by Marilyn Rhames

I recently sat with four colleagues during a school-based professional development session on diversity. There was a Jewish woman, a Mexican woman, a White man, and me. We had to answer the question “Which part of your identity has had the biggest impact on you growing up? Race, class, or gender?”

I learned a lot about my colleagues that day, including one who admitted being afraid to walk near a Black man (I won’t say who said that). As for me, all three factors have deeply affected me.

Gender, however, is the the one I’ve explored the least.
Growing up, my friend’s older brother would call me “the young and the breastless.” Boys would form a cross with their fingers and run away screaming like I was a witch. I was tall, flat, and dark.

Ugly.

At least that’s how my male counterparts made me feel. (Girls weren’t as cruel.)

So poured my energy into being a top student. My fight-back strategy was to silence the bullies with my brilliance. Plus, I could imagine nothing worse than becoming an unsightly, broke, dumb Black woman like the one-dimensional characters I saw on TV shows depicting a rich, glamorous White man’s world.

The angst of my young reality was reflected in a recent Teaching Tolerance piece called Don’t Forget About Black Girls. It reminded me how invisible I used to feel at school.

While Black females have made significant gains in college enrollment rates, we are also the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system.

Worse, no one seems to be paying attention. The report Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected argues that discipline and behavior studies tend to be laser focused on Black boys, and in the webinar accompanying the report, discourse regarding gender is largely centered on White girls in more well-off schools that don’t have zero-tolerance policies. Meanwhile, African-American females are traveling at full speed along the school-to-prison pipeline, a trend virtually ignored by researchers.

For example, the report found that Black girls are suspended six times as often as White girls and 10 times more in New York State.

I was one of the fortunate ones. Though I felt ugly on the outside, I never once doubted my inner beauty or acted out in school. When I wasn’t studying, doing chores, or jumping rope, I poured myself into church activities. I read the Bible and loved Proverbs 31, which praised a woman for her virtuous character, not her good looks.


But what about today’s Black girls who look “on fleek” but feel like broken glass?Where do they turn to when they have no faith and no safety at home or at school? What about the girls who mask their insecurities and pain with endless selfies plastered on social media? When their frustration with the past and fear of the future cause them to disengage or lash out at school, what happens?

Black girls don’t get the counseling they need. They get suspended. Then expelled. They go to juvie. Then, they drop out. And when they can’t find a job, they commit minor crimes. They get arrested. They go to court. They get sent to prison.

One African-American male principal in Chicago told me that based on the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) survey, about 45 percent of his predominantly low-income Black students have a parent who is either dead or incarcerated. A whopping 90 percent of his students reported experiencing childhood trauma. During the past few years, he has seen an uptick in violent incidents involving girls.

“I used to worry about my Black boys, but now the girls are the ones fighting and causing the most trouble,” he said.

Historically, women have always been the quiet strength of the African-American community, so hearing about large numbers of Black girls falling apart in schools is a troubling phenomenon that must not go unaddressed.
By my senior year in high school, I had accepted my beautiful cocoa brown skin, thick braided locks, and brown eyes that slanted upward. I had curves, and the same boys who taunted me in elementary school were asking for my phone number. Moreover, I was ranked at the top of the class and voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”

This Black girl was on the top of the world, fairy dust all around me. That is, until I enrolled in a private liberal arts college that had little ethnic diversity among students or staff. None of the White boys had any interest in me (except one red-headed, freckle-faced basketball player who asked me out and then stood me up). And when I took my first science class, I realized that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.

My #BlackGirlMagic seemed to stop working. But coming home on the weekends and seeing the pride in my momma’s eyes always broke the spell of disillusionment. That’s what Black girls need. They need us to see them, affirm them, love them. Love produces the most amazing magic show.

by Shaneda Destine

August 2016 will mark a year since I decided to engage in a consistent practice of Bikram Yoga. Over the years I have tried countless diets and exercise regimens ranging from counting calories on My Fitness Pal, buying gym memberships, and lifting weights at home off and on. Though, I still struggle with reaching my goal weight and being consistent throughout my daily life as Ph.D. student, wife and provider—yoga is more than exercise to me.

