Category: Uncategorized
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The Math Doesn’t Work
I wasn’t the aestheticI guess, I get it.So much pressure to appear just like themPretty and cosmeticElementary, alphabeticSo much pressure to appear just like them. There’s a particular kind of softness people reach for when they look at me. A lowered voice. A tilt of the head. The face you make at something you’ve already… read more
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Title: What the Body Needs
The body politic refers to the people of a nation considered as a political unit — the collective body whose health, representation, and survival a government is theoretically organized to protect. Violence, in its most honest definition, is not limited to what leaves a visible mark. It is any act — or deliberate absence of… read more
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Selling the Shadow
“I sell the shadow to support the substance.” — Sojourner Truth, printed on her carte de visite photographs, circa 1864 Sit with what that means for a moment. A woman born into slavery in New York in 1797. A woman who was property before she was a person, whose body had been owned and labored… read more
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Title: You Can’t Swipe Left on Liberation
“somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” — Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf Shange wasn’t talking about possessions. She was talking about the self. The particular, irreplaceable accumulation of a woman — her rhythm, her voice, her way of moving through the world —… read more
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Title: The Flesh Remembers
My granny used to say it the way she said everything — plainly, without ceremony, like the truth didn’t require decoration. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. She meant it as a word about accountability. About the weight of living in a fallen world with the best of your intentions and still… read more
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Title: Visibility Is Not Safety
Content note: This essay contains a first-person account of sexual assault. Please read with care. Some days I walk into a room and the room rearranges. Not loudly. Nothing so dramatic as a scene. Just the air — shifting, recalculating, deciding what I am before I open my mouth. I have been walking into rooms… read more
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The Body As Evidence
What do you do when the world expects you to be strong? So I have to ask myself what do I do with all this anger? What club do I have to join to feel I’m equal? My protest like my country isn’t a melting pot. My protest is a riot… Where were you when… read more
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I Am
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will… read more
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Daring Greatly
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who… read more
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