Yelitsa Jean-Charles

Yelitsa Jean-Charles was raised in a religious, Haitian household where she was taught to adapt and conform to the white spaces she grew up in. It wasn’t until Yelitsa went on to study at RISD that she began to unpack her own internalized racism and the self-policing she’d learned over the years. While exploring these ideas through her art, she developed “Healthy Roots” a line of Black dolls that confront negative thoughts and stereotypes and would instead show that Black girls can occupy a positive space in the world as well. In her talk, Yelista walks us through her own growth, from conformity to “becoming woke” and embracing her own Blackness, and how her line of dolls brings positive representation to Black youth.