I am a white, cis-gender, middle class, Ashkenazi Jewish woman, able-bodied, WNBA enthusiast, loves the ocean or any body of water, cooking, anti-capitalist with US citizenship who is deepening my Black Feminist practice, expanding my imagination, and how I practice community care.

I currently live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is occupied Lenape land.+

My understanding of different types of feminism was initially formed at Franklin High School by collaboratively forming an intersectional Feminist Union, which met weekly during our lunch period. This club had various levels of success at achieving our goal of practicing intersectional feminism within our school community and larger positionality in South Seattle but was an extremely formative point of engaging with Black Feminist texts written by Kimberle Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker and beginning to explore/understand different types of justice frameworks. I do this ongoing work to confront supremacy in every form because I want to live in a world where every person experiences care, justice, and liberation, which is possible when Black women and trans women are free because in the words of the Combahee River Collective “ it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”.

The poem below was written in response to a prompt exploring
how citizenship feels in the body by dr. drea brown
​
"a queer-black feminist-poet-scholar whose interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship and teaching is embedded in the overlaps of the critical and creative,” at Bryant University. I experienced a great privilege of learning from drea brown in their course, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” in the Fall of 2018 at Goucher College.

etchings of inked numbers
 
I am told that I am the daughter of fear
a girl of gas
hiding within the darkness
citizenship
eroded like soil
the bright light white not yet given
my body a bridge to the pistol of peace
inherited scars bound to diasporic pain
dead silence to spoken hate
pathways erased
I see shoes of a nameless face
daughters of dirt
little girls
never seen, read, or learned except from the truth of stars
 
singing songs of
a foreign place trying to make a home inside myself
hate is nestled, coiled in my throat
crystalizing into hurt
as I test the freedom of movement
my soul needs a place to stay
lila-tov, rolls around my mouth
an uncomfortable privilege
sliding off the tongue embracing the history
of the yellow star
re-telling that something has tried to kill us
from the narrow place
I have been taught to celebrate
 
Basha Hofheimer Nachman