Druella Jones who was not “owned” but enslaved. From ifunny.com

updated from May 16 2025

Some women today get married on plantations.

OG rebellious women lit a match

and tried to burn that torture chamber down.

She, Aunt Jonas, lit a fire that freedom remembers.

We don’t talk enough about her.

Druella Jones, (sometimes credited as Druilla) born into slavery in Alabama, did not wait for history to hand her liberation. She tried to set it ablaze.

She lived through the Civil War. She lived through Emancipation. And by the time a camera captured her image in 1915—she was 94 years old. A living witness. A Black woman with eyes that had seen more than most could bear.

But unlike the narratives that tried to romanticize Black survival under slavery…
Druella did not quietly endure.
Druella resisted.

During the war, she did what many would not dare:
She attempted to burn down her enslaver’s house -who separated her from her children-while he was asleep inside.

Let that sit for a moment.

This was not petty rebellion.

This was a woman enslaved, brutalized, silenced—and still courageous enough to try and burn down the very symbol of her oppression.
She didn’t run for safety.
She reached for fire.

🕊 A Legacy of Defiance

When her photograph was taken and preserved in Essie Collins Matthews’ 1915 book, Aunt Phebe, Uncle Tom, and Others: Character Studies Among the Old Slaves of the South, it was part of an effort to document Black lives after freedom.

But even that book, like many of the era, leaned into a narrative of “loyalty” and “docility” among the formerly enslaved.

Druella’s inclusion?
A disruption. A truth-teller. A spark in the archive.

Her story reminds us: not all survival was quiet.
Not all resistance made it into history books.
But she is why we are here.

✨ Let Us Say Her Name

Let us tell our daughters about Druella Jones.
Not as a side note.
Not as a “character study.”
But as a woman who dared to be free—while the walls of the plantation still stood.

She was not waiting to be rescued.

She became the match.

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-b1af-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

📜 In her honor, may we resist the silence they tried to bury us with. May we walk boldly in the legacy of women who did not flinch—who faced power and said, “Not today.”

Druella Jones, we remember you.
We speak your name.
We light a candle—and we carry your fire forward.

📌 Important Footnote:

When we look at the archives of places like Nottoway, the records were kept by the enslavers—the Randolphs. They documented births and deaths as if they were property, but they deliberately omitted any acts of rebellion from the official narrative.

If you are searching for honor, truth, and integrity amongst enslavers of human beings, you are not going to find it. To admit an enslaved woman like Druilla successfully struck back by burning their “prized” empire would be to admit they lost control. 

How Her Story Was Washed Away

The “Vandalism” Narrative: When enslaved people burned property, the white press and plantation records often attributed it to “accidents,” “clumsiness,” or “mysterious fires” to avoid inspiring other uprisings.

The Erasure of Agency: By calling these accounts “folklore” or “ghost stories,” the academic world often dismisses the very real political hits taken by Black women against the plantation state.

The Sanitization of Nottoway: For decades, Nottoway was marketed as a “White Castle” wedding venue, completely ignoring the blood and the fire that Druilla brought to those halls.

Plantations were not symbols of charm or gentility.
They were sites of calculated terror.

Behind their grand columns and manicured landscapes were spaces of horror—where Black women, men, and children were shackled, beaten, raped, bred, burned alive, fed to animals and other monstrous terrors…..under the guise of “economy and order”.

The beauty of the architecture was never meant for us. It was meant to disguise the violence, to distract from the screams, and to make palatable what was inhumane.

Every brick, every porch swing, every magnolia tree knows.
They remember what was done in those walls.

Many plantations were not homes. They were houses of horror and terror.

No matter how beautiful the woodwork, how sprawling the land, or how “gracious” the architecture—what happened within those walls was barbaric.

These were not grand estates. They were forced labor camps.
They were breeding grounds. Forced rape.
They were torture chambers wrapped in lace and deception.

And the women and men who lived through them—like Druella Jones—were not passive characters.

They were Survivors of unimaginable cruelty, and some, like Druella, resisted with every breath they had.

The land remembers.
The trees remember.

When you stand against violence against women and children, make sure that you stand against ALL of it.

The post 🔥 Druella Jones (Aunt Jonas), Alabama, 1915: The Woman Who Lit A Fire Freedom Remembers appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

Rest in power Nancy Metayer Bowen and Donovan Metayer.

When people express pain, shock, and grief; your confusion is not an emergency.

