Person looking serious in a three-piece suit on a city street

How comfortable do you feel in a three-piece suit? “Professionalism” is a social construct, and like all social constructs, it’s a total downer. Standards of looking professional uphold a lot of ugly “isms,” as policies with a racist, sexist, classist, and xenophobic core. Here’s the truth about why the work we do should speak more loudly than how we look.

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There exists a prevailing sense that feminism is a (straight, cis, middle class) white woman’s game. As such, another fairly common notion is that black folk don’t do feminism. Check out the perspective from dozens of black feminists about the truth (or lack thereof) behind this notion, its implications, and its effect on the movement within black communities.

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(Trigger warning: rape.) Like most college freshmen, I drank too much. And one night, I drank too much and was pitched out of a frat house in the dead of winter. I woke up in my lofted bed. My clothing was on the floor, and I felt an invisible miasma of shame engulfing me. And my coping mechanism was to make my rapist my partner, giving purpose and intent to something horrible.

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Growing up, it didn’t take much for me to realize that power lay in the masculine. There was power in being one of the boys. And I wanted in. It’s no wonder why some women trade in their womanhood for a piece of the golden ticket to ride along the manhood train of success. And in doing so, these women cut themselves off from the rest of womankind. They become the exception – the loophole women.

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Our social movements have failed to reach a transformational level of change. In part, this is due to how we don’t address our own privilege or prioritize supporting and lifting up marginalized voices to the social change table. And until we do, our work will not achieve lasting structural changes – where those being impacted are leading the fight for their own communities, supported by allies.

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Originally published on Medium and republished here with permission. More than two months after the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be to unpack my thoughts on the ripple effect of the march. And, although there is a litany of elucidating articles and posts on social media written on…

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