Sarah Moola is the only Muslim girl in the UK who competes in roller derby. Despite its reputation as an aggressive contact sport with women wearing raunchy costumes, Sarah adores roller derby and insists it does not clash with her religious beliefs.
“What’s that? I am oppressed brown women? I can’t hear you, I am to busy gracefully slaughtering my opponents in squash ” says Nicol David this year’s World number 1 in women’s squash who also has the record 6 titles in the World Open.
Once in a blue moon I will make the mistake of looking at my inbox in the wrong way, with the filters off or something, and seeing the awful hateful things my mother has written to me.
Even worse, the kind, desperate things she’s written to me.
Today there it was - in my to-be-deleted section - my mother begging me to contact her.
—-
I want to talk abuse within families of colour towards their daughters. I don’t like it when white folks look at my family and think “those defective brown people.” I don’t like it when white people know how my family treated me. But I have no other option when speaking to my peers and fellow woc. If you’re listening white folks, if you’re reading - this is not about you. This is not here for you to gawk at. This is about us for us.
That being said, too often have I seen the unfortunate effects of racism and sexism take a toll on dark daughters. On foreign daughters. On poor daughters of poor women. The way so many young woc talk about their moms (and dads! and older sisters/brothers!) on tumblr sounds identical to an abuse romantic relationship. Moms telling us we’re fat. Not respecting us. Beating us. Witholding love and affection and support from us.
So many mothers like mine like to remind us, Honor Thy Mother, Honor Thy Father. When the fuck are we gonna Honor Thy Daughters?
My parents, my mother and sister and father, are not sorry. They arenot sorry. They are not looking for forgiveness. They told me day n and out that they would kill me, that I wasn’t worth shit. They beat me any object that they could reach. They fat-shamed me. They told me I was being watched on cameras. But what they expected was even worse. They expected me to love them, to look good, to marry young. When I had no inkling of myself, no identity of my own, when they called me their dog, their loyal stupid pet.
So often I have seen our families denying us private space, access to our own bodies, a future.
I remember when one of the women my mother nannied for started paying for me to take figure-skating lessons. I remember my mother begrudgingly letting me continue, paying for more. I remember pushing relentlessly to prove I was twice as good as the white girls who had been skating seven years ahead of me. I remember begging them to please let me have this. I remember making it to the local finals and winning my first medal. I remember how angry they were, that I was starting to leave the house, starting to believe in myself. How my mother cut the classes unceremoniously as soon as she heard I got into college. How angry she was. How I gained all the weight I had worked so hard to lose back.
I urge woc to unite and demand more from our families. We are fighting different battles than white people and white daughters. I know they can be similar but don’t get it twisted.
For me, that meant cutting off all contact with my immediate and extended family. Everyone. It took years until I was financially independent enough to do that. But even before I was, the dependence was coming at such a high toll to my self-esteem and emotional life that it was not worth it for me.
I used to think that this was what love was. That love was a hand around your throat. That love was shame. That this wasn’t just love, this was my culture. When it occurred to me, even in passing, that not all daughters were treated like this, that not all girls of colour were treated like this. I made myself a promise. That they would never ever see me again when I got on my own two feet. That there would be no apology well-thought-out enough, no regrets sincere enough, to undo the beatings I was getting and were then yet to come.
I wish I could make this clearer - white families abuse their daughters too - but we are on our own, as far as women of colour - when our mothers hit us. When our fathers hit us. Because often we have no where else to go. I hear so many of you struggling with abusive narcissistic mothers and fathers.
Please remember, you are precious and you are in an abusive relationship. Whether you can correct it now or never, it is important to just have that awareness. Women of colour are touted as strong, brave, and the subtext of that is we should have a higher pain threshold and take the beatings of life with some kind of grace or patience.
I say no, scream. Run, if you can, but, always shout. Let them know you’ve been hurt.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about white privilege by proxy. Because I often felt as a child and especially now as an adult that by surrounding myself with rich white people I have gained access to a lot of relief, food, education, clothes, you name it - just because I was near them.
My mother worked as a nanny for white people. She used to take me to work with her in the summer, so I would play with the white children. I learned English this way at a young age, from my best friend Dylan, to the last little girls I knew, the other Olivia, Matthew, you name it, what the white children had was what the white children passed on.
If rich child didn’t like their toy, it was mine. If rich child grew out of clothes, it probably wouldn’t fit me, but my mom knew *someone* with a baby would appreciate it. If rich family couldn’t finish all their food, we ate it. Always rich people leftovers, which to be honest were always better than our first-overs.
And what I learned quick was that my abusive mother would not hit me in front of white children, and that white children got “time-outs,” and that white children did not HAVE to finish their dinner if they wanted dessert. I learned that white children had activities, commitments, expectations. White children were told “when you grow up.”
My mother, never in her life, referred to “when I grow up.” I didn’t know what college was. I didn’t know that I would really have options. I didn’t know about the future. My parents never asked me about my hopes or predicted a life for me, because as far as they knew the future didn’t include me. One day, we too would be cast away, like so many meals, toys, and leftovers. “Mommy, I don’t like them any more,” the white child might say, and who knows where we’d end up then.
