Column: Letter to a brown girl
This is a letter to a past, present and future brown girl.
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This is a letter to a past, present and future brown girl.
In a recent post, DarkMatter, a non-binary collaboration between South Asian artists Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian, wrote “Transmisogyny teaches us that femininity is a selfish and individualistic endeavor, not a collective emancipatory project for liberation.”
In celebration of National Farmworker Awareness Week and in light of a recent claimed attack on two Black North Carolina farmers, it is important to recognize the farmworker justice movement as part and parcel to liberation movements for Black and brown people in this country.
Assata Shakur writes: “People can get used to anything; the less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
Last week in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, my sister and I listened as a physician at the school effectively reduced an entire continent to a monolithic entity. How he did this was with a sweeping statement: “You know, in the ’90s, everybody in Africa was dying of HIV/AIDS. It was really terrible.”
My sister and I were studying at a coffee shop in Durham when we overheard a conversation between three people about the problems they felt existed within and were caused by “those migrants” in Europe.
In the context of public health, often times we don’t talk about the ways in which people can be empowered on an individual level. We talk a lot about exposures and outcomes, about how certain populations are affected by health outcomes more than others. We talk a lot about “racial/ethnic disparities” without talking much about the sources of those disparities, which trace back to systematic racism.
The recent “Town Hall on Race and Inclusion,” was the University’s attempt to “have a conversation” in order to cover its respective derriere.
As a student of public health here at UNC, I’ve sat through some difficult lectures, both intellectually and otherwise. But when it comes to the topic of racial disparities in public health, my time as a mixed-race brown woman of color listening to professors and students alike at Gillings School of Global Public Health has yielded cringeworthy moments.
It’s that time of the year again, when white people pull out their racist and unfunny costumes for Halloween. While people of color, every single year, have the undue burden of calling white people out for appropriating, disrespecting and portraying our cultures as racist stereotypes, white people keep on keeping on.
As Amerikkka continues to sanction the deportation, killing and exploitation of Black and brown bodies, the state of North Carolina chose to ramp up its reign of terror against these communities.
Dear Chuck,
While the nation remembered those killed on 9/11, tomorrow, Sept. 15, will not be remembered in relation to the attacks. On Sept. 15, 2001, just four days after 9/11, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man, was murdered outside his gas station in Arizona.
At the #SayHerName vigil last week, Black women here at UNC shared their stories, said the names of Black women — both cisgender and transgender — who were murdered by police and mourned the extinguishing of Black women’s lives.