Mikki Kendall Quote

I am currently listening to Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot, and I think this is a good reminder during Black History Month.

I am an intersectional feminist, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black civil rights advocate to address the unique and simultaneous impact of racial and gender prejudice on Black women.

Kendall, Crenshaw and others have been critical of a feminist movement that centers the needs of White women, and ignores or subjugates the needs of women of color and how those unique needs might be relevant and important to the feminist movement.

And as a White woman during Black History Month, I feel the need to remind other White women that we benefit from a White supremacist culture and it is our duty to help dismantle it and actively use our privilege to help dismantle it.

It is my duty as a White, cisgender female, heterosexual therapist who works with many that do not come from my privilege to say that I believe Black Trans Lives matter and that Black history is American history.

The work that I do is not apolitical because the lives of my clients are actively being legislated against in this country and I have a platform to talk about and raise awareness.

It is my duty to educate those in MY community about the impact of anti-trans legislation, the existence and reality of trans and non-binary identities now and throughout history.

It is my duty to acknowledge my privilege and work to understand how that shows up in the therapy office and how it may impact my clients’ and their experience of me and my experience of them.