Idenitity Building From the Home Spaces of Black Women

“The healing knowledge of ‘Our Ancestors’ is central to our survival. The veneration of our foremothers is essential to our self-respect”
- Luisah Teish, Women’s Spirituality: A Household Act

So maybe it’s just the place I’m in, a plea I’m wailing through words, but here I am, again, writing and thinking and writing and shouting about how critical being a black queer woman whom loves Black Queer women really is. Maybe I’m just at this point where I’m trying to pull a lot of different things together in my healing for self-respect/dignity/love and wholeness. Lets go on and say it’s that along with the fact that I NEED FAMILY and I’m really beginning to understand that my readings and virtual correspondence is just not enough. I need to see, touch, hear, and smell my family (and in family I mean Black Queer women who know writing is healing, who are mediums for our ancestors and foremothers, and who exert love and work towards the powers of freedom truth and justice). So shouting about whom I am and am not- what I stand for, help the process of gathering and building and knotting those family ties. However, this writing has more of a focus. I want to speak directly to the healing and structuring of identity between black queer women (and Black women in general, although I’ve queered all Black women/people in my mind and understanding already).

I am not a Black Goddess
I an not a Rock
I am not a Photograph
I am not a picture in your mind
I am myself struggling toward myself
- Donna Kate Rushin, The Black Goddess

This writing initially came out of my want to place on paper the feel and identity growth that comes from loving Black women. I wanted to articulate how I’ve been able to piece together my sensing of who I am and where I come from or how I’ve been able to transform the distorted and negative concepts of self through loving Black women. Well, we won’t stray too far from this. However, after consulting with my handy dandy, always trustworthy, spiritual reader, Home Girls, I realized that I needed to address the topic on a larger scale. I want to discuss the resistance and the healing that births from Black women’s writing and through sistering and mothering one another, altogether. Its been a little more than a year now since I discovered Cheryl Clarke’s essay, “Lesbianism As Resistance” and let me tell you, she’s been my hero every since! I was at Spelman, trying to figure out how I ended back in the middle of a world that’s feeding me disguised images and messages of self-hatred. A world I was running away from in Boston at Simmons. So I made it my duty to conspire a master plan to go against all the visuals and aesthetics I was confronted with by being the biggest Poor Black, Queer, Dyke, Writer Warrior Activist (in all that I understood those terms and identity labels to mean) as resistance. I shouted and screamed and dressed in my chucks and jeans, and cut my locks and laid them out in my room next to Sitting Bull. And in all this, I came up with what I thought to be an original thesis for a final paper, lesbianism as resistance. After typing this into Google/J-Stor/Clark Atlanta’s library search engine, all this info on Cheryl Clarke and Bridge came up and I was floored. It felt so good to be able to read and hear a voice that sounded so much like my own. A voice that articulated all that I was feeling and trying to draft up in all my running and big fusses made. It was a deep exhaling and release of so much tensed energy just in knowing you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, and that you’re struggle and want to survive is experienced by many others. This is the healing power of women’s writing. Through the writings of women like Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Alice walker, Audre Lorde, and others, I was able to grab hold of a community, language, and legacy of voices that reflected my narrative and struggle, and greatly impacted the way I shape and develop concepts of identity, resistance, and healing.

“Certainly, self-hatred, in one form or another, is what brings Black women to therapy. How many black women, in the course of our lives, could unequivocally withstand the assaults on our very existence? We could sue society for nonsupport except for its ‘support’ in teaching us the oppressive process of internalizing racism and sexism, i.e., self-hatred”
-Eleanor Johnson, Reflections on Black Feminist Therapy

