It's well-known that the common enemy among communities of color is white supremacy. Due to the wide-reaching impacts of institutionalized white supremacy, many communities of color fail to examine their own problematic behavior towards each other, especially towards the Black community. With that in mind, it's important to better understand how anti-Blackness functions even … [Read more...]
10 Ways the Beauty Industry Tells You Being Beautiful Means Being White
Note: This article originally appeared on EverydayFeminism and is reprinted by permission. I have to cringe when I think about my early days of putting on makeup. First, my mom wouldn’t let me touch the stuff until high school -- which I can understand, knowing what I know now about how girls can be pressured to grow up too fast. But I was lagging behind other girls who … [Read more...]
3 Reasons We Need to Be Critical of Compulsory Sex Positivity in Queer Spaces
Sex positivity often acts as an implicit — or sometimes explicit — foundation of leftist, feminist, and LGBTQ+ spaces for completely valid reasons. As women and queers, sex has been the driving force behind both our oppression and the spaces we create to separate, heal, and liberate us from our oppression. Sexualized spaces for socializing predate our modern understanding of … [Read more...]
6 Lessons To Learn From Fathers of Color This Fathers’ Day
As I reflect on my father this Fathers' Day, I'm reminded of how I used to teach writing for freshmen at a community college. One of my regular reader-response assignments included an essay by San Francisco journalist Rose del Castillo Guilbault about how the word “macho” carries different interpretations depending on culture. She argues that to Americans, "macho" is a negative … [Read more...]