 My first time trying yoga was on my winter break as a first year Ph.D. student at Howard University. The workload and commute caused stress on my relationships, overall ability to time-manage and my own self-care that I require as a self-proclaimed introvert. My first year of graduate school consisted of me waking up early to read for class, traveling an hour from Baltimore County to Washington, D.C., reading some more and taking night classes. There were times that I forgot to eat or didn’t have time to hydrate while chugging up Howard’s infamous hills from my parking space, blocks away. So, investing in yoga was about meditation and caring for myself for just an hour or more. Though my first encounter with yoga didn’t yield a consistent practice after school was back in session, it left an lasting impression.  When I moved closer to school, I tried Bikram Yoga in my second year at Howard and by my third year I was determined to put myself first and make it a consistent practice.
"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde

Yoga works for me because I had an injury years ago that left me with metal in my right ankle, and it strengthens these muscles. It is my time to acknowledge the divine from within, appreciate myself and heighten my self-awareness. Yoga has become my sanctuary, my space to pray, meditate and be gentle with myself in a world that is often hostile to my being and everything I embody. I am a Black queer woman, married, academic struggling to breathe in many spaces such as this academic climate, queer space, Black space, white space hat often doesn’t value all of the intersections of my identity at once. When I walk into my regular practice at my yoga studio, I am taking my health into my control, valuing myself and appreciating all that I embody for an hour or two. That often reverberates throughout my day and gives me a new sense of reverence for all those struggling to breathe around me and with me.

Though my yoga practice is more about my spiritual and emotional decompression, the health disparities we face as Black women are important to note. Black women’s health disparities are a source of systemic injustices, but with knowledge of this we can begin to shift this paradigm by applying an intersectional lens.

Now when I think about the power to transform our health and the effects of the compounding inequalities we face as Black women, I can’t help but contextualize it within the many obstacles black women have faced throughout American history and beyond. I think about how my activism and scholarship, the overlap of my work and my being, often leaves me overwhelmed and underappreciated. I think about the struggles to breathe and survive in capitalism, heteropatriarchy and under white supremacy. And although it is overwhelming at times, I know that Black women realized a long time ago we have to demand space and time for our humanity. Activists, scholars and regular folk already knew what the world has yet to realize, that we are mothers of the universe, powerful beyond measure.

Putting our health first is also putting our rights to live, breathe and exist first. Yoga has connected me with the indigenous and ancestral practices that we have lost over centuries, that doesn’t divide holistic health, but values our spiritual, physical, emotional being all at once.  I’m reminded of a talk last year with Angela Davis at University of Maryland, when she spoke about the fear of telling her comrades in the 60s that she had practiced yoga during her time in jail and continued when she was released. Davis expressed her shame to tell her community that she was taking time to care for her wellbeing. This highlighted to me the complexities of our oppression and the need for us to continue to demand space for our own self-care.

Photo: iStockPhoto

Shaneda Destine is a wife, aunt, god mommy a yogini, Ph.D. student and professor in the DMV area. Her research focus on Black women activism and self-care. She is a sociologists by trade and a kid from Long Island, NY that loves poetry, yoga and cooking.

by Brionne Janae

I have lived the better half of the last five years with shame. A shame I didn’t know how deeply I felt until I sat sobbing in a Pentecostal church, my head resting on the chest of a woman whose name I don’t know, and had never spoken to until just then. Yet there I was in her arms as she rocked and prayed for me. I had only once before spoken honestly of the state of my mind in church, though I have spent a good portion of my life there.

The first time I shared my burden, I got the typical give it to Jesus prayer. I’m sure many of us who struggle with depression in churches, especially black churches, have heard it. It’s the kind of prayer that turns my blood, makes me want to stand in the pulpit, and shout. Jesus gave this to me. Jesus handed me this weight and never asked if I wanted it. I didn’t choose this. Give it to Jesus? You might as well say walk away from yourself, or get over it, or if the fire is so damn hot why don’t you get out of the kitchen. Because my whole life is tied up in that kitchen. 
But this woman Sunday before last, didn’t pray one of those prayers. She was specific. She prayed for my body, that I would have the strength to get out of bed in the morning. She prayed that I would not stop believing in the sanctity of my mind, she prayed that I would not feel the need to kill myself. She prayed that I would not be ashamed.