After coming across this in Eleanor Johnson’s essay, “Reflections on Black Feminist Therapy”, the overall themes and material entailed in that essay pushed me to address the impact that Black women sistering one another has on identity. It enabled me to reflect on the spaces I call home and here is where I realized that they are mostly queer but always involving Black women. Taking the time to ponder the question, “How many black women, in the course of our lives, could unequivocally withstand the assaults on our very existence?” I could only imagine the answer amounting to little to none. My friend Miafere and I always talk about how if folks only knew how hard or how much it takes for a Black girl to embody some sort of self-confidence (or even the masking of such) the whole premise of the Black girl’s big and bad attitude persona would be diminished, as its only our survival skin. This skin is something that I’ve learned to turn on when standing along a threatening path. My protective skin, something taught from a very young age, equipping you with a poker defense face and tongue that can intimidate nearly anyone in any situation. However, what I wish I were taught is that it’s okay to cry and hurt and feel/be vulnerable. Yes, and I could never understand why white women are always crying! And I find myself being kind of angry at this tool they seemed to possess, the ability/affordability to show weakness and sensitivity. It weirds me out every time I encounter it, in the classroom, in an office, on television, at a restaurant or market, any and everywhere. It’s such a crazy visual for me as I can only recall seeing one Black woman elder cry along the twenty-one years of my journey, and that turned out to be a big mistake.

I used to think
I can’t be a poet
because a poem is being everything you can be
in one moment,
speaking with lightning protest
unveiling a firey intellect
or letting the words drift feather-soft
into the ears of strangers
who will suddenly understand
my beautiful and tortured soul.
But, I’ve spent my life as a Black girl
A nappy-headed, no-haired,
Fat-lipped,
Big-bottomed Black girl
And the poem will surely come out wrong
Like me.
-Chirlane Mccray, I Used To Think


Nevertheless, there is an unveiling that comes out of home spaces between Black women. An unveiling of self, the masks, and protective skins. I am able to confront myself in a way that forces me to learn and evolve. Through the writings and communities, I am able to discover the truths about my ancestry and sisters that walk with me now. I am able to face/meet/see real Black bodies and minds and hear the voices in separation from the bullshit that clouds our daily societal existence. The realities of my being, the beauty, strength, magic, warmth- all things that aren’t accessible in my everyday are found within the circles of Black women. There are simple things one can pull and take from these spaces, like a love for my hair. I love being able to see a Black woman with a head full of tight coils (as mine) as she has it all twisted and wound up in some funky style- not in the light of taming or controlling her hair. But in loving its uniqueness. Hair, is always a topic amongst Black women. It can’t seem to escape confrontation as it so tangled in with our struggle around womanhood and humanity. Yes, something as small as hair is an item that Black girls learn to align as enemy from an early age. It’s learned to be the one extension of yourself that may set you apart from obtaining beauty, safety, love, acceptance and its through convening with like minds and spirits that I re-learn to love and see the beauty in every puffy coil. The pulling of the love I have for my widened hips, rounded saggy breast, belly that wraps all around the back and sides, cellulite thighs, and the stretch markings resting on my waist. There’s also the taking of hearing the drawls, snaps, slurs, and sounds that comes off a Black tongue. Those little Black woman grunts and noises that seem to be oh so universal and innate. In loving a Black woman, I’m enclosed in this sharing of aesthetics, respect, and tools for survival. In loving a Black woman, I extend myself- my energies my survival my healing onto her and between ourselves.

There’s an underlining truth and understanding of each other’s walk that Black women meet on and having such a foundation is quite powerful. It calls for discovery in one another. Eleanor Johnson posed the question why Black feminist therapy? Her answer, “Why Black women? Why Black people? We seek our grandmothers’ strengths, our great-grandmothers’ strategies-we find our sources. We discover/recover ourselves” (Smith, 324). And this is truth as our stories histories fear struggles strengths hurts are all intertwined, creating a sense of free when we come together. One unlike any other I experience in other spaces or circles. And there is a struggle and strength in carrying on such relations as it’s like you’re confronting you. You’re confronting all that you are and struggle with. All that you struggle with loving, you’re taking those energies of fear and anger strength and heaviness and you love it. You love her with all that’s in you and you heal and you survive and you get through and you love you. You love you and you feel lighter. She makes me feel lighter just as all the black women whom I love and loved have healed me in some way. I see myself in her as sister as lover as friend as comrade as my support and I reflect the same.

