racism

A new study finds that African-American women achieve the highest outcomes of any demographic by race and gender.

Honoring my feelings and being true to myself are just as important to me as being critical of the ways that a multiply-oppressive society manifests itself in the way I date, love, and desire.

If you asked me to guess what was going through her head, I would say she was in shock that a fat lady would wear a tight skirt, belly in full sight. This feminist act of taking up space, tacitly but clearly making room for myself in a fatphobic culture, is a bold-but-crucial move if you’re my brand of fat babe.

In 2015, to be a woman (and a black woman at that) among the general public means having to keep your defenses up.

[CN: racism, incarceration, slavery] What happens, they asked, when your community is targeted and generationally oppressed; when you are raised to fear the police because you’ve seen whose blood it is they’re spilling; when your father and uncle and siblings and cousins are all labeled criminals?

When Clinton dismisses her women critics as merely whiny, she also dismisses their concerns, and exemplifies the exact single-issue mainstream feminist thinking that many young women and intersectional feminists oppose her for in the first place.

Black hair, like Black identity, is diverse and nuanced, but it still stands out as different from White hair. The point is not that all Black hair needs to look the same, but that we share the experience of feeling pressure to alter our appearance, to present a version of ourselves solely to satisfy the White gaze. When we truly own our bodies —the fat, skinny, scarred, hairy, melanated, unconventional bodies we walk around in — they will no longer be things to defend or hide or alter.

I barely had a chance to say “What’s taking him so long?” before he stepped up to the counter to ask me what he could help me with. Me. Not my friend who had been standing there for a minimum of twenty minutes waiting for assistance, but ME, the white girl.