women of color

As a woman with disabilities – she has cerebral palsy and requires the assistance of personal care attendants to live an independent life – Ashley Volion is no stranger to isolation and discrimination. But as she wrote on Bridge The Gulf yesterday, nothing hurt this 28-year old academic from Lafitte, Louisiana as much as having to defer pursuing a Ph.D. [...Read more]

When the plane set down in Rio de Janeiro, I thought, "Wow, this is like the movies."  I had never been to Brazil before. But what I was really excited about was reconnecting with my sisters from developing nations across the globe. [...Read more]

By Shaun King, crossposted from Women With a Vision. I arrived for my internship at 215 N. Jefferson Davis Parkway on a sunny Tuesday morning. This location had been home to Women With A Vision for the past three years. [...Read more]

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Editor's note: Last week Deon Haywood, the Executive Director of Women With A Vision, discussed how Louisiana's Solicitation of Crimes Against Nature statute allows law enforcement to target poor and trans women of color (read here). [...Read more]

Editor's Note: With President Obama's historic statement in support of marriage equality, the national political debate over who has the right to marry has heated up. But the right to marry is not always the most pressing issue confronting queer people, especially in queer communities of color, which continue to face criminalization and police violence. [...Read more]

This article is adapted from my comments on the panel “Laying the Groundwork:  Why do we need to understand gender to understand the major housing issues of our day?” with Gary Perry of Seattle University, and Charmel Gaulden with the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center. [...Read more]

Every year the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) honors the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by hosting the "Fit for King" conference on housing.  James Perry, Director of GNOFHAC, kicked off the event on Friday, January 13th, by explaining why this year's theme was "Women and Fair Housing": [...Read more]

Jesmyn Ward of Delisle, Mississippi, recently won the prestigious National Book Award for her novel about "a poor black family living and loving in a rural backwater Gulf Coast town in the days before Hurricane Katrina." In an interview with Julianne Hing of Colorlines, she talks about writing about the "fraught and lovely and important" lives of poor folks and black folks and rural fol [...Read more]

Houston resident Aurelia Suchilt was detained two times, for more than two months each, in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities due to mistakes in bureaucratic paperwork.  Iconic immigrant's rights activists Maria Jimenez (right, photo by Joshua Cogan) says women like Aurelia are leading the defense of people detained by ICE.  Listen to these interviews, and more, in a radi [...Read more]