And it is not more urgent than a woman’s grief.

What we are witnessing, again, is how quickly pain gets rerouted when it does not arrive in a form people can immediately understand. A woman speaks from the middle of shock—before the facts are neatly arranged, before the sentences are polished—and instead of stillness, she is met with demands.

“Explain it better.”
“Say it clearly.”
“Make it make sense—for us.”

That is not curiosity.
That is control.

History has long trained people to expect women to translate their pain into something digestible. To soften it. To organize it. To make sure it does not unsettle anyone who is listening. And when she does not—when she speaks from the wound instead of the script—there is a rush to correct her.

But grief is not a performance.
It does not owe coherence on demand.

When a family is carrying the weight of burying a child—let alone more than one—there is no version of that reality that comes out clean. There is no timeline where emotion waits its turn so the audience can stay comfortable.

So when people choose to center their own confusion over someone else’s pain, what they are really revealing is this:

They have been taught that understanding should come before compassion.

And that is a lesson we must refuse.

Women are not here to manage the emotional ease of the world. They are not responsible for making tragedy easier to process. And they do not need to earn care by first being clear.

There is nothing wrong with speaking while the grief is still forming.
There is nothing wrong with words that arrive incomplete.
There is nothing wrong with feeling out loud.

What is wrong is the instinct to discipline that humanity.

On days when the noise is loud and the responses are sharp, let this be steady:

You are allowed to recognize manipulation, even when it is dressed up as a request for clarity.
You are allowed to step away from demands that ignore your humanity.
You are allowed to protect your voice, your boundaries, and your right to feel without performance.

Clarity will come when it comes.

But compassion should never be delayed until it does.

Women do not need permission to see what is happening, to draw the line, or to protect life in all its forms—and doing so does not harm the world.

It is how the world is held together.

Rest in power Nancy Metayer Bowen and Donovan Metayer.

The post Your Discomfort and Confusion is Not More Important than Her Pain (audio/podcast) appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

Photo by Land O’Lakes, Inc./Unsplash.com

updated from June 9, 2025

Control doesn’t always disappear. Sometimes it evolves its language and waits for you to mistake it for freedom.

Let’s talk about something that doesn’t get said enough:

Just because you’re in a space that calls itself “progressive”
or “radical,” or “revolutionary…”

doesn’t mean you aren’t still being conditioned to be meek, agreeable, and submissive.

Some women believe they’ve escaped obedience because they’re no longer in church, or no longer listening to their elders, or no longer subscribing to traditional roles.

But the truth is:

• You can be in a feminist/activist space and still silence yourself for male approval.

• You can be in a social justice movement and still be discouraged from setting boundaries with men.

• You can be applauded for your “power” while being quietly expected to defer, submit, and not disrupt the order of things.

In these spaces, if a woman resists, questions, or draws a firm boundary…
she may still be labeled.

“Difficult.”
“Divisive.”
“Unsafe.”
“Not aligned.”

Control in older systems was loud.
Clear rules. Clear punishments. Clear roles.

Control in newer spaces can feel… kinder on the surface.
But it often moves through social pressure instead of authority.

No one says “be small.”

But watch what happens when a woman is not.

Examples:

♦Boundaries get reframed as harm

A woman says,
“I’m not comfortable with this.”

And instead of that being the end of it,
the conversation turns into:

“Why are you uncomfortable?”

“Can you unpack that?”

“Have you examined your bias?”

Now she’s defending her instinct.

She’s no longer protected.
She’s on trial.

♦Language becomes a leash

Certain words become required.
Certain phrases become signals of belonging.

And if she speaks plainly, directly, or in her own cultural voice…

She may be corrected.
Not for harm.
But for tone.

That’s conditioning.

Because now she’s translating herself to be acceptable.

♦Protection gets mistaken for oppression

This is one of the most important shifts.

When women say:

“I want privacy”

“I want sex-based boundaries”

“I want spaces where I can exhale”

Those needs can get reframed as:

• exclusion
• intolerance
• backward thinking

So now safety itself has to be justified.

And that’s a dangerous place for any woman to be.

What makes this hard is that some of these spaces do offer growth, language, empowerment, and insight.

So it’s not about dismissing everything.

It’s about being able to discern the difference between expansion and conditioning.

🔍 Ask yourself:

• Do I feel safer when I go along with the loudest voices in the room?

• Am I still praised when I question the men in this space—or only when I support them?

