For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

utilize the word Latinx, instead of Hispanic or the gendered male Latino, to talk about my communities. Hispanic does not include people without Spanish ancestry, and it does not include non-Spanish speakers.

Mujerista is a non-Black Latina feminist liberation theology, and part of this theory prioritizes the poor and disenfranchised above anyone else.

The current state of so-called underdeveloped countries is the result of greed and exploitation from developed countries.

Outsiders cannot compare these realities and remain unmoved, but what we need is more than white guilt. We need white people to riot against national trade policies implemented by their career politicians and put a stop to corporate exploitation so that we do not have to live like this.

Voluntourism is a relatively new word that has unknown origins, but it combines both “volunteer” and “tourism” to define a particular kind of unskilled volunteer that seeks to visit the Global South under a guise of benevolence. Yet at the end of the day, in regard to the labor provided by voluntourists, we now know that their impact is minimal.

The assumption that some people do not have the wherewithal to save themselves implies their assumed inferiority.

The idea that you must elevate someone’s existence means that you do not view them as capable of knowing what is best for themselves. This is a dehumanizing act veiled as a benevolent one,

We did not create anti-Indigenous sentiment; we were taught it, we were forced to accept it, and then we internalized and perpetuated it on our own. That is the insidious nature of colonization. Many people have survived by assimilating toward the dominant group’s values, and this internalized racism continues to traumatize entire nations.

Demanding open borders is how we begin to repair those relationships with people whose countries have become almost unlivable. Demanding and ensuring health care for everyone in this country, including mental health care, is how we can begin to cut away the trauma.

White supremacy promotes the idea of individualism, because that keeps us busy and unfocused on what the real problems are. Through individualism we do not analyze the systemic problems, the institutions that keep so many of us down. Because of individualism, I was unable to see that this was not about me, but about us all. Our wins are ours, and our losses are ours, and they belong to our communities who encourage us. When we don’t seek white approval in PWIs, we can look to our Black and Brown peers and our chosen family, who show us how to resist and how to be seen by one another.

Racism comes from a place of willful ignorance. I am not one who is willing to tirelessly educate white people on how to approach me.

her insightful prodding. I had a life that felt like my own at school. I felt free, or

fickleness toward favoring the most indoctrinated,

Systemic oppression and internalized racism keep many of us down.

Racism and classism are why it is easy to accept some children and easy to overlook others. Gatekeeping taught these adults which traits were indicative of success, and they perpetuated them onto us.

Hard work and luck were not going to cut it anymore. What I needed were two college-degreed, upper-middle-class parents who had the advantages of immersing me in a lifetime of leisure visits to museums and art exhibits, home libraries full of advanced books from the Western canon, dinner conversations full of critical and intellectual discussions, and access to parents’ friends to give me mentorships and internships and recommendations and advice.

Some days, you will forget that oppressed communities have been using laughter to deal with our oppression for centuries. Instead, you will be kicked out of restaurants and told you are being too much.

The delicate dance required to make my white peers feel safe sucked the life out of me. And even when I was trying to not “be the issue” or “cause drama,” I still got the same responses: “You’re taking things too seriously.” “It’s not always about race.” “Not all white people…” “Not my experience…” “I have a Latina friend.” “Are you sure that is what happened?” This is white peoples’ coded language for: “You’re being too aggressive,” or “You’re being too Brown,” or “You’re making me uncomfortable about my racism.” Instead of addressing their own issues, they will vilify you.

White people will go out of their way to claim themselves as victims, as if the entire system is not built for their benefit.

Respectability politics has robbed so many of us of the joy of being ourselves, and so many of us have decided to accept the version of ourselves that white people prefer. When I accepted their preferred version of me, I felt like I was in a constant state of bodily displacement. It was always a show, a performance for them. I felt like a clown.

Respectability politics is a circular trap.

I am socialized to rationalize the behavior of my abusers in order to survive a patriarchal culture. I

have been socialized to do the emotional work to understand and heal relationships with men who

believe themselves to be superior. This same culture socializes men to do little to no emot...

Women’s main activities are reduced to two: suffering the male presence and mourning male absence. —Elizabeth E. Brusco

White people are used to having their experiences constantly centered as the norm; so much so that they cannot read any other experience as a legitimate human experience. By utilizing an intersectional framework, I am decentralizing this normative culture. This story is for people whose intersections mean that they are women with darker genetic traits and a predisposition for hairiness.

A failure of mainstream feminism is that it is white and elite. The concept of intersectionality arose, in part, as a critique of gender-only feminism. A feminism that sees the white cis female experience as the universal female experience simply cannot address the issues faced by most women on the planet—because most women on the planet are Black and Brown.

And mainstream feminism lacks awareness that, while women can share some experiences (such as the pressure to shave), how we experience them is based on our intersections of race, ability, class, and sexuality, which can make that similar pressure feel very different.

betrayal to femininity. White women have

A woman of color’s self-love is political and radical, and it is unsettling for the status quo because she is choosing bravely to dismantle the narratives of racist aesthetics against her.

It means various realities can simultaneously inform who we are, why we think the way we think, why we care about what we care about, and why we cannot be expected to join movements that do not consider all those realities.

People in my community are going to love the color of your eyes, your baby-blue eyes. It might even inflate your ego; it probably already has. Please remember what it has cost people to value light features and lightness in general; there are skin-lightening industries and even a whole industry of colored contacts that thrives off the self-hatred of BIPOC.

white people will still claim colorblindness to avoid admitting their own privileges.

If you cannot articulate all the ways society has erased you, you begin to think your voice is being ignored because you did something wrong. BIPOC often find ourselves invalidating our own experiences and memories.

How I was read in my mostly Latinx community was not how I was read in white spaces.

You cannot force someone to see your humanity after they have already decided you are inferior.

I am a cis person and grew up with a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world that made my ethnic and racial differences feel less threatening to white people at times. My Christianity made me palatable to white people in ways that, if I was not Christian, I would not have been.

Understanding just how completely we live in a segregated society meant that I finally had the information I needed to take some weight off myself for constantly feeling misunderstood.

I realize that there are ways that my intersections function to oppress me, and that simultaneously these intersections function to privilege me—depending on whatever circle I am

As a non-Black women of color, it is up to me to reject anti-Blackness even when I can stand to benefit from it.

Existing “successfully” as women means adhering to patriarchal structures. We risk losing a lot in our rebellion.

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

—bell hooks

Being a woman is already dangerous, but it is even more so when women give up their own agency.

We cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective denial about its impact on our lives. —bell hooks

I began to learn that concepts of purity and protection were actually methods of social control—and methods of justifying male violence toward women.

LOCA, because that word had been weaponized against me many times. I had

Claiming your body back is a radical act, especially for BIWOC, whose bodies are often crucial sites of oppression.

Whites as a group seem unable to grasp the significance of race. They ultimately misunderstand the world they have created, shocked by the lines on the palm of their own hands. —Cheryl E. Matias

White fragility functions to shift the blame of racism from white people to BIPOC.