I am not a Black Goddess
I am a Black woman

Remember
There is the residue of fear in me
Remember
There is Healing in my hands
If you can hold these contra dictions in your head
/in your heart

You can hold me in your arms
-Donna Kate Rushin, The Black Goddess

A lover (my love(r)) told me today, in midst of our session of loving supporting sistering mothering and just knowing how to be there (in knowing what that means) for one another, something that spoke great volumes to how I was feeling at the time. It was a very small token of good listening and understanding that allowed me, for a moment, to settle in and exhale from all the hootin’ and hollerin’ I was doing. In discussing my anger for the white gentrified presence in Harlem and how I would love to find a way to simply not carry so much with me day by day, she interrupts my tirade by saying, ‘I know, you just want to be lighter’! And in her uttering of those words, I sunk into the mattress and took a deep breath. She said this and yet again, (as this usually is the case), those words (her words) were my own. Taking a breath and weight from me at the immediate connection understanding and alliance made after my first listen. It felt as if through my whole rant sighs and exhales/wavering/grunts/ shouts she knew what I was feeling (where my frustration laid) and sweetly said, “I know, you just want to be lighter”, and that made sense to me. It made sense because that’s what I felt and that’s what I was trying to convey to her through all my fussing. And just as it made sense to me, those words were hers in her knowing of what such emotion/yearn feels like. Its moments like these that I feel something greater/deeper transpire in my loving Black women. There is a presence of knowing and understanding that is beyond….just beyond. I am able to build, mold, transform my sensing of self through the correspondence, meetings, gatherings, love making, consoling and it helps me to be a better, stronger, wiser, more honest me. I’m able to love myself throughout it all, as that’s what it take for me to love her….and at the end of the day, I’m being healed and loved for being me, the biggest Poor Black, Queer, Dyke, Writer Warrior Activist of em’all!

Why you should care about Melissa Harris Lacewell

To all who have followed the very beginnings of this blog thank you for not abandoning us…we’re back! Ladi and I were discussing some of the affirming comments that were left on one of her first posts and we reflected on the potential of our efforts. We’re grateful for the use of this blog to hold the necessary space to speak our truths and dialogue around these issues. As a white woman I am extremely grateful not only to this community, but to the many spaces and communities I turn to for support, guidance and solidarity.

Our inspiration for the blog originated from classroom discussions, which became so pivotal not only in validating our voices, our truths, but in expanding our consciousness & forming a beloved community able to offer refuge after periods of isolation.

When I approached Ladi and Alicia about the creation of the blog I was fired up by the work of Melissa Harris Lacewell and Yolanda Pierce, two Black women professors at Princeton University and their blog called The Kitchen Table or TKT for short.

As of July 7th, 2009 Harris Lacewell has officially retired from her place at TKT. I am a big fan of Harris Lacewell and an avid follower of her on Facebook and Twitter. Her appearance on Democracy Now! debating Gloria Steinem is how I became familiar with her work. More than just being a fan though I am fascinated by the significance of her presence and how she uses social networking and blogging to hold a virtual space for dialogue. Not only is she teaching us and setting an example on how to do it (evidence Speaking Our Truths blog), but the work of Harris Lacewell and others is actually redefining the tradition of the narrative and access to information–efforts that were the focus of multi-racial feminism and traditional text.

TKT was a unique haven to multi-racial feminists in the cyber blogging world for many reasons. I recommended it to all of my friends because it is politically smart and socially aware. Tell me who else was critiquing Hillary Clinton and going head to head with Gloria Steinem in defense of Barack Obama? Along with the a critique of the racism exerted by the Clinton campaign, Harris Lacewell and Pierce spoke out on issues from a perspective that is not welcome or encouraged at many other media tables. That perspective is inclusive of personal experience and intellectual knowledge. It analyzes the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, etc and dissects how privilege and social hierarchies function in our society. Basically it is a whole lotta truth speaking!

In addition to generous amounts of knowledge that was imparted to the readers there was the underlying personal narrative of the blog that made it so special. These women were writing not just because they were informed about a topic or an issue, but because of a personal connection. It embodied the personal as political and the political as personal.