• Have I traded one kind of submission for another, just dressed in different language?

• Do I feel pressure to be agreeable even when something feels off?

Being part of a movement doesn’t automatically make you empowered.
Your freedom is not proven by your affiliations.
It’s proven by your ability to speak the truth, make choices, and question power—even when it’s unpopular.

The real test of any space isn’t what it calls itself.
It’s how it responds when a woman says:

• No
• That doesn’t feel right to me
• I don’t agree
• I’m protecting myself

If her voice is respected (even when others don’t agree), even when it disrupts comfort…
that space is doing something real.

If her voice is managed, softened, corrected, or punished…
then the conditioning never actually left. It just learned new words.

🌀 Survivor Affirmation:
“She left the cage.
But the silence still followed her.
Until one day she turned around and said—
No more.”

📣 Belonging should never cost your voice.
Solidarity should never require submission.
And no movement is truly liberating if it punishes women for standing up, speaking out, or stepping away.

💬 Affirmations: I Belong to My Voice, Not Their Approval

1. I do not need to perform submission to be accepted.

2. I can be part of something bigger without disappearing inside it.

3. My questions are not a threat—they are a sign of my awakening.

4. Agreement is not the price of belonging.

5. If my voice must be silenced to keep peace, then it is not peace—it is performance.

6. I release the fear of being called difficult for standing in truth.

7. My loyalty is not to a movement—it is to my wholeness.

8. I am allowed to speak even when it disrupts comfort.

9. I do not owe anyone quiet compliance for the sake of unity.

10. I walk in alignment with truth, not trends, titles, or approval.

The post 🚫 Some of the Most Empowering Movements Still Require Women’s Submission appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

In nearly every community, there are and always have been questions around:

• Who gets to represent a people

• What counts as “proof” of identity

• Who institutions choose to believe—and why

And underneath that:

Communities that have been erased are now guarding the door.
Institutions that once ignored them are now trying to catch up—sometimes clumsily.

That tension is not going away.

There are moments when a word enters public conversation and exposes something deeper than the word itself.

It doesn’t just point to a person.
It points to a boundary.

And once you see the boundary, the real question emerges:

Who is allowed to draw a line around who they are?
And who is expected to leave the door open?

Some communities are understood when they say,
“This is ours. This belongs to us. This is not for everyone.”

Others are questioned, challenged, slurred, threatened, harmed, and punished for doing the same.

So instead of rushing to conclusions, let’s sit in the questions.

Questions About Identity and Protection
When a community says, “You must belong to us to speak for us,” why does that feel reasonable in some cases—and restrictive in others?

Who taught us which groups are “allowed” to protect their identity—and which groups are expected to be open, flexible, or undefined?

When identity has been stolen, erased, or exploited, what does protection look like?

What happens to a people when anyone can claim their identity without relationship, accountability, or shared history?

Questions About Power and Access
What opportunities become available when someone claims a specific identity?

Who is most affected when that identity is claimed inaccurately?

Are institutions more comfortable verifying identity in some communities than others? Why?

When identity opens doors, who decides who has the right key?

Questions About Survival
If a group has experienced generations of erasure, is protecting identity an act of survival?

What does it cost a community to constantly explain, prove, or defend who they are?

Who benefits when identity boundaries are blurred or dismissed?

Who is harmed when those boundaries are ignored?

Is it possible that what some call “gatekeeping” is actually a form of cultural self-defense?

Questions About Double Standards
Why are some communities respected for preserving lineage, language, and belonging—while others are told they are being divisive?

When marginalized groups protect their identity, why are they sometimes labeled as “rigid” or “exclusive”?

Who gets to define what counts as “real” identity—and based on what standard?

Are we consistent in how we respond to identity claims across different cultures and histories?

When did women lose the ability to define “female” based on sex—and who made that call?

Questions Worth Sitting With for Women

• Why are so many of these cases tied to authority roles
  (professors, authors, cultural leaders)?

• What happens when identity becomes a pathway to credibility or access?

• Why are communities often the ones doing the investigative labor—not institutions?

• And the harder one:
  Why do some people feel drawn to claim identities that are not theirs? Who enables this?

Questions About Permission…….As a female human being

• When did you first learn that speaking about your own body (especially around pain, discomfort, and unease) might upset someone else?

  Questions About Safety and the Body

  • What has your body experienced that shaped how you understand being female?

  • Have there been moments when being a woman affected your safety, your choices, or your freedom?