I am ashamed of depression, but mostly I am ashamed of how often I have wanted to stop living, to cease existing, to get in bed and stay there. When I was 19, I fantasized about stepping in front of busses. It was my first time living away from home, first time living without a car, and walking everywhere and catching the bus. I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, living for the first time with real space in my life for depression and anxiety to spill over into. I didn’t have to stress about my parents worrying about me, calling my gloom insolence, or using my angst as a mirror for their own. I started cutting, mostly as a means to cope with living. I knew if I decided to leave my body it wouldn’t be with a knife.

I would walk down College Avenue, and every time a bus would drive by, I would want to lean into it, and I'd be filled with this terror that I actually would. I didn’t really want to die. I just wanted to not be alive, to stop and rest a while, to be at peace. I’ve long stopped leaning into busses, but never spoken of that time or any of the ways I’ve imagined leaving my body, not even in my poetry.

It has always felt wrong to ask people to step into this with me. Wrong and terrifying. What if I tell someone and they decide the best place for me is a mental hospital? What if every conversation I have with them from then forward is with their eyes looking at me as if I were a wounded deer? What if I drag them down with me? What if they walk away?

I’ve always believed that it was my job to pretend that everything is good, even and especially, when it isn’t. I do this for the sake of those around me, but mostly for myself. I’ve internalized this belief so much that often when I’m confronted with a person who wears their depression on their sleeves, my knee jerk reaction is nasty. I think get over it. I think fucking filter yourself. I think just fake it like the rest of us. Fortunately, I have a decent filter, and have come to realize that what I dislike in them is, simply, what I am ashamed of in myself.

That afternoon, after I wept like a small child in that church woman’s arms, I tried going about my normal Sunday routine. I went to the cafe downtown where I like to grade essays and pretend to be productive. I went to the movies on a whim and saw whatever was playing next, and after as I walked toward the station, I detoured through Macy’s and bought a small silver cross on a whim. Or if I was continuing my usual dishonesty, I’d say because it was 55 percent off. I mean I payed $65 for a cross that was regularly $150. What a steal. But that is not why I bought the cross. As I meandered home I made myself a promise. A promise I make quite frequently: I will keep on in this fight for my life, and if I keep fighting then, God, you must be here with me. I’ve ended more than a couple poems with this sentiment.

Living with my mind constantly under attack means, that sometimes every day, and sometimes every hour, I am fighting for my life. I am asserting that I want to be here. It is my choice and I choose life for myself, knowing full and well, that abandoning my body looks so much easier.
And that’s what is hardest about mental illness. Here I am fighting for my life, making the most important choice I’ll ever make every day, and I’m ashamed of it, which means I tell no one, which means I fight, for the most, part alone. We don’t send soldiers into combat alone for a reason. People need people. We are fundamentally social beings. People with mental illness shouldn’t struggle alone. And so even as I have committed myself to life for the umpteenth thousandth time and purchased a tangible symbol of that struggle and commitment. I also need to commit to not doing this alone. To letting go of shame.

This mind I have, this temperament of my heart and soul, was given to me at birth. I did nothing to earn them. It has shaped and worked at me for better, for worse. Has made me more compassionate, and attuned to the world around me, even as I struggle to love myself and all the ways I move through this life. I do not need to be ashamed. I must commit today to finding new ways to exists in the world. Ways that allow me to be honest about what I’m feeling. Ways that permit me to ask for help when I need it. Ways that allow me to trust and believe that the world is filled with people like the woman from my church, people who will offer a hand up when it gets difficult to stand. I need to not only speak but live the words of Audre Lorde:

“….when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”

Photo: Shutterstock

Brionne Janae is a California native, teaching artist and poet living in Boston. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in jubilat, Apogee Journal, Waxwing, The Nashville Review and Bayou Magazine. Brionne received her MFA from Emerson College, and is a Cave Cane Fellow.

by Ari C. Johnson




Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Ari C. Johnson is a student of Religion and International Studies at the University of Miami, an activist, and a walking contradiction. A Southern 'preacher's kid', she is passionate about the intersection of anti-gentrification efforts and the preservation of historic Black churches. Her other interests include Black feminism, British literature, unrevised history, abandoned buildings, nature, escapism, and Southern food.

