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

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

confrontation with a “well-meaning” white person. Any intervention was going to end poorly. I realize now that white fragility means that it is not just that white people’s feelings must constantly be considered (when our feelings never are). In order to avoid a white person’s meltdown and cries of victimization, the only solution is to accommodate their entitlement to always be centered.

White fragility means tiptoeing around white people, a self-policing.

When white people get called racist because they are being racist, they figure out a way to shift the blame. This is peak white fragility, to be so fragile that they forget the actual harm they caused and focus on their own hurt feelings.

It is emotionally taxing to keep my own feelings controlled while white people react and do not think before they speak.

decided to not put in labor for these white people, because there was no way in hell I was going to be the “bigger person” for privileged, highly educated white people who should know better.

This defensiveness is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional. —Robin DiAngelo

White women are allowed to question other peoples’ humanity and are still allowed to be read as well-meaning. White women’s tears stop conversations on race,

class, and gender in their tracks because white women’s feelings are considered sacred. White women become untouchable in a white supremacist society. They

am not comfortable in rooms that are predominantly white, because white people have shown me that my presence is only enjoyable so long as I do not object to how they choose

to interact with me.

Criminalizing Blackness means that Brown people are given the terrible option of either aligning ourselves with white people or suffering similar results.

So find your people, push against individualism, and push toward community.

Mi mami is not terca, nor is she ignorant, nor is she someone I need to teach all of my academic knowledge to forcefully, or even at all. Mi mami is a fountain of knowledge and wisdom that I was taught to not respect.

have a mami who gets “feelings” about things and warns us, randomly, much to my embarrassment growing up as an immigrant trying to assimilate. I have a mami who has kept a part of her spirituality alive, a nonmainstream type of spirituality that is messy and unpredictable, which goes against everything within Eurocentric

Christianity.

Rejecting individualism is part of that narrative. Embracing re-existence is how I can thrive despite what is force-fed to me and to our society at large. Re-existence gives me wider perspectives of our joined humanities.

Decoloniality is about taking back the power that was stolen from us. The

Obama deported more undocumented Latin American and Caribbean people than any other president in the history of this country.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. —Audre Lorde

Decoloniality is about divesting from colonial concepts, structures, and institutions as much as possible, even while knowing that colonialization is here to stay. Decoloniality is a form of resisting, and decoloniality is lived and experienced daily. Decoloniality requires that we fight, and I have a reservoir of fight left in me. But it also requires us

to rest and be gentle with ourselves.

The entire system relies on our complicity, and when we step out of line, we are destined to become targets. So find what your community needs, what your community values, and you will be surprised with how much you will learn.

Freedom is not a destination, it’s a communal journey.

May it heal you, may it challenge you, may it make you laugh, but most importantly, may it lead you back to you.

desahogue to remind myself that my vulnerability and my community, not colonial institutions, will heal me.

Machismo is about the power and violence within a patriarchal society and as a result of that society.

Rural and poor people have always found ways to keep one another alive when vital medical supplies and doctors were not around or

did not exist, and this is just one of those strategies.