Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison were born on the same birthdate, February 18: Morrison in 1931 and Lorde in 1934. Thanks to the good folks at Many Voices, I’ve been listening to Audre Lorde speaking to students at UCLA. The date of the lecture is unclear, but the video uploader places the session in the early […]
Self-care among activists
I’m in Philadelphia this week with a few thousand organizers for the 29th annual Creating Change conference. The first time I attended, in Denver, CO, I co-presented on the intersections of climate change, faith, and sexual orientation and gender identity with Peterson Toscano, J Mase III, and Rev. Nancy Wilson. This time around, the conference […]
Imprinted with fear
Fear learned early can affect us life-long. In a working paper on the topic, Harvard child psychologists explain that intense, chronic fear and anxiety hampers children’s ability to learn, and undermines their ability to correctly perceive threats. Without intervention, children raised in chronically fearful environments learn to interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way, build stress as they […]
It is Better to Speak—Lorde
and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive ― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems