The Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson is to basketball what Beyoncé is to music.
Both are masters at their craft. Both possess an unabiding passion and zest for what they do. Both convey a vibrancy and vitality that is infectious. And they both use their platforms to celebrate and empower Black women and girls in society that often overlooks and stigmatizes them.
For Beyoncé, it was her landmark album Lemonade in 2016, and for A’ja it is her new book Dear Black Girls: How to Be True to You published by Flatiron Books through Macmillan Publishers. The book not only chronicles her life, from growing up in Columbia, South Carolina to becoming one of women’s basketball’s most popular players, but also serves a guide for Black women and girls to be their unapologetic selves and to be looked at as full human beings.
The precursor for the book was her powerful 2020 essay of the same title, “Dear Black Girls,” that was published in The Players’ Tribune. Her essay came out as the COVID-19 pandemic intersected with the movement for racial justice spurred by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In that summer’s