  • When you think about protecting yourself, what realities come to mind first?

  • If your body could speak without interruption, what would it say about what it needs?

  ---

  Questions About Silencing

  • Have you ever been told—directly or indirectly—that speaking about women’s experiences is “too much,” “unnecessary,” “disturbing,” “insulting,” “nasty,” or “divisive”?

  • What did you do in that moment—did you speak, or did you quiet yourself?

  • What did it cost you to stay quiet?

  • Who benefited from your silence? When you feel up to it, list everyone.

  ---

  Questions About Boundaries

  • Do you believe you have the right to define your own boundaries?

  • What feels harder:
    saying what you need, or holding the line once you’ve said it?

  • Where in your life have you made yourself smaller to keep the peace?

  • What would change if you no longer felt responsible for managing other people’s reactions?

  ---

  Questions About Double Standards

  • Have you noticed that some groups are encouraged to protect their identity—while women are often asked to be accommodating?

  • What messages have you received about being “kind,” “inclusive,” or “easygoing”?

  • Have those messages ever conflicted with your sense of safety or truth?

  • Who decides when your boundaries are acceptable—and when they are not?

  ---

  Questions About Worth

  • Do you believe your experiences as a woman are valid—even when others don’t understand them?

  • What would it mean to take your own reality seriously?

  • If you trusted yourself fully, what would you no longer tolerate?

  • What would you protect—without apology?

  • When women name what they see and experience, are they trusted—or corrected?
  • In what situations are women expected to override their own perception of reality?
  • What does it do to a person over time when they are told their understanding of their own category is “wrong” or “outdated”?

  ---

  Questions That Gently Shift Ground

  • What is the difference between excluding others—and including yourself?

  Questions About Authority

  • Who has the authority to define “female” in law, policy, and culture?

  • Was that authority ever clearly held by women—or was it always mediated through institutions?

  • When definitions change, who is in the room making those decisions?
    And who is not?

  • Are these changes coming from democratic processes, professional bodies, or internal policy shifts that most people never see?

• ---

  Questions About Impact

  • What happens when women feel they cannot speak plainly about their own experiences?

    

  • Does redefining terms increase clarity—or does it create confusion in areas like safety, data, and care?

  • Who is expected to carry the emotional and social cost of that confusion?

• Questions About Timing

  • Can you point to specific moments—laws, policies, court decisions—where definitions around being female and womanhood began to shift?

  • Did this change happen suddenly, or through a series of small adjustments that few people tracked in real time?

  • When did everyday language begin to diverge from medical or legal language?

  • At what point did disagreement about the meaning of “female” become socially risky to express?

• Questions About Language

  • What happens to a category when its definition becomes unclear or contested?

  • Can a word hold two meanings at once without creating confusion in practice?

  • Who benefits when language becomes flexible—and who struggles when it does?

  • When people say “female,” are they always talking about the same thing?

• Questions About Boundaries

  • What is the purpose of defining “female” in the first place—classification, protection, data, identity, something else?

  • What happens to sex-based boundaries when definitions shift?

  • Are there spaces where clarity about sex still matters?
    If so, who decides where those spaces begin and end?

  • What is the difference between expanding recognition and dissolving categories?

• Questions About Impact

  • How do these shifts affect women’s safety, privacy, and participation in different areas of life?

  • Are some groups of women more impacted than others?

  • Who is asked to adapt the most when definitions change?

  • What happens when women raise concerns—how are those concerns received?

  ---

  Questions About Consistency

  • Are all identity categories treated with the same flexibility—or only some?

  • Where do we see firm boundaries still being respected? Why there?

  • What makes one group’s self-definition protected, while another’s is negotiable?

  ---

  Questions That Cut Deeper

  • Is it possible that women were never fully allowed to define themselves—and that this moment is revealing that more clearly?

  • What does it mean to “lose” something that may not have been fully recognized to begin with?

  • If women were to define “female” collectively, what principles would guide that definition?

  • What would it look like for women to participate directly in shaping these definitions now?

  ---

  A Grounding Question

  • If the definition of “female” shapes law, safety, medicine, and lived experience…
    who should be responsible for defining it—and how should that responsibility be shared?

Questions That Stay With You
What does it mean to belong to a people?

What is the difference between connection and claim?

And perhaps the quiet question underneath it all:
What would you protect, if losing it meant losing yourself?

Some questions are not meant to be answered quickly.
They are meant to be carried.

