Stop ALL LIVES MATTERING Empowerment
Why saying “just love yourself,” doesn’t cut it anymore.
Written by Jolie Brownell
It’s been a minute since I’ve written an actual blog, but I needed to get this off my chest. Early last month I did an incredible interview with AGENCY about my latest poetry works. During the interview, I was asked a question regarding my Nappy Headed Teachings E-Book and its focus on empowering Black women and femmes. I explained how empowerment has been central to my work since I started writing at 13 years old. Yet, since my youthful ambition to uplift the world, I have learned that “women and femmes [especially WOC and Black femmes] need more than to just hear the words ‘love yourself.’”
Today, I’m here to break down what I mean.
Isn’t Empowerment for Everyone?
Seven years ago I set out to empower girls my age, started a whole blog, wrote a book, and everything. My messages echoed other familiar femme empowerment narratives; “I am, repeat after me: ‘I am beautiful just the way I am,’ ‘I am perfectly imperfect, flaws and all,’ ‘I define who I am, no one else,’”(Brownell, 14). Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not. Am I proud of the work I’ve done? Of course I am. Yet, back then, if you would have asked me “as a Black woman, does your identity impact your messaging?” I would have laughed and responded, “but isn’t empowerment for everyone? How does being Black change or impact my message? I am here to empower all women and femmes.” I even remember seeing blogs that centered on empowering Black women and wondering how exclusive they were...don’t Black women need the same empowerment as Latina women, White women, Asian women, etc.?
In other words, I #AllLivesMattered empowerment.
What is Intersectional Empowerment?
Looking back, while my intentions were pure, there was definitely a flaw in my logic. To say that all women and femmes of different races, ethnicities, sexualities, and backgrounds share the exact same experiences with empowerment concerning beauty standards, sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, etc. is false and actually, quite disempowering. More on this now:
I am now a 20-year-old rising junior at LMU majoring in Women and Gender Studies. During my freshman year, I was introduced to a new term, “intersectionality” coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black intersectional feminist. To read her full explanation for this term click HERE. But for now, Google has a great simplified definition for intersectionality: “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” In other words, it is looking at various parts of one’s identity and analyzing how they connect (intersect) in relation to each other. Some examples of intersectional questions include:
“What does it mean to be a Latinx lesbian in the workplace?”
“Why are poor Black transwomen and femmes experiencing the most violence?”
“How does identifying as a disabled person (or person with differabilities) of color impact how one moves around and navigates the world around them?”
Examples of intersectional questions more relevant to the work of empowerment include:
How does patriarchy/heteronormativity negatively impact the livelihood and thus, hinder the confidence and self-image of women and femmes in the LBGTQIA+ community?
How do beauty standards that uphold white supremacy, impact the self-image of women and femmes of different races/ethnicities?
How does the model minority myth impact the confidence of Asian identifying women and femmes?
I realize now that my 13-year-old empowering messages weren't wrong, they were just missing an intersectional lens. Ask me now how the intersections of my identity impact my messaging and I will tell you that it is central to everything I do. My current work still focuses on empowerment, yes, yet now it has expanded to not only challenge one’s negative self-talk, but to question how the very structures and systems in place play an integral part in how we think about ourselves and perceive each other.
The takeaway then, is that when we expand our empowerment work and make it intersectional, we complicate it in a good way. We are complex human beings. We are not just one thing. To water down a person to one thing would be disempowering as it refuses to see them for who they are in their entirety. So let’s make our empowerment work intersectional. Let’s create more space to understand and celebrate each other for everything that we are.
Don’t Confuse This With Oppression Olympics
Before I sign off, I believe it to be necessary to specify that intersectional empowerment is NOT the oppression olympics. What’s this? A basic Wiki definition states: Oppression Olympics “is a competition to determine the relative weight of the overall oppression of individuals or groups, often by comparing race, gender, socioeconomic status, or disabilities, in order to determine who is the worst off, and the most oppressed.”
Intersectional empowerment is not about asking who needs the most empowerment? What a complete waste of time. Yes, in this work, we should and will ask questions like: Who is marginalized? Who aren’t we including? Who isn’t being seen? ...and yes, there are women/femmes who are more marginalized, violated, and oppressed, than others...but it should never be a competition. Intersectional femme empowerment is about trying to figure out the needs of different women or femmes based on their intersections of identity and how they walk and experience the world around them.