a book about feminism

You and I
It’s not about me. It’s more than that. It is about you, me, and the world we live in. You and I are not so different from one another, you want the same things I want, you stand on the same land that I stand on and you breathe the same air that I breathe. We are deeply connected to each other, you and I. More connected than you think, while we live on the same land and breathe the same air; we also live for a system that is broken. A system built by us, a system that is dependent on its foundations of thick injustice and its legacy of internalized injustice that lives on inside its subjects. We are connected, you and I. We are products of an environment that we shaped ourselves. An environment that thrives on our control and our need to pave paths of least resistance. An environment that lives and breathes for us while we cut off its circulation We are connected you and I, we want power. Power that will make others see you, hear you, believe you and innately fear you. Power that will make others see me, hear me, believe me, and innately respect me. We are not so different you and I. We want to tell our names, we want to tell our histories, we want to tell our stories. So you see, there is a story here. A story of you, me and the world we live in. A story of how connected we are. A story of once upon a time we mattered. And hopefully a story of what will be.

We need to start with why. Why is feminism important? bell hooks said it best, “feminism is anti-sexism”. It is not a movement or ideology that is based on putting others last. That would just encourage the existing brokenness of our systems today. Feminism is the story of what can be, it is the movement to stop the injustices that all genders internalize. Those injustices stem from the belief that male-attributes come

first, and the actions that enable those beliefs come from everyone, not just men. Because we embody it, too. The injustices that set us back, we internalize it. The broken system is not just inside of you, it is inside of me, too. A system that has the ability to transform and evolve through generations to consistently marginalize people. That system is run by you and I, it is run on innate biases, on belief and on thick injustices.

Our beliefs that stem from innate biases prevent us to differentiate what we believe is just and what is actually unjust. And biases run very deep, think about the tools we use to get substantial data that we consider reliable. Those datasets were written by humans, just like you and me. So when you hear of the “broken” system ask yourself, where is my information coming from and what it is trying to do. Because just like you and I, we have our biases and our errors, and data is not objective to biases because after all it was built by you and I.