Telling the discrimination my family and I have endured is far too easy.
My siblings and I were multi-racial children adopted by a lesbian couple living in a small town in Idaho. We thought we were beautiful, but at some point, I found out the world felt a little differently.
Jessy Forsmo-Shadid | Argonaut
I got into activism because I am a minority within a minority. I never liked the term “minority,” but the fact is I am a black woman with an equal sign tattooed on my wrist representing my lesbian mothers. I am short and round and talk too much about racism, sexism and homophobia.
I can’t tell you much about my first pride parade in Boise — I was 8 years old and burning up in the summer heat — but I watched with intent and came to understand what people were talking about years later.
Making a difference is all I really wanted, so I took every chance I had. I would write poetry often, got involved in plays and even challenged the school board’s idea of protecting LGBTQA students.
I became an activist by standing up for my parent’s equality, but developed my activism by getting out of my small town. In the past 2 years at the University of Idaho I have learned more about the LGBTQA community than I ever have before. I’ve read stories of people in the Civil Rights Movement whose names were never mentioned in my history books.
Feminism had never sounded so interesting to me. The fact that there are so many people who cringe at the word has made me want to dig deeper at what feminism means to me. What does social justice in general even mean to me?
“The Vagina Monologues” have helped start my activism here at UI. I met so many wonderful people who deserve equal opportunity and equal rights.
The Women’s Center, Black Student Union, Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) and Feminist Leadership and Movement to Empower (FLAME) are some of the groups at UI that have opened me up to the possibility of making a change. The people in these groups have given me personal stories of the discrimination they’ve been through and listed the reasons they protest today. They have given me history lessons about what their families went through and why they are here today.
The community in Moscow made me want to change things for the better. Getting involved with as many things as possible means I get the chance to grow into a more understanding and open person.
If history and political classes have taught me anything, it would be that if everyone was afraid, nothing would get done. No progress would be made.
Activism is the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change. I want to be this change, and I want to make a difference.
Jessy Forsmo-Shadid can be reached at [email protected]