Erica Thurman is a writer, speaker and consultant with a focus on inclusion, intersectional and issues that impact the lives of Black girls and women. More of her work can be found at ericathurman.com.

by Benie Hallel


“The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs-- as who has not?-- of human love, God’s love alone is left.” - James Baldwin

A gunman opened fire in a queer Orlando nightclub on Saturday evening after reportedly becoming irate at the sight of two men kissing in Miami a few months prior. The media has, of course, sensationalized this tragedy to be an act of “Islamic terrorism,” without making much mention of the sustained, engrained homophobia embraced by American culture that feeds a beast of this sort.
The bodies that were slain in that club were not just white bodies; they were queer women and men of color who were targeted for their sexual attraction. Religion alone did not do this. We did. Every word that we have spoken in hatred and condemnation of queer folks, every time that we listened as LGBTQI identities were mocked and demeaned without saying a word, has done this.
On the Sunday following the shooting, I was driving in my Boston neighborhood when I overheard the car next to me blasting Buju Banton’s “Boom Bye Bye.” Every Caribbean kid who has ever attended a cookout or endured a mass house cleaning on a Saturday morning knows this song, and we know it well. For those who don’t know, the lyrics go something like, “boom bye bye in a batty boy head, rude boy no promote no nasty man, them haffi dead.” I wondered if the people in the car next to me had heard the news, or if they cared. I wondered why our community continues to normalize messages of hating and abusing queer identities as if there are no consequences for these words. Black people, it is time we get serious about our homophobia. It is time that we address and challenge the ways that our culture, music, and conversations serve to isolate and terrorize queer and trans folks of color. This starts with us- we have a responsibility to deconstruct our own bullshit before we can even begin to challenge it in the society around us. It isn’t funny anymore. It isn’t benign. It is deadly and our brothers and sisters continue to pay with their lives.

I am a West Indian born immigrant and the daughter of a christian pastor. We immigrated to the U.S. from Dominica when I was five years old. For me, and many West Indians, black Americans, and christians alike, homophobia is cultural. I was taught very early on that same-sex attraction was a sin, and that participants would be condemned to death and hell fire if they neglected to repent for their lust. No mention was ever made of love. For a long time, I believed my parents and I believed the Bible. I mean, it’s right there in the text. Admitting that homosexuals are not mortally doomed to the flames of hell meant facing the possibility that parts, or all, of the Bible may be an inaccurate- that they are the result of subjective human bias, and not of transcendent wisdom and love. This is a conversation that most christians are not ready to have.

At the risk of sounding like a cliche coming of age novel, I began to change my opinions on homosexual partnerships when I began making gay friends. A critical step in this process was a close friendship that I formed with an openly gay male during middle and high school. We had many things in common and were able to speak openly about our attractions and romantic relationships. I like to say that this was the beginning of a budding awareness, but in retrospect, there was always a part of me (and all of us, I think) that knew better. The supposed homophobia that I had previously embraced collapsed way too quickly to have ever been real. Within seconds of forming a bond with this person, I thought “okay, there is nothing wrong with him.” It was a light-switch turned on, an understanding that attraction is attraction, feelings are feelings, love is love, and his were all very real and very valid.

The deconstruction of my homophobic feeling did not happen all at once, and learning to be aware of gay consciousness and prioritize their struggle is a process that is still ongoing for me.
It took time. It took a lot of listening to queer voices, reading queer perspectives, and seeking the Creator to provide answers that never explicitly came (I am aware that all of you may not value a spiritual connection with a deity- I am speaking only of my own journey). As a former christian and the daughter of a pastor, reconciling my acceptance of and love for queer identities with my belief in the Bible and christian dogma was difficult. God never gave me an answer on whether homosexuality was “right or wrong,” but I believe that She transformed my heart to walk a continuous path of loving better, more freely, and without judgement.

Love is a word that our society throws around loosely. Let me be perfectly clear as to what I mean by love; when you love a population that is oppressed, targeted, and terrorized, you love by accepting them. You love by reminding them that they are whole, okay, and that there is nothing wrong with them. You love by using your privilege as a heterosexual, cis gendered person to make space for them. As in usual tragedy form, I see a lot of people “praying for Orlando.” I urge you also to pray for yourselves, your families, your friends, and your communities. I urge you to ask whichever God you believe in to touch your heart and reveal all fear and loathing of difference that lies there. I am praying for a love that will swing wide the gates of hatred, connecting us to a world where LGBTQI identities are safe, seen, and valued just as they are.


