By D’Shonda Brown — 2021
These black women and gender-nonconforming individuals have created a space for other young girls and nonbinary persons to feel seen and heard.
Read on www.essence.com
CLEAR ALL
Creating spaces where the need to assimilate, conform, and belong are no longer important
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I’m learning that my challenge isn’t just to unlearn what my family has taught me, but to put myself in situations that would reaffirm the new lessons I was trying to replace the old ones with.
Meet the model and body activist challenging beauty norms, bullies, and online trolls.
“Representation and visibility is given to us by larger power structures, but what do we give ourselves? I’m more interested in that. What questions are we asking ourselves to grow and heal? To challenge the ways this world constantly teaches us to hate ourselves?”
I am very particular about the use of ‘healing others’ as I believe that term creates a certain level of superiority that I find disempowering. When I chose to take responsibility of allowing myself to be fully revealed, I allowed the seed inside of me to be fully expressed.