Why is this important? Well, for many reasons. As two professors they were altering who typically has access to resources by using a blog to relay information. The Internet is accessible not only in homes (for those who can afford it and privileged enough to own a computer), but also in schools and libraries. It is also essential that these are two black women who while working within the institution are working against the system simultaneously. The act of writing itself is pivotal when we come from a history where a Black person with an education was seen as dangerous to today where schools that primarily teach Black and Brown students are in deteriorating conditions, underfunded, and have minimal resources is no coincidence.

The Black narrative historically documents not only oppression, but also survival and resistance. Although I am not exactly sure how third wave multi-racial feminism emerged based on my knowledge I would argue that 3rd wave feminists used a model of the Black narrative to shape identity politics.

Texts such as This Bridge Called My Back are groundbreaking because here are radical, lesbian women of color vocalizing and printing what has kept them maybe not only isolated from each other because of social norms and hierarchies, but also oppressed and exploited in society. Within their words and pages there are so many validating experiences for the readers. That is one reason I love books and writings because for so many people we feel so alone in our communities, within our own families, but then truth is discovered from one to another. It is these spaces that sustain us, which we thrive from. One person sharing their truth can indefinitely change another’s opinion of themselves, of another person or group, or of how structural inequalities work. Just one voice CAN do that.

Why did I focus then, specifically on Harris Lacewell? I feel that she is continuing and contributing to the work of our ancestors-Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, among others because she offered another layer to identify politics although no, she’s not a poet (that we know of.) I was saddened that she left her place on TKT, although I don’t blame her. Her accessibility divulges her busy life as a public figure, devoted mother, author, campaigning for her boyfriend, James Perry, running for Mayor of New Orleans, her research and advocacy for the victims of Katrina & NOLA, her dedication for her students at Princeton and the list goes on and on.

BUT I felt like TKT was a space created by two activists, advocates, public figures, professors who recognized the vitality of a community. There is no other blog out there that I have found similar to TKT. How many of us doing this work often feel so alone in a world where so many people are already disconnected from each other? What we need is strength and support, acceptance, advice, patience and each other. So be it blogs or Facebook, twitter or books, whatever, however let us gather for each other, for ourselves.

Loving and Sistering Women: A Rant

   So I've been wondering just how close and crucial writing, speaking, loving, and connecting with women in general is to my survival,
my clarity and overall feeling of safety,
identity building/discovery/creation,
the shaping of home, and in healing.
I mean it’s in those spaces and at those times (with women) that I feel the need
   want
      desire to place my innermost on the table - Whether it’s through tele-sound waves, on a pc screen, or through ink. 

   Loving and Sistering women, is what helps me to sit and make peace with myself and the wavering energies that flutter within and round'n about daily. It’s in these circles or between these one on ones that I reach out for safety and grip hold to something strong and binding on the other end. I take the creations,
    creativity,
       tears,
          shivers,
             sighs,
                exhales,
                    nods and yes ‘sums,
                        wavering hands,
                            the eyes/that look, 

                               the laxness and intensity back to school, back to the classroom,
   on my walks through Harlem, Philly, campus, wherever,
      my mother’s home 
         an aunt’s house 
            church
               the stoop
                  to meetings
                     the park 
                        the bus/charlie/trolley stop and subway
                           the cafe
                              lab 
                                museum 
                                  to eat there or sometimes here
                                     that store, or in that cab, with memories and the knowing that home, like minds and like love and vision is not is real is truth is not far away. I take my fillings of those meetings wherever I go so that I may not ever be caught without a weapon or defense or courage. And cause I know I'm not alone, I know my voice struggle fight lives in many.
There's a power, a revival that comes from those meetings moments and shared words that I think need to be
   to be
     to be
       to exist more freely, abundantly with more safety more rage and more love. With less competition 

   envy 

      negative energies of hurt 

         lies 

           and self-loathing. There is a need for some true community village family sisterring thinking knowing and doing. There is a need for the hate