Photo: iStockPhoto


Benie Hallel is a Master's student in English Literature at Carnegie Mellon where she studies postcolonial literature and intersectional identities. She is a freelance journalist, radical black feminist and superhero.

by Ashley Daniels


I have this thing. Whenever someone is talking to me about a subject that requires a bit of thought, I'll think of a song that applies to the question, as I'm thinking of an answer. For example, when asked, "Are you a feminist?" I think of Mya, while searching my brain for an answer: I'm so confused / I don't know what to do.

I have an answer, but it’s not as direct or simple as the question.

Growing up watching BET, MTV, and VH1 (before they became the holy ratchet television trinity), I only understood feminism to be three things: white, angry, and mostly lesbian. I watched scores of white women on a field wearing sundresses and combat boots holding hands with other white women wearing buzz cuts and flannel shirts, swaying to the spellbinding sounds of the Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge at Lilith Fair. I listened as Meredith Brooks told the world how she was a bitch, a lover, a child, and a mother. The news showed hundreds of White college coed girls with megaphones, candles, and makeshift signs in an effort to "take back the night."

All these sounds and images bonded together in my pre-adolescent understanding of one word: feminism.
From hearing that word tossed around in interviews and news reports, I developed an associative understanding of feminism. But because I rarely saw faces that looked like mine in these spaces, I didn't think that feminism was a "thing" for a little Black girl like me. Every once in a while I would catch a glimpse of artists like Tracy Chapman or Meshell Ndegeocello on MTV or VH1, but I was more in awe of their Blackness on a predominately white music network than their feminism. It would not be until my sophomore year of college where my mind would change (sort of).

Every year, my aunt gives me a book as part of my Christmas gifts. In tenth grade, I received Kevin Powell's Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature. I skimmed through the book but hadn't really read it until I was in my dorm room one boring snowy Saturday years later. Flipping through the writings of Robin D.G. Kelly, Ras Baraka, and dream hampton, I happened upon an essay by a writer named Joan Morgan, who introduced me to the concept of hip-hop feminism.

When reflecting on the treatment of women during the Million Man March with Farrakhan banishing us from the National Mall to our kitchens to "cook for our warriors" as noted by Kristal Brent-Zooks, Morgan cited the need for a new kind of feminism that is relevant to Black women of the present 20th Century (the essay was written in 1999). She understood that not too many Black women were checking for "the f-word" due to deep-rooted racism from White women. But honestly, that wasn't the part that resonated with me. What drew me was the idea of being a "hip hop feminist."

Despite knowing all the words to "Bittersweet Symphony" and "You Oughta Know" thanks to binge-watching MTV and VH1, I'm still an avid rap and hip-hop fan. Trips to class were included background tracks from A Tribe Called Quest, The Roots, or Missy Elliot in my ears. I can knowledgeably discuss the Roxanne Wars, the Bridge Wars, and how the Biggie/Tupac beef fucked all that up. I could tell you about the Zulu Nation and the significance of Afrika Bambaataa. So of course the notion of hip-hop feminism intrigued me.

But as a young Black woman, I was conflicted. This was around the time when sisters at Spelman were protesting Nelly's appearance on their campus after the infamous “Tip Drill” video. I applauded those sisters for standing up against the misogynoir that flooded our radio stations on a daily basis. But as a lover of rap and hip-hop, I questioned if I even allowed to do such a thing?

True, I wasn't constantly checking for songs that said Black women were nothing more than ass and titties wrapped in a quick weave. But I won't lie and pretend that my bitty booty doesn't automatically get ready to twerk a lil' sumthin' when I hear that Cash Money is taking over for the 99 and the 2000. Joan Morgan let me know that I was not alone. That there was a space (or there needed to be) where this intersected. We needed a kind of feminism that "was brave enough to fuck with the grays," as Joan Morgan writes in her classic text, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. As Morgan writes, we needed a feminism that understands how "truth can't be found in the voice of any one rapper, but in the juxtaposition of many… they lie at the magical intersection where those contrary voices meet—the juncture where 'truth' is no longer black and white, but subtle, intriguing shades of gray."

