Eschewing the traditional Girl Guide duties of cake-baking and car-washing, a new group called the Radical Monarchs are donning brown berets to pay homage to civil rights movements while learning about radical beauty, environmental justice and how to become LGBT allies. ‘Last year, my fourth-grade daughter desperately wanted to join a young girls’ group,’ says co-founder Anayvette Martinez. ‘I began to imagine what a radical social justice troop looked like; one that centred and affirmed her experiences as a beautiful and brilliant brown girl against societal pressures to conform to mainstream ideals of girlhood.’
The troop of 12 girls aged between 8 and 12 began to meet fortnightly last December in the Bay Area of California. News of the troop, which was originally called the Radical Brownies, has spread quickly around the world via social and conventional media. Its mission is to ‘empower young girls of colour to step into their collective power, brilliance and leadership to make the world a more radical place’. Any child who identifies with the mission and vision can join. Amid racist state violence that has prompted US-wide rallies and protests, one of the first subjects explored by the Radical Monarchs has been the Black Lives Matter movement. For each unit taught, the girls participate in community-based actions in order to ‘cultivate and inspire hope’.