and hate
   and hate that lives within us individually and as a collective persons to be understand holistically and rid from our bodies minds spirits families and communities. We've allowed them to break and tear us down for too long and the destruction and death and disappearance and suicide and killing has to come to an end before were all extinct and parish and fade into white...seeing as how we know, live and exist in the dark too well and for far too long. There needs to be more of a fight for visibility and fight for a loving and collective visible we. I want
  I want
    I want a lot and very little at the same time and am willing to put in the work. Am simply in need for the energizing of my loves my sisters to occur alongside my walk with a collective of tired minds bodies and spirits with me! My rant and continuous plea as I rest the days thoughts for some nighttime rest!

In Peace and With Much Love,

Ladi

Redefining the Politics of the Body

So I am in a steady battle of coming in and out of the type of language and labeling I place onto my body and onto my struggle with this constant changing of my politics and sense of who I am within my struggle as a queer Black woman in this society.

Changing from the idea that I am "trapped" within a body that society, media, and this western/euro-centric worldview deems as other, hyper-sexual, inadequate, and without voice and womanhood to a language that separates the blame from that which I live and breathe in, to the actual root. Changing the notion that my body is the root to my oppression as it operates alone within society, detached from my being, allowing the placing of labels, meanings, and definitions to be carried with me without my sanction. Transforming those notions to a language that clearly identifies the actual source to which my struggle lies instead of using language that directs to my external being, my flesh as the outer layering of who I am.

I'm moving away from this siding of accepting this feeling and hurt that correlated with this sense of "trapped-ness" to a body that's constantly targeted with harmful images, messages, and misrepresentations of my Black womanhood, my queer identity, my "poor" socio-economic status, my African cultural aesthetics and retentions, etc.
However, I recognize that I am forced to move through society with these additional concepts of my being that are in opposition to the self-concept and perspective I hold for my own body and person-hood. I just wonder where and how the line be drawn to separate the two. Are the methods of resistance just not enough, as I am young woman who is in search of a higher level of consciousness of the matters that are going on around me, my community, and globally, yet in still, I struggle with finding a concrete grounding to loving myself within this body. What are the resistive methods that need to take place here? What are the solutions to building a barrier that will allow younger Black and Brown girls to be confronted with all that this society throws at them without the internalization of such? What does such intervention look like, and how do come to a place to hold our communities, families, educational systems, and ourselves accountable for doing this work?

As I've just begun putting together an interactive forum for middle school Black and Brown girls to receive the message of moving these questions to their conscious forefront, I hope to make the necessary connections of what can be done and in what ways we can make our efforts effective. Hopefully the writing and dialogue around this discussion will shed more light on ways to maintain our sirvival actions.

In Peace,

Ladi

To Palestine:

I'm sorry. As a Jewish American I have no words, only numbness-no sensation because I'm afraid that if I feel it will hurt too bad. To know truth is to be in constant agony, constant ache. And I know I have the privilege to keep that away. So I'm not sorry because I know that in many ways I myself am responsible for this terror. How can I apologize when I am a participant?

I don't know how it is possible for the Israeli government to hate so much that innocence is forgotten. These are people; mothers, fathers, daughters, brothers, sisters-and our cousins. These are people, humanity. They have eyes and ears, hearts, lungs, blood that pumps. These are people, they feel, laugh, cry, hurt, love just like we do. Wherever there is oppression we forget that there are people there.

I have no words, only breath right now. I am breathing for those bodies at rest right now. I don't know what to do to change ignorance & hate because it seems so deeply embedded in the psyches of those who have power. Can we replace power with people? With hands? Smiles? Life instead of death? Babies instead of corpses? There is no justification to murder. There is no excuse, no explanation.

I was born Jewish, born Palestinian.

And what about the rest of my Jewish-Americans? Irena Klepfisz says Jews have made the mistake of thinking that to “transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it’s kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression-not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression.”

