reveals the speaker's delusion.

And here's what the data actually reveals: society sees us as less than. But the relentless escalation—the obsessive focus, the fact that the punishment keeps increasing decade after decade, century after century—reveals something else.

We've never agreed with that assessment.

And our refusal is precisely what they're responding to.

You don't bother hating someone irrelevant. Not worthy. Boring. It's not worth the energy. There are infinitely irrelevant things in this world that get precious little attention.

But Black women? Black girls? We get obsessed over. We get legislation. We get presidential insults. We get entire research studies documenting how the world perceives us differently starting in kindergarten. We get Malcolm X dedicating speeches to us. We get Beyoncé sampling those speeches in Lemonade.

The punishment isn't proof of our deficiency.

It's proof of their failure to convince us.

That's why it never stops. Not because we're defiant by choice. But because we're defiant by premise. They keep trying to make us feel ashamed of something we're not ashamed of. They keep trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist. And our refusal to accept their diagnosis—not as an act of rebellion, but as a simple recognition of reality—drives them insane.

I've spent my entire professional life learning how systems work so I can make them fairer.

I'm a scientist. A doctor. A woman trained to master complexity, to understand architecture, to see the invisible structures that shape outcomes. I study maternal mortality disparities. I build clinical models that protect Black women from a healthcare system that statistically does not value their lives. I write policy briefs and research papers and investigative journalism because I believe that if we understand the machinery of oppression, we can dismantle it.

My daughter seems born knowing she was never meant to obey it.

She doesn't need to understand the system to resist it. She just is—authentically, defiantly, joyfully herself. And as I watch her, I realize: she won't internalize this either. The shame they're engineering for her? It won't take. Not because I'll protect her from the data, but because she'll reach the same conclusion I did.

She'll look at the evidence meant to break her and think: "Naw."

But here's what terrifies me: she'll still inherit the punishment.

That's what people don't understand about this. The cruelty doesn't require our compliance to continue. In fact, our refusal to comply—our inability to accept a hierarchy built on a lie—is precisely what makes the punishment escalate.

They don't keep suspending Black girls at six times the rate because the suspensions are working. They keep doing it because they're not working. Because no matter how many times they punish us for being "too much"—too loud, too confident, too visible, too sure of ourselves—we don't shrink.

And that drives them absolutely insane.

My daughter will grow up knowing she's magnificent. Just like I do. Just like her grandmother did. Just like her great-grandmother did. That knowledge will protect her from the shame, but it won't protect her from the consequences of refusing to perform inferiority.

She'll be punished more harshly than her white peers for the same behaviors. She'll be told she's too aggressive when she's being assertive. She'll be called difficult when she's being direct. She'll be suspended, detained, dismissed, and underestimated at every turn.

Not because she's done anything wrong.

But because she refuses to believe she's defective.

What I hope—what I'm fighting for—is a future where her spirit still has room to dance. Where she can still march to that beat. Where she can choose who to love, when to marry, whether to have children—or not.

I'm fighting for a world where "I know" isn't met with suspension or silencing or the presumption of guilt, but with respect.

I'm fighting for the radical, simple freedom of a Black girl to grow into a woman who still hears her own rhythm—and isn't punished for dancing to it.

I'm fighting because the alternative is unconscionable.

Because a system that strips innocence from five-year-olds, that punishes confidence as defiance, that criminalizes Black girlhood itself, is not a system worth preserving. It's a system worth dismantling.

Because my daughter deserves better than a world that forces her to choose between who she is and who she's allowed to be.

And because—whether she has children of her own someday or not, whether she marches to a drum or conducts an orchestra or builds something none of us have imagined yet—she deserves the freedom to make that choice herself.

So that's who I'm fighting for: a world where she can grow into a woman who still knows herself. A world where her first words—"I know"—remain true for the rest of her life.

A world where every Black girl gets to march to the beat of her own drum.

Dr. Yamicia Connor is a physician, researcher, and founder of The Labora Collective and Diosa Ara. She writes about reproductive justice, maternal health, and the systems that shape women's lives.