What Holds Us: 3 key takeaways from young feminist conversation circle #1
Facilitator, Alice Dunbar Nelson Fellow Keturah Kendrick shares her reasons to be hopeful for the fate of Gen Z feminists of color
We have not been destroyed, neither will we ever be.
I started the What Holds Us circle with a reading of Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” I wanted the young women I’d gathered to put our
conversation into its proper context.
The conversation circles for Black girls and young women of color span across the country as part of a larger Reimagining and Building Democracy Series. The circles focus on living inside a democratic crisis, resisting authoritarian pressure and imagining a future worth building. In their observations of their realities, this circle’s participants, ranging in ages from 16 – 23, all understand the magnitude of the political climate and how this impacts them as they head toward adulthood.
Their reality: They know it’s intentional
The world they see:
The young women know this current administration has not been kind to them. They know it’s intentional. They know it will be a sustained cruelty.
Through their eyes:
One participant spoke about being the youngest of six. Her oldest sibling has had to navigate their version of this same sustained cruelty when they were just starting out. So have her parents. She commented that this rigid commitment to keeping a permanent underclass of citizens has not weakened since the inception of the United States of America. A history buff, she knew of the concrete progress that has been made for Black people, but also wondered if there had really been tangible enough gains, since we’re back to the same fight as previous generations.
Their reality: Grants and low-cost loans are dwindling
The world they see:
New education policies limiting access to grants and low-cost loans will predictably impact Black and brown students more than any other demographic in the nation.
Through their eyes:
Two of the young women are currently college students. One spoke of her great fortune in earning a full ride scholarship for her undergraduate degree, yet uncertainty of how she would afford graduate school. This participant’s anxiety about the costs of grad school already highlighted the impact.
Their reality: The tradwife life looks appealing on the surface
The world they see:
Capitalism and an unforgiving economy impacted how peers of the young women looked at relationships.
Through their eyes:
The youngest of the group, a high school junior, confirmed that tradwife and manosphere content has directly impacted her classmates’ worldview. Some boys in her school will question why women are “given so many advantages now” compared to their grandmothers’ era.
Even those who don’t openly spout that rhetoric seem to at least consider the “hot takes” of their peers who do. The oldest of the group, a recent college graduate, shared how she’s been in conversations with friends who claim they’re tired of working (even though they haven’t really had a “big girl” job yet). They want their man to provide and “leave me alone.”
This participant recognized such aspirations as friends being frustrated with capitalism and a vicious economy that causes some women to believe “old school ways” are the only way to survive. The participants who’d made it out of high school and into college universally agreed such a mentality was the minority among the young Black women they encountered. In some ways, social media content did influence their desire for the “soft life,” but they knew working was just a fact of life. And they had ambitions, so the goal was to find good-paying work they at least liked doing. Not to substitute a work history for a husband.
But where there’s community, where there’s adaptation, there’s hope for Gen Z
Overall, this circle left me feeling hopeful. The youth have little faith in government and legacy institutions to take action that will dramatically improve their chances to thrive in this country. They do, however, believe in their ability to adapt. They all feel connected to the community found within their families and friendships. They also were able to articulate that the larger community of the people they meet as they work toward goals serve as indirect connections to resources. Though it seems like this iteration of anti-Blackness in American governing is much more severe than when I was young, this two-hour conversation reassured me GenZers are clearly the descendants of us GenXers. Many things will try to kill them. All those things will fail.
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