The Sound of Silence: Where Is the Anti-Choice Outcry Over North Carolina’s Forced Sterilization of Women of Color?

A task force in North Carolina recently ruled that survivors of that state’s eugenics program should be paid $50,000 each in financial compensation. Eugenics is often defined as the science of “improving” a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of “desirable” heritable characteristics. The practice of eugenics was not limited to Nazi Germany nor [...]

Ai-jen Poo: Organizing Labor—with Love

Talk to Ai-jen Poo about her work and it won’t be long before you hear language you don’t often hear in the midst of intense social movement campaigning. For one, she does not shy away from talking about “organizing with love.” A 37-year-old organizer based in New York City, Poo is founder of Domestic Workers [...]

Happy-To-Be-Nappy Barbie

This week, a group of black women in Columbus, Ga., started a campaign to donate 40 black Barbie dolls to young black girls. And here’s the twist: Before gifting the Barbies, the women used boiling water and pipe cleaners to transform them into curly-haired “beauties.” In my 32 years on this earth, I’ve owned a [...]

The Real Story of Margaret Sanger

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is back in the news this week thanks to GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, who claimed on national television that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: “preventing black babies from being born.” Cain’s outrageous and false accusation is [...]

Narratives on Race, Sexuality, and Love on National Coming Out Day

To celebrate National Coming Out Day, Miriam Perez sends on these videos of people of color coming out, from Basic Rights Oregon. The videos are poignant, and sometimes painful recollections of what it meant to come out. Siblings waiting for a moment of discussion that never comes; mothers wrestling with their religious beliefs and the love [...]

Weathering Health Inequality

A hypothesis with legs. In the early 1990s, Arline Geronimus proposed a simple yet profound explanation for why Black women on average were having children at younger ages than White women, which she called the “weathering hypothesis.” It goes like this: Racial inequality takes a cumulative toll on Black women, increasing the chance they will have health problems at [...]

We Are the 99%, Too: Creating a Feminist Space Within Occupy Wall Street

As most people know by now, something big is happening on the streets of New York City. It began on September 17, where a growing number of protestors began occupying Wall Street, many of them camping out in Liberty Plaza. Though first largely ignored by the media, Occupy Wall Street has gained steadily increasing attention—especially [...]

#OccupyWallStreet, SlutWalk NYC and Racial Blind Spots: Editors’ Picks, 10/2-10/8

Progressive and feminist activists were in the national spotlight this week as they took to the streets of cities and towns across the country in protest of corporate greed and rape culture. The Occupy Wall Street movement continued to gain momentum, spreading from New York City’s Liberty Square to 18 other cities in the U.S. and [...]

Gender and Race Determine the Worth of Your Degree

Researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce have compiled a new report on how education affects people’s earnings, based on 2007-2009 American Community Survey data. Not surprisingly, higher education significantly increases lifetime earnings of U.S. workers: But education doesn’t pay off equally for all groups. Women make less at every level of [...]

The Terrible, Awful Sweetness of The Help

If Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help was an angel food cake study of racism and segregation in the 60’s South, the new movie adaptation is even fluffier. Like a dollop of whip cream skimmed off a multi-layered cake, the film only grazes the surface of the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender and geohistory. Let [...]

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