Where are our voices? Our anger? Are we going to be passive? What if it was us? Is not one of the 10 commandments to love thy neighbor? Sometimes I wonder where God is at in this mess. I'm disgusted that people believe that this war is justified, that violence is acceptable and that retaliation is the answer.

And really we do not know how bad it is over there because we are here and you can't understand until you live it, feel it, breathe it, eat it, sleep it, shit it, cry it.

We can never understand the power, the torture of hate until we are the hated.

In peace,
Leora

A Political Love Poem from an Angry White Girl

Here is my spoken word piece, posted by popular demand, parts 1&2. WARNING: There IS profanity. Thanks for checking out the blog! Namaste, Leora

A Political Love Poem from an Angry White Girl

I.
What is the poem that is burning up my chest?
Baby, only this poem knows how much I be loving you
How come only African American Vernacular English
can capture my depthitude of my feelings for you?
It means I loved you in the past
I love you now and
I’ll love you in days that we yet can’t foretell.

And on this first chilly night in November
As I rode my bike past the projects and
I saw the light shining on the different colored leaves on the trees
I felt the magic that the changing seasons have
Like it was the first time
In my life
I was watching the seasons change
In that moment
I understood that change is real
That change [be] just like love [be]
Except, maybe/ evenmorecomplicated

Even though October didn’t answer my questions
It changed the questions themselves
And even though last month I grew further away from you
As you so cautiously positioned
Thin/
Metal
Bars
around your heart
So
Delicately protecting what is left of that
Brokenness
That even when I tried to salvage just one piece
From the rubble
That one piece
Could barely slip through the slit of your prison wall
In my worn hands I grasp it so delicately
So, cautiously
Not to crush your
Fragileness
With my fingers
The same fingers that are holding this pen,
Give me this voice that I claimed four years ago
(maybe before that, but I can’t remember details)
Because there is too much shit in this world baby
And maybe it’s really me,
That is my heart breaking
And you are my escape from reality,
My favorite distraction
Because it is easier to look at you,
Love you,
Then it is to love me
And maybe I’m the baby.
The one who can’t look in the damn mirror
Too afraid that it will break
The one that sees fatness where there’s flesh,
The one that you would never choose because of what
I stick in my mouth.

Hatred makes the belly wider
And any love I had for myself was no love at all
Cause I lost it now that you’re gone.

I hate hating me.
I’m so tired of defending my body/
in order to protect my emotions/my psyche/my mentality
ME

Every comment you make on my appearance it’s like you’re
Choking me suffocating me
Your fingers are so
Purposely pressing into
That
Area of my throat where
I place my very own fingers sometimes to see how
Asphyxiation would feel.

It’s as if you’re silencing me from being me.
166.9 or 150 fuck you.
And if you peeled off all my layers
all my pounds that so intricately guard what remains
then you would find a woman, not a girl
so vulnerable simply trying to live
as an odd soul in a fucked up world.

And as a girl with an eating disorder I can’t lie-
I judge your pounds too.
Thick or thin
It doesn’t matter.
I do to you what others do to me ALWAYS.
Because it’s my own insecurities,
My own way of self-mutilating to view you
How I see me.

How do you see me? Beneath all this?
I know you didn’t choose it, cause you didn’t want it.

I understand, I really do.
If I’m as repulsive to me as I am to you then
Who would want
This?
Do you find this true too?

I hope one day I can read this and say who the fuck was that girl?

Can you not see the rawness of my skin?
Hear my tears in the night?
Watch the breaking glass shatter to the floor when I look in the mirror?

If I’m not beautiful enough for you then baby,
Just say so.
I know you must have noticed the extra weight.
Is that what’s holding you down?
Or is it your toomuchmisunderstood
dilemma
that makes you unable to connect
to the rest of the world?
Your selfishness?
Your isolation?
Your privileged white ass that doesn’t allow you to understand
Shit about reality?