Because identity is not just about who we say we are.
It is about who we are in relationship with—and who we are accountable to.

And for many people, protecting that is not optional.

It’s survival.

This isn’t about whether women can recognize who we are.
It’s about whether we are allowed to say it—and be heard.

The post When Did Women Lose the Right to Define “Female”? A Question Worth Sitting With appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

Two survivors of domestic violence discuss their stories, the role of restraining orders

‘Unheard’: Black women open up about mental health

Global prevalence of violence against women with disabilities: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis – PMC

Sexual Violence and Intimate Partner Violence Among People with Disabilities | Sexual Violence Prevention | CDC

Disability Abuse Statistics

Newly Released Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief – Prevention is paramount for safer relationships

The post Living in the Aftermath: The Intersection of Domestic Violence and Permanent Disability appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

We honor how far women have come. We refuse to be quiet about how far we still have to go.

Sit with these. Say them out loud. Carry them with you.

I honor the women before me by telling the truth they were denied.

We have come too far to pretend the work is finished.

I name harm clearly, because silence has never protected us.

My voice is not too much. It is necessary.

I listen deeply, without rushing to defend systems that have failed us.

We do not need perfect words to tell the truth. We need courage.

I refuse to confuse progress with completion.

Every gain we celebrate is also a reminder of what still must change.

I stand in gratitude for the doors opened and in responsibility for the ones still closed.

I will not inherit silence. I will break it.

We can hold pride and urgency at the same time.

I will not look away from harm just because it is familiar.

Our history is not just survival. It is resistance, brilliance, and unfinished work.

I am allowed to demand more. For myself and for those coming after me.

We are not asking for permission. We are building what should have already existed.

Listening to women is not optional. It is the foundation of change.

I carry truth forward, even when it shakes the room.

Let this be the close of a month, not the closing of the work.

Because honoring women is not a moment. It is a practice.

The post Women’s History Month Closing Affirmations: Speak Truth, Name Harm, Keep Going appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

There is no clean ending to something that was never fully confronted.  Ending violence, abuse, and harm requires us to tell the truth without dilution.

---

Generational harm requires intentional repair, not passive hope.

Slavery did not just extract labor. It rewired how a nation decided who counted as human. That kind of damage does not expire on its own. It mutates. It adapts. It learns how to survive in new language, new laws, new systems.

First it was ownership. Then it became control.’

---

Lynching was not history. It was a warning that echoed forward.

After slavery, terror became a tool of enforcement. Lynching was not random violence. It was public spectacle. It sent a message without needing a courtroom. It told Black communities, clearly and brutally, that their lives could be taken without consequence. That fear was policy, even when it was not written down.

White Mob Lynches Marie Scott in Wagoner County, Oklahoma

Excerpt from EJI.org:

The Associated Press wire report and accounts published by Northern papers explained that the group of white men had ventured into the Black residential area to sexually assault Black women and attempted to rape Marie Scott. According to some of these accounts, Marie stabbed Pierce in self-defense; in others, Marie’s brother killed Pierce in an effort to defend her, and Marie was only arrested and lynched because her brother escaped.

Local press reports, on the other hand, did not say anything about why the white youth were in the Black neighborhood or what they did while there and simply claimed that Marie Scott stabbed Pierce unprovoked and in cold blood.

For generations of Black women, racial terror included the constant threat of sexual assault and a complete lack of legal protection.

The same communities that lynched and legally executed Black men for the scarcest allegations of sexual contact with white women regularly tolerated and excused white men’s inappropriate attacks against Black women and girls.

“Given this history, Marie Scott may have been among the many Black women targeted for sexual violence during this era by white men who knew that they would face no judgment or consequences for rampaging her community.

Whether she acted in her own defense or was protected by her brother, Marie Scott died at the hands of a mob, the victim of a society that devalued her life and body; deprived her of the chance to defend herself at trial; and denied her the right to be free from rape, terrorism, and racial violence.”

---

There is no expiration date on unaddressed harm.

Then Jim Crow stepped in to formalize what terror had already enforced. Segregation was not just about separation. It was about hierarchy. It was about making sure one group moved through the world with dignity, while another was forced to navigate humiliation as a daily condition of life.

---

Society has a responsibility to repair, not just acknowledge.

Redlining followed. No chains. No burning crosses. Just maps. Policies. Decisions made behind desks that quietly determined who could build wealth and who would be locked out of it. Neighborhoods were not just shaped. Futures were.