As part of my quest to find such a feminism, I ordered more books about Black feminism including those by Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks. I perused through essays by Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Barbara Smith. I read feminist studies on the writings of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston.

Feminism and I formed a “situationship.” Where in a relationship you relate to the other party involved, I could appreciate learning about Black feminism… but I still couldn't seem to shake the idea of how “white” it was. While Morgan, Guy-Sheftall, Smith, hooks, and Collins helped me see myself in the mirror of feminism, its reflection was still fuzzy. I found myself still in search of an ideology that I could relate to. Not knowing of anything else at the time, I reluctantly linked up with feminism.

As I read more about the history of feminism, I understood my apathy. Doing research prior to joining my sorority, I learned that the founders of Delta Sigma Theta were regulated to march in the back of the processional, because of their race during the 1913 Women's Suffrage March. When doing a paper on the history of Black women voting, I learned that the rift in the alliance between Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony was caused with the decision to either support voting rights for Black men or White women. While I wasn’t really trying to claim feminism, historically it wasn’t claiming me either. The situationship lasted for the remainder of my undergraduate tenure up until my second year of doctoral school.

That's when I met Womanism.

Props must go to my Black Political Theory professor. In a discussion with him about what I wanted to study regarding Black women, he suggested that I check out Dr. Clenora Hudson Weems's 1993 classic Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. This book too was like looking in a mirror, but with a clearer reflection. Here was an ideal whose founding roots shared my own: being a woman of African descent in America. It was something I could relate to, therefore form a relationship with. I had dreamed of a "feminism" that didn't reluctantly acknowledge the racist roots of feminism, but that called it out on its bullshit. Dr. Weems did just that in her definition:

Africana Womanism is a term I coined and defined in 1987 after nearly two years of publicly debating the importance of self-naming for Africana woman. Why the term "Africana Womanism?" Upon concluding that the term "Black Womanism" was not quite the terminology to include the total meaning desired for this concept, I decided that "Africana Womanism," a natural evolution in naming, was the ideal terminology for two basic reasons. The first part of the coinage, Africana, identifies the ethnicity of the woman being considered, and this reference to her ethnicity, establishing her cultural identity, relates directly to her ancestry and land base: Africa. The second part of the term, Womanism, recalls Sojourner Truth's powerful impromptu speech "Ain't I A Woman," one in which she battles with the dominant alienating forces in her life as a struggling Africana woman, questioning the accepted idea of womanhood. Without question, she is the flip side of the coin, the co-partner in the struggle for her people, one who, unlike the White woman, has received no special privileges in American society.

As good as feminism could be, it still fails to address how intersectionalities—like race and gender—further complicated the realities of women of color. (An example of this is the recent discussions around closing the wage gap that white women like Patricia Arquette champion, without acknowledging that Black women make even less.)

Womanism does a better job at this, but it’s not perfect either. We have our beef, too. First there is a sense of exclusiveness, even among Black people. In reading about other Womanist works, there is a strong emphasis on spirituality and religion. By centering the concept around a particular religious belief, we are pretty much guilty of the same crime we accuse White feminists of committing: leaving folks out. I'm reminded of the approach Malcolm X proposed in his speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Regardless of our backgrounds, we must all come together to realize that we are catching the same two kinds of hell in America constantly: being Black and being woman. We cannot afford to ostracize anybody from our cause—no matter how religious affiliation, sexual identity, class, or education background. Every type of Black woman is necessary and should be represented in our fight for liberation. It makes no sense that we vote at the highest rate of all voters, yet our social progress is still among the lowest.

There is strength in solidarity and inclusiveness.

Second, I take issue with Womanism being a belief more so than an ideology. A belief is based on faith or perspective. It is what a person thinks or perceives. As noted by Karl Mannehiem in Idelology and Utopia, “an ideology is a vehicle used to mobilize a belief.”

