I discovered a bizarre fringe wing of anti-abortion Christian Nationalists this week. Abortion “abolitionists.”
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A skeptic's quest for books, science, & humanism
I discovered a bizarre fringe wing of anti-abortion Christian Nationalists this week. Abortion “abolitionists.”
Read moreOn May 2nd, 2022, I had the honor of being a featured writer with an above-the-fold story on OnlySky Media. While I was proud to be featured, I could not have been less proud of the subject of my article: my alma mater, Grove City College. (The Roe v. Wade draft opinion leaked later that same day, so my fame was short-lived. But it did happen.)
Read moreEveryone knows that access to abortion is a critical human rights issue. The potential overturning of Roe v. Wade is more than unconstitutional, it’s inhumane. An unjust human rights violation. But the worst part? As many activists have said, it’s the floor, not the ceiling, of reproductive justice. That’s where Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger’s Reproductive Justice: An Introduction becomes crucial to understanding what that ceiling might look like.
Read moreThe crimes of white supremacy have not gone unrecorded. They are etched into the bodies of brown and black people the world over. Our scars, past and present, physical and emotional, bear witness to the violence white men and women insisted they were not inflicting. White society marked the bodies of women of color as a receptacle for its sins so that it may claim innocence for itself, and, as the chosen symbol of the innocent perfection of whiteness, the white damsel with her tears of distress functions as both denial of and absolution for this violence.
Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars, p. 101
(Trigger warning: racism, colorism, fatphobia, ableism, child abuse, sexual abuse, and suicide.) 90-minute read.
Read moreWhen you think of reproductive rights, what comes to mind? I’d bet you thought of the right to a safe and legal abortion. At least I hope you did, because that’s a central part of reproductive liberty. Before I read Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, I perceived reproductive freedom as the ability to get safe and effective birth control, age-appropriate sex education, and reproductive healthcare, which includes abortion. However, for over a hundred years, poor Black women have viewed reproductive justice as much more than just abortion rights.
Read moreIf you have read Ibram X. Kendi’s bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, then you know that it is an absolute must-read. Kendi clearly explains why and how racism is sustained—and how it affects every group of people in dozens of intersecting ways—and he uses these facts to demonstrate how to dismantle it. While I definitely recommend that you read the entire book, here are some of my favorite quotes.
Read moreAt long last, this week I completed the final book of my first “15-book reading challenge“. Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 bestseller How to Be an Antiracist seemed like a great end to the series, as it is one of the most popular books in the antiracist movement right now.
Read moreIn my quest for both truth and empathy, I discovered geneticist Adam Rutherford’s book How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (And Don’t) Say About Human Difference. I find combating racism to be very important, and I find great joy in reading about science. This book was a perfect mixture of both of these, which is great regardless of my preferences, because it turns out (unsurprisingly) that science is the best way to debunk racist claims anyways.
Read moreWhen I started reading books on combating racism and injustice, I wasn’t sure how to go about reviewing them. It wasn’t my place as a white woman to deem them “good” or “correct”. I’ve since decided it is better to urge my audience to read these books for themselves rather than to ignore their important messages. I also want to take a moment to step aside and let these books speak for themselves. So here are 32 of my favorite quotes from Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism.
Read moreFor years, I’ve considered myself a feminist. I’ve believed that feminism was part of a dichotomy where society is made up of two groups: women and men. Barring the obvious problem of ignoring nonbinary people, I hadn’t taken into account that feminism is concerned with many more than two groups. Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot reminds us that feminism is about much more than just white women paying more for razors and not being able to fit their smartphones in their pockets. Hood Feminism exposes the honestly terrible job that we white women have done in including everyone in this movement: especially women who are not cis, straight, and white.
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