We’re here demanding intentional, meaningful investment in our community, and in our community efforts to end this motherf*cking epidemic. We are demanding funders and organizers, especially LGBT foundations and granters, to intentionally invest in the trans community… If you serve us, you need to include us.
Jessie’s death is tragic, especially since she was so young and her friends had to witness her being killed. Was it really necessary to shoot and kill a teenage girl? The problem is the ones to evaluate that question work under a system that is unjust to people of color. Jessie didn’t deserve to die, even if she indeed used a stolen car as a weapon. Her life was taken because it was deemed unimportant and disposable because an officer decided his sense of safety was worth more than her life.
Yvonne via Jessie Hernandez Didn’t Deserve to Die
Buying sperm and getting pregnant started to seem like a better path for me as a queer black woman. I didn’t need anyone’s approval to get pregnant. As long as I had the money for the sperm the sperm bank would sell it to me.
Asher Jak via Adventures in Baby Making as a Single Black Lesbian
See this report? It found that 100% of women of color in STEM face gender bias on top of tons of racism! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. That means all of them, in case you didn’t realize.Every last one.
Say their names: Lamia Beard. Ty Underwood. Goddess Edwards. May they rest in power.
I mean, how silly am I that I thought by passing as a black male, I’d ruled out all threats. The sad truth is I have no identity to retreat to. Unless you’re a straight white cis male, you have a reason to be scared. I’m not saying that you should be, I’m just being honest about the fact that I constantly calculate the potential threats of situations. And if you think I don’t have good reason to, you’re wrong. Because when you’re black, it goes beyond never feeling truly safe. You don’t even have the right to protect yourself.
Forcing Marissa to serve even one day in prison represents a profound and systemic attack on black women’s right to exist and all women’s right to self-defense.
Alisa Bierria in Maddie’s piece on Marissa Alexander’s release today - and the work that’s left to do.
None of my teachers told me that Black feminism was the framework that made my life possible. It just didn’t come up. That’s why I want you to read this book.
This country owes Black citizens nothing less than full recognition of our human rights. The White House’s current racial justice initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, ignores too many members of our communities. It does not address the inhumane conditions we collectively experience living in a white supremacist system. The issues facing Black women, immigrants, trans and queer people must be included and we demand a full expansion of My Brother’s Keeper to do so.
We demand the same inclusion from our movement.
“When I say I was married to the cause,” Coretta is quoted as saying, “I was married to my husband whom I loved… It was my cause, and that’s the way I felt about it.”
Learn more about the First Lady of Civil Rights in our archives.