Womanism still lags behind feminism in its ability to mobilize around womanist beliefs. From modern feminism’s early origins within the Suffrage Movement, women mobilized around the issues they believed in by forming organizations such as National American Women's Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). As history has tells us, these mobilization efforts have done a pretty decent job thus far.
Africana Womanism, to me, has not yet reached that level of influence yet. We still need a vehicle to move our agenda forward, and we still need to create a centralized agenda on our own terms. We need to be our own champions, and not rely on the examples set for us by white women or Black men. We need to move from the trajectory of margin to center, as bell hooks, famed Black feminist, would tell us.

So am I a Black feminist? Yes and no. Am I a Womanist? Yes and no.

I guess I'm like Joan Morgan, in a sense. I have a need. I need a Womanism that encompasses the spirit and passion of Black feminism. I need a Black feminism that truly advocates for us, understanding that Black women are quick to get lost in the shuffle of other issues.

I need "the intriguing shades of gray" of both, I suppose.
Ashley Daniels (also known as Ashfronomenal) is a third year Ph.D. student in Political Science program at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She is currently featured in the book, "The Miseducation of..." from the Ignorant Intellectuals. To purchase, please email ignorantintellectuals@gmail.com.

By Kimberly Foster @KimberlyNFoster

I was a lonely child. I had a friend or two, but I often felt unlikable—that I was strange and damaged because what came so easily for others evaded me. I avoided engaging with kids my age because I could never quite get the hang of it. My interactions with peers were awkward. They left me filled with self-doubt. So I learned to perform extroversion early. I mimicked the kinds of personalities I saw others flock to.

These shows won me attention and acquaintances but never deep connections. Always being “on” put a barrier between the sensitive girl I was, and still am, and the world that would reject her. Hiding in the open has been safe and comfortable. And when I am not performing, I retreat.
Introversion is misunderstood. Many interpret a preference for stillness as arrogance or misanthropy. When, for me, it has been a byproduct of a lifelong battle with anxiety and insecurity. As an adult, I work through it by spending time with my thoughts. It is not selfish, nor is it weird. And this does not make me unlovable.

Prolonged stretches with limited interactions are important to me, a true introvert, but I’ve always desired the community that accompanies deep, meaningful friendships. In my childhood bedroom, I dreamed of the day when I would be able to get away and find my people—the people who didn’t question the quirks, who laughed at the jokes, who identified with the values. I was looking for my tribe.

I found them in college. By the end of Freshman spring, I had grown close to the women I now call my soul mates. They got me. I didn’t have to explain the jokes or apologize for the emotional outbursts. Our bonds have been more fulfilling than I could have imagined. We can spend months a part and gather for celebrations as if no time has passed. I am lucky. We all are.

I knew that the love we shared was about more than proximity after my dad died during my Sophomore year in. I dropped out of school. I hid, once again, out of embarrassment and sadness. But they continued to show care even from thousands of miles away, during at a time when I could not care for myself.

And when I told them that I was not going to get a real job, no one tried to discourage me. Instead of seeding doubt, they checked in, asked questions and gave to fundraisers. It was an essential vote of confidence.

Together we have weathered tumult and triumph, and after nearly a decade, they’ve become a sort of home for me— a place I can always return to.

This surety has made dating much less painful. As I’ve wandered in and out of unhealthy romantic relationships, I knew they were there. During a rocky period in the healthiest relationship with the most well-adjusted person I’ve ever dated, I realized he might leave. As I considered how I would navigate out of the hole of heartbreak, I remembered that I would always be ok because my home, comprised of the most constant presences in my life, was unmoved.

Thusly, I have abandoned the common conception of soul mate as a romantic love. There is a particular burden of social expectation put upon straight women, that our male partner will be our everything. That through him we will be fully seen and whole. That could never be true for me. Whomever I partner will get me as fully-formed and functional because of the eternal loves I’ve already found.
When I watch Oprah describe to Barbara Walters her best friend, Gayle, as “the mother that I never had, the sister that everybody would want, the friend that everybody deserves” I understand completely. When she explains that she’s crying because she does not tell her that enough, I understand that too.

Because I have not tributed my best friends, my sisters, my soul mates, the women who have loved and cared for me consistently, who have invested without expectation of return, nearly enough. But everyday I am grateful for their boundless kindness and generosity.

Photo: iStockPhoto

Kimberly Foster is the founder and editor-in-chief of For Harriet. Email or Follow @KimberlyNFoster