---

We have a responsibility to examine systems, not just individuals.

And then came mass incarceration. A system that does not need to say what it is doing out loud because the outcomes speak clearly enough. Entire communities over-policed, over-sentenced, and under-protected. Lives interrupted. Families fractured. Generations rerouted.

---

Policing without trust is control, not safety

Policing, in too many places, reflects this same pattern. Not as protection, but as pressure. Not as service, but as surveillance. Communities are told they are being kept safe while simultaneously being treated as a threat. That contradiction is not confusion. It is design.

 

---

Justice delayed across generations becomes injustice normalized

This is not a timeline with a finish line. It is a pattern.

Dehumanization is not always loud. Sometimes it looks like neglect. Sometimes it looks like indifference. Sometimes it hides behind policy that claims neutrality while producing predictable harm.

What started as a justification for slavery became a lens. And that lens still influences who is seen as dangerous, who is seen as disposable, and who is given the benefit of the doubt.

If you want to understand impact, do not just look at history. Look at outcomes.

Look at who is more likely to be stopped, searched, denied, underfunded, displaced, or disbelieved.

Look at how often pain is questioned instead of addressed.

Look at how systems respond differently depending on who is standing in front of them.

This is not accidental. It is inherited.

And inheritance, if left unchallenged, becomes identity.

Here is the truth many people try to soften: harm that is not repaired does not disappear. It compounds.

It shows up in health disparities. In wealth gaps. In education access. In housing instability. In the constant, quiet calculation of safety that some people must make every day.

Dehumanization is not just about what was done. It is about what continues to be allowed.

So the question is not whether slavery ended. The question is whether the logic that sustained it ever truly did. Without confrontation, dehumanization evolves. It does not retire.

Because healing does not come from pretending something is over. It comes from deciding, collectively and consistently, that it will not be allowed to continue.

---

The post The Lynching of Assault Victim Marie Scott: How Slavery’s Logic Still Shapes Our Lives appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

Black women are not “overreacting”—we are responding to what our bodies have been forced to carry for generations. The pressure to ignore racism, to stay composed, to be endlessly strong is not harmless—it is physically costing us our health and our peace.

This is a call to shift the narrative: venting is not weakness, it is release. Naming harm is not division, it is clarity. And silence is not resilience—it is a risk.

Let Black women speak without correction. Let us process without punishment. Let us breathe without being told to endure what is slowly breaking us.

Stay Woke: When a Warning is Turned to a Punchline – WESurviveAbuse

The post Stop Telling Black Women to Be Silent—Our Bodies Are Paying the Price. (podcast episode) appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

And once it becomes ‘common sense,’ people stop investigating it. That is how deception survives.” ~ Malcolm X

Malcolm X taught us that truth is part of the infrastructure of safety.

A lie doesn’t survive because it’s believable.
It survives because it’s repeated, protected, and made convenient.

And once it settles in, it starts doing something dangerous.
It starts reordering what people think matters.

Children’s safety no longer matters.

Women’s safety no longer matters.

Safety no longer matters.

Harm gets reframed as “misunderstanding”

Violence gets softened into “conflict”

Boundaries get labeled as “overreaction”

Truth gets buried under debates that never needed to exist.

The people who see it get labeled as “hateful”.

Here is what the people telling the lies know:

A lie repeated enough doesn’t just survive.
It becomes the environment.

So the work becomes very clear, even when people make it hell:

• name harm plainly
• refuse softened language that protects it
• keep the focus on safety, not comfort
• repeat truth just as consistently as lies have been repeated

Because truth also survives through repetition.

And when truth is repeated with clarity and courage, it does something lies can’t do.

It restores order.

It puts the focus back where it belongs:

Protection.
Dignity.
Safety.

Shared by @zoomafrika1

The post Malcolm X Wisdom: When Lies Become the Environment, Safety Disappears appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.

From WE Survive Abuse Podcast

They will celebrate you as long as you are palatable.
As long as your strength entertains them.
As long as your truth doesn’t disrupt anything.

But the moment you speak plainly, the room will shift.

This is not new.
This is how the world responds when women stop performing and start telling the truth.

This is a short story about Pam Grier and millions of women before and after her. Not everyone can handle the truth. 

Some of us are forced to, though.

The post They Loved Ms. Foxy Just Fine -Until She Spoke Truth (podcast episode) appeared first on WESurviveAbuse.