II.
Maybe only this poem knows the truth-
Even your truth
The multitude of truths
Truth of
The lies we’ve been told
For years
That defends white social positioning
In the caste system
Which we have here
In the
United States of America
The same
United States of America
That
Only forty years
Ago granted
Black People
The right to
VOTE
To be citizens in a country
That was
Built on the backs
Of
Black People

Black People/who were
Brought Here
As
SLAVES
From Africa
Treated less than human

Women , young girls, as young as 11
Sometimes even younger
RAPED
By white men
Seen as nothing more then
Erotic Sexual Bodies
Animal Like
Bodies
For
White dicks
To assert their power
Over a race


And black men, boys
Killed like Emmett Till, 14
Beaten, eye gouged out, shot in the head
Thrown into the river
With a 75 pound cotton gin fan
Tied to his neck with
Barbed wire.
These black men
Lynched/beaten/burned

Has your white skin blinded you?
And I don’t care if your family
Got off the boat
Years after
Slavery “ended”
Don’t you see the privileges you’re granted
That you don’t deserve?
The greatest privilege of all is
that your skin color is not a matter
of life/death or
fear and suffrage, which comes in between
when you are considered less than.
Where every color that is not white
Is considered
Other.

This poem is a plea to white people
To pick up a damn book by DuBois or
Collins, Wright, Baldwin, hooks, Mumia Abu Jamal or
Angela Davis
Almost any black writer, really
And stop being so fucking defensive
About your white skin.

I want you to know what it feels like dammit
to be scared because of the
color of your skin.
I want you to feel scared
I want you to feel SCARED
I want you to feel all the fucking injustices
I want you to feel the same fear the Jews felt during the Holocaust
The same fear the Palestinians feel now at the hands of Israel.

I want you to feel the fear whiteness provokes when whiteness feels threatened.
It is fear filled with hate.
And I feel so much rage, coraje
I want to curse all white people out
(even myself none of us are innocent as whites when it comes to racism)
When they claim not to be racist
Cause if you really knew anything about
Racism you’d know
That statement makes you sound like a dumb fucker.

Sometimes I actually feel bad for the white wo/man
Because them and even you
So called liberals will never know truth,
When your social positioning is built on lies
Built on other
peoples suffering.

You disgust me. Even you baby, even you.

Hell yea I’m angry.
I want you to feel my anger
I want you to feel my pain.
I want you to feel furious.
I want you to know how three children were shot
Right by where I live.
I want you to know
White people,
(don’t worry about killing Black People they’re already killing each other)
Because of their rage at the white institutions that
Keep them imprisoned, literally and figuratively.
Keep them oppressed.
They take out all this frustration and pain on each other
Because no one gives a damn
When a black wo/man is killed.
If you don’t believe me, then pick up a book
And read Fanon.
It’s not my job to educate you and your
Ignorance. Which is a choice, not a mandate.

How come we’re always hearing about little white children
Getting abducted?
When the federal government has the Rail to Jail, putting all the
Black Children into Juvi?

Dear Lover,
It’s November now. You still don’t have a bloody consciousness. I’m out. If you change your thought process meet me at the revolution. I’ll be the one with the sign that says, “Our Words Are Our Weapons”. I’ll most likely be wearing a ski mask, like Marcos. If too many years pass I might have a baby on my breast nursing milk, life, we be struggling for freedom, together with the rest. Although I have hope, clearly I don’t have much left. The fight is forever. Join me or witness my death. Complicity is a participant when it comes down to it. Do you get it yet?

Yours in Struggle,
Leora

Welcome

Hello!
Speaking Our Truths originated at Simmons College in Boston, MA as a space for women to engage in dialogue outside of the classroom.

We want to develop a community and sisterhood that embraces the concept of identity politics, the personal as political and the political as personal that came out of third-wave multiracial feminism. As women of all colors, sexualities, socioeconomic backgrounds and spiritualities we come together to build bridges in a society that structurally keeps us divided.

This blog is a collaboration in solidarity of each others struggle. We are witnesses to each others silence.

If you want to be heard we would love to listen. Please contact us to be a contributor. Essays, articles, poems, spoken word and other forms of expression are encouraged.

Welcome!

Yours in struggle,
Women of Consciousness
speakingourtruths@gmail.com