Latina and Black women have a long history of taking care of white people children. I wonder what it says to their Black and Latino children, that they see their mothers working so hard taking care of other white babies instead. The way my mother would look at the little blue-eyed babies made me hate them. I remember wishing more than once I could push a white baby over, pinch it and make it cry, make it go away forever. Horrible white baby, taking my mother away from me. Horrible white baby, my mama hitting me and kissing you. Horrible white baby, driving you to baby-ballet classes while my ass gets fatter and fatter. Horrible white baby, going to good schools while my mom refuses to even read to me. Horrible white baby, my mom whispering to you how clever you are, while telling me I’m no good and her life was ruined when she had me.
White baby’s so happy to see my mom, “Nana Ana”. They always say, “My Ana, My Nana Ana.” Like the bought her off the shelf and now she’s there’s.
I went to a good white college, and white children continued to cast away their goods in my favour. At the end of the semester, white children leave the dorm fridges full, furniture strewn across the laundry room. Go have your pickings, the white children have left this for you.
I married a white man, and he’s a good man, he loves me and he takes care of me. But the condition I was living in before him and now is startling. I hold a BA from a prestigious white college that cost $65K/year. He’s a college dropout. Yet. He’s employable, gifted, a software developer, he feeds me, we have all the middle-class privileges that I only dreamed of as a child - we live in a high-rise downtown - we eat organic. We have a pet cat who gets to regularly see the vet. We can afford health insurance. We can eat out regularly. We can slowly start paying off my student loans. We can theoretically afford to send me to graduate school. Most importantly, I can live in a protected building where white supremacist stalkers from my college cannot visit or find me.
What if you can’t afford to be next to white people, rub elbows and scrounge their crumbs? What then? Where would I be then? Back in El Salvador comiendo mierda and catching cholera from the water. That’s what my mom would say. I don’t know. Part of me likes to imagine, I’d be fine. We were fine before white people. But that’s not true - white people are in El Salvador, they destroyed it, and they have their hands in every community of colour in the world.
I used to ask my dad, how come you moved here if you hate America and white people so much?
He said: Better to Be in The Belly of the Beast Than At Its Jaws.
I love my culture, I love everything about it. It does annoy me when white chicks wear bindis for fashion. It’s not a big deal, but at least learn the meaning behind it. That whole quote-> “Their culture is consumed, but no one wants the people.” you don’t want to try the food, you don’t want to know the people, you just wanna look cute & “exotic” & whatever.
I’m not trying to be rude, but I remember growing up wearing bindis and people looking at us like,”what’s that thing on your head?” =_=
Sooraya explaining to her mother why she wears the Niqab.
Her mutant powers develop when she lashes out at a man who tries to remove her Niqab and she flays him alive!
She’s kind of awesome.
Rest of the article on her here.
This article started out as promising.
“…she (Carly Rae Jepsen) rocked a beauty look I’m not certain will be as popular. I really liked her dark purple manicure.. But the bindis glued to her fingers? Beyond nail art. This is finger art, which I guess has kind of been a thing recently…”
Ok… but it’s not going to be popular, and it’s beyond nail art, because it isn’t nail art, right? It’s a part of a culture. It is disrespectful to treat a culture as a passing trend, as nail art, that comes and goes according to the whims of the people.
“I can’t really hate on the bindis, though. As a child of the ’90s and a No Doubt fan, I sauntered into middle school wearing a bindi on my forehead on more than one occasion…”
I… what? What about the cultural appropriation going on here? What about the thoughtlessness of this act? Ok, so you did it during middle school. But that was middle school! You couldn’t have know any better. (Although I argue that you really should have, but I digress.)
I know that you’ve probably grown, matured, and educated yourself since then in order to work for a prestigious magazine. Allure magazine is enormously influential, and you have certain responsibilities that go with being the associate editor. I’m waiting for the punchline. I know that you see the more egregious thing wrong with this “beauty trend.”
“My question: Has wacky nail art become so unshocking that the trend will spread all the way up to the fingers? Is forearm art next?”
THAT’S YOUR QUESTION? That’s what you’re most concerned about? Are you kidding me right now. No. You’re actually serious and oblivious. Besides the questionable fashion and beauty taste behind a finger bindi, you couldn’t see the bigger thing wrong with a white girl wearing a finger bindi?
And that was pretty much my thought process reading that article. I do not mean to single out the author of this article because the magazine as a whole failed. They failed to see how white girls can disrespect, to say the least, other girls without even thinking about it. I had really hoped that Allure would be more forward thinking and enlightened than this, and I am honestly just disappointed.
Submitted by daubentonian
OKAY WHAT THE FUCK
BINDIS SHOULD NOT BE ON YOUR FUCKING FINGERS
HEY I JUST MET YOU
AND THIS IS CRAZY
BUT YOU’RE APPROPRIATING MY CULTURE
SO STOP IT MAYBE
GOD
I was doing a class presentation about discrimination in the media and pop culture, and many of my classmates were surprised when I brought up Latina women. Latina women are used as stock characters on TV, often sexualized and seen as “fiery”. An example of this would be Santana from Glee. She is quick to anger, cusses people out in Spanish, and got into fights with multiple characters. Guys in my school often brag about encounters they’ve had with Latina women. One even said, about his first girlfriend, “Of course she was hot, she’s Latina.” Everyone in the class seemed shocked at this information, except for the one Latina girl who was nodding in the corner.
Submitted by youhavenosense
MUSLIM WOMEN.. BEING OUTSIDE?? HAVING FUN? THIS CAN’T BE.
(this is a really cute video tho)
(via silber-fuchs)
SOMEONE SAVE THESE WOMEN ASAP.
