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

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

Because of my experiences with men and my very dogmatic church context, I thought of most authority figures as unsafe.

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.

So when a BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ person tells a white person their chosen name, the white person must comply. What we are asking for is very basic.

Because the hypersexualized Latina trope is real, people assumed my sexual prowess was part of my culture.

I was often told that I dressed too provocatively, and therefore any negative attention I received was merited. This one was hard, because I heard it mostly from other women.

The whole thing became a show. The Vanderbilt lawyers asked me what I had been wearing and how much I had drunk before the incident, and I was immediately reminded about the shame I had been taught.

That is why survivors do not come forward: society will blame us for what happens to us before going after a man with seemingly uncontrollable urges.

The staffer was older and had more power, but to them, I must have asked for it.

I reclaimed the words that were meant to stop me and keep me in line and well-behaved.

I learned that allies are rarer than I ever thought imaginable.

learned to live for myself, rather than for others.

But most importantly, I finally understood in my core that a husband was never the prize—I am.

If society teaches men that they are naturally superior, and our systems reinforce that belief, then it is up to men to disown a system that benefits them.

When I talk about white fragility, I am talking about those moments when you encounter a white person who is incapable of having any perspective about their whiteness. They decide not to see how whiteness has harmed and killed so many of us.

I have this survival instinct to make myself small when I feel unsafe.

I also knew myself, and I knew that if pushed far enough, I would react, and I knew they wouldn’t handle it well. White fragility means tiptoeing around white people, a self-policing. So my silence was really to protect them, because consequences to racism is something unheard of for white people who think they are not racist.

I wouldn’t be a joke just because racism was funny to them.

The thing about tolerating racism is that when I am done tolerating racism, any small infraction will carry all the other instances when I resented my own silence and complicity.

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. No attention is paid to address my pain or heal the relationship.

White fragility means that someway and somehow you, the BIPOC, are the aggressor and the insensitive one.

Because, to them, their humanity trumps mine, always.

Somehow, white fragility requires that BIPOC comfort their oppressors.

Furthermore, being a person who is not white means that I am tasked with doing the work of making white people see my humanity, and that work is emotionally taxing.

We are left to pick the pieces of our humanity up off the floor, all while smiling and graciously bowing out, being the “bigger person.” When in reality, I want to scream and cry and fight because that is what their words incite.

white people view themselves as morally superior to BIPOC,

In a society that coddles white fragility, the result is Amy Cooper.

white people will be racist to maintain the racial status quo and then deny their racism in the same breath to maintain their moral superiority.

White women become untouchable in a white supremacist society.

I have learned that liberal white people will be white people before they are liberal—leaning into their whiteness as is convenient, and leaning into their liberal ideals with that same strategy.

White people demand docility from us, and when that demand is not met, we are treated like social pariahs at best or, at worst—well, just look at the prison population or the latest trending hashtag.

But even so, Brown girl, whatever choices you’ve been backed into, I know you are trying to survive as someone Brown in a racist country.

I hope that you feel free to wash your hands of their fragility and racism, but it is not about you—it is bigger than you—so do not let these moments take the wind from your wings.

Do not succumb to their guilt if you need to shut someone down or cut someone out of your life for your own mental health.

Do not shrink yourself for their comfort.

Not everyone gets to go to college. Some of us have to play this game of life with no cards, and surviving is the goal, not winning. The game was rigged to begin with.

So, the minute that my education teaches me to look down on her, I have failed her and myself. Not only that, but my education has failed to teach me how to treat people with compassion.

I am the product of my parents’ migration and their sweat and tears, and although mi mami does not understand me, she believes in me, because she believes in herself enough to fight. And her fight is what I carry.

When I say I am mi mami’s revolution, I mean I am who she could not become.

We cannot undo centuries of colonialization, but we can resist its control over us.

My successes are nothing if they are mine alone.

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.

I do not want to prepare people for the harshness of this world; I want to change it.

Brown girl, this world does not want to see you survive it, so defy it and dare to thrive. And desahógate to stay tender and soft.

Yo me desahogue because that is how I resist a history of silence and complicity. Me desahogue para incomodarme.

Decoloniality helped me understand why I never felt safe in any space, and it helped me find peace in creating new spaces, for me and for us.

As Black and Brown women, we do a lot of emotional labor for our families, friends, partners, communities. And learning to step back and actively take care of yourself, in a society that does not value your life, is the decolonial practice I want you to walk away with.

Desahógate to find them, because they are somewhere desahogandose solitxs, and we need to be doing that together to actually make it. Because, Brown girl, we need each other.

This book unpacks the many ways that trauma manifests. It also explores neuroscience behind what happens to your brain during traumatic experiences and posits that trauma needs to be addressed directly to heal.

Your body and your brain are made to keep you alive, and if you do not address the triggers your body has recognized through trauma, then you are destined to keep repeating patterns through trauma-fueled responses.

Unless we are willing to learn the languages of our Indigenous ancestors and relearn their traditions, we have to acknowledge that there are privileges in being mestizo within our particular borders.