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adrienne maree brown (she/her/hers) “We think of self-care and self-healing as something we go off and do individually. [But] there’s nothing that happens in a vacuum and there’s no such thing as a pure individual. We live in a super interconnected world. This means that anything we do that improves how we are being with each other is of benefit to the entire planet.” adrienne maree brown is an author, podcaster, and community organizer. She’s worked with numerous social justice organizations, like the Harm Reduction Coalition, recognizing the role of structural inequality and trauma on how individuals cope. She’s been a sex columist for Bitch Media and has written several of her own books, including Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Currently, she is with the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute as the writer-in-residence. Through this work, she explores sexuality and consent. As a pleasure activist, adrienne maree brown advocates valuing one’s own pleasure for both healing and activism. By examining the effects of trauma, her work challenges oppressive systems and helps survivors and others reclaim their bodies. Social Media: |
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Tarana Burke (she/her/hers) “You don’t have to be anything but yourself to be worthy.” Tarana Burke is an organizer and activist who’s worked since the 80’s on issues from racism to economic justice. A survivor herself, she soon turned her focus to uplifting young women and girl survivors of sexual assault. In 2006, she founded the #MeToo movement which went viral a decade later. Burke began the #MeToo movement to empower survivors, particularly young Black women, to share their stories and learn how to become advocates for others in their own communities. Today, she continues to fight for survivors, focusing on marginalized communities such as youth, the disabled, LGBTQ+, communities of color, and Black women and girls. Social Media: |
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Laverne Cox (she/her/hers) “It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist.” Laverne Cox is a notable actress and LGBTQ+ advocate. Cox first gained national attention with her role on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Since then, she’s earned many impressive achievements, including being the first openly transgender person featured on the cover of Time magazine and the first to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. Laverne Cox is a powerful voice on social justice topics from racial equality to trans liberation to survivors rights. Using her platform, she draws attention to the violence experienced by trans people, especially trans women of color. She’s also spoken out about the #MeToo movement, discussing both her own experiences and topics including consent and identity. Social Media: |
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Kimberlé Crenshaw (she/her/hers) “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” Kimberlé Crenshaw is a Black feminist, lawyer, and professor at UCLA and Columbia. She helped establish the field of critical race theory (CRT), a theoretical framework which sees racism as socially constructed and societally maintained. Racism serves a purpose both maintaining material wealth and feelings of superiority in white people. CRT shows that racism created institutions, such as the legal system, and, in turn, continues to be perpetuated by them. She also coined the term “intersectionality”, at first to explain how Black women’s experiences of racism and sexism are different than Black men or white women’s experiences of each. Now, intersectionality has come to illustrate how each part of one’s social identities (including race, class, gender, and sexuality) affect each other and shape every person’s experiences of oppression, discrimination, and power.. Finally, she founded the #SayHerName campaign to bring awareness to all the Black women murdered by the police. Social Media: |
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Patrisse Cullors (she/her/hers) “Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.” Patrisse Cullors is an artist, organizer, and speaker. Her performance pieces explore mass incarceration, abuse in the prison system, and the violence of racism. She founded Dignity and Power Now, a grassroots organization supporting incarcerated people and striving for justice for them and their communities. She is an advocate for survivors, especially those who are incarcerated. She works with communities to empower them both locally and internationally. Perhaps most famously, she is one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter Global Network. As a queer, Black woman, she uses intersectionality in her fight to abolish prisons, end police brutality, promote queer rights, and dismantle colonialism. Social Media: |
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Roxane Gay (she/her/hers) “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.” Roxane Gay is an author, speaker, and self described “bad feminist”. She has written for Marvel, becoming one of the first Black women to be a lead writer with them. Her published works include themes of race, immigration, sexual violence, and body image. She explores feminism in books like Bad Feminist, offering critiques and discussing what it means to be intersectional and to have privilege. She’s spoken and written about her own experience as a survivor and how that trauma shaped her relationship to her weight, body image, and sense of self. Through her work, she uplifts other survivors and speaks out about anti-racist and anti-rape advocacy. Social Media: |
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Ayanna Pressley (she/her/hers) “As a survivor, I struggled for years to tell my own story, and I know how it feels to be a survivor in a country where believing and supporting survivors has become a partisan issue, where survivors are made to feel marginalized and ostracized. I tell my story both because it is part of my own ongoing healing and because I know that sharing my story can provide others with agency too.” Ayanna Pressley is an activist and congresswoman. After her victory in 2019, she became the first Black woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts. As an activist, and during her time in office, she’s fought for issues including reproductive rights, criminal and legal reform, support for immigrant communities, and justice for survivors. As a survivor herself, Congresswoman Pressley regularly speaks out about the dangers of rape culture and the importance of having survivors in positions of power. She’s made supporting victims of sexual violence central to her platform and constantly works to increase resources and protections for them. Social Media: |
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Janet Mock (she/her/hers) “Our approach to freedom need not be identical but it must be intersectional and inclusive. It must extend beyond ourselves. I know with surpassing certainty that my liberation is directly linked to the liberation of the undocumented trans Latina yearning for refuge. The disabled student seeking unequivocal access. The sex worker fighting to make her living safely.” Janet Mock is an author, director, and activist. She’s published a best selling memoir exploring gender, race, sex work, representation, and identity. She’s worked on shows such as Pose and was the first transgender woman of color to sign a deal with a major content company. She’s been open about her past survival sex work and continues to push to end the stigma against sex workers. She started the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs to make a space for transwomen to express themselves and uplift each other. She’s also a survivor, which she has written about in her book Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me. She uses this experience to further speak out about the violence women face, particularly trans women, women of color, and sex workers. Social Media: |
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Indya Moore (they/them/theirs) “I don’t know who I am outside of someone who’s just trying to be free and find safety for myself and for others.” Indya Moore is a non binary actor and model. They began modeling at age 15. Since then, they’ve appeared in independent films and television shows and walked in New York Fashion Week. They’re possibly most wellknown for the show Pose, in which their portrayal of the character Angel humanizes sex workers and depicts some of the struggles and triumphs of a trans person of color. In an interview with Elle, Moore discussed their own experiences with sex traficing as a teen. They use their platform to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice. They speak out against white supremacy, beauty standards, transphobia, and the stigmatization of sex workers. Social Media: |
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Farah Tanis (she/her/hers) “We’re coming from a space of deficit when we think about black women, when we think about the most vulnerable among us, instead of coming from a space where we are fully already in possession of what we need to step out there and claim our freedom—whether it’s personal, whether it’s social, or even political.” Farah Tanis is a transnational Black feminist and activist. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of Black Women’s Blueprint, an organization she started to serve the specific needs of Black women and girls and to uplift the voices of Black survivors. She was co-chair in organizing the March for Black Women. In 2016, she initiated the Tribunal of the Black Women’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the United States’ history of sexual violence against Black women. A survivor herself, Tanis is dedicated to centering the experiences of Black women and to understanding how sexual violence is linked to racism and structural violence. Social Media: |
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Wagatwe Wanjuki (she/her/hers) “Believing survivors is not just the right thing to do. It’s the best thing to do if we want to stop sexual violence. The popular myth that women lie about rape doesn’t just hurt the survivors we accuse of lying. It hurts our entire society because it allows rapists to continue harming — unpunished and undetected.” Wagatwe Wanjuki is a speaker, educator, and digital strategist. As a student at Tufts, Wanjuki became a survivor of campus sexual assault and intimate partner violence. She earned national attention by challenging her former university for their inadequate response. Since then, she’s been an outspoken advocate for believing survivors, challenging rape culture, and holding campuses accountable. She’s also openly shared her struggles after her experience, including aspects like the burden of her college debt and how the trauma and lack of support impacted her academically and financially. She and Kamilah Willingham started the hashtag #JustSaySorry to pressure universities to apologize to survivors for their handling of their cases. Wanjuki continues to write and give talks at colleges across the country. Social Media: |
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Kamilah Willingham (she/her/hers) “We know that you cant fight rape in a vacuum because rape doesn’t occur in a vacuum. If you address sexual assault as an issue in and of itself alone rather than the contexts in which it occurs, you will never cese to marginalize certain people” Kamilah Willingham is a writer, speaker, and activist. As a law student at Harvard, she and a friend reported another student for sexual assault, but felt their experiences were dismissed. She was later featured in documentary The Hunting Ground about campus sexual assault where she discussed what she endured after reporting. With Wagatwe Wanjuki, she created the hashtag #JustSaySorry to get universities to own up to how they handled sexual assault cases. She calls on colleges to do better but also advocates for a larger cultural shift that acknowledges all the structural elements that permit sexual violence and silence survivors. Now, she works with survivors in prisons, giving a voice to another populations too often left out of the conversation. Social Media: |
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Alicia Garza (she/her/hers) “Black people have always played a role in unlocking the promise of an America that has not yet been realized, and if there was ever a time to tap into that power—it’s now.” Alicia Garza is a writer, speaker, and organizer. Throughout her life time of activism, she’s fought for better sex education, domestic workers rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial justice. She founded the Black Futures Lab, which surveys Black people across the United States to produce a Black Census Report. The data from the report is used to demand better policies and solutions for the issues that actually matter to Black communities. She, along with Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, created the Black Lives Matter hashtag and founded the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Recently, she has published a book The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. As a Black queer woman, she highlights the roles race, gender identity, and sexual orientation play in institusional violence and oppression, especially sexual violence. Social Media: |
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Opal Tometi (she/her/hers) “We don’t need a pretty little story that you can put a bow on. BLM is more multifaceted than that and it’s actually our strength.” Opal Tometi is a community organizer, writer, and activist. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Tometi is a strong advocate for immigrant rights and racial justice. Early in her activism, she worked supporting survivors of domestic violence and fighting injustice against immigrant communities. She later served as the director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, an organization supporting Black immigrants. With Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, she began the Black Lives Matter hashtag and founded the Black Lives Matter Global Network. She continues to fiercely advocate to lift up Black voices, especially the most silenced and ignored. |
updated 3-18-22