What "Moving Forward" Means for the WMST Intern Team

Here is the statement our WMST Fall 2016 Team shared today at the Brown Bag. We wrote this prior to the sharing of screenshots. We stand by our statement and implore our social justice communities also work hard to examine our complicities. We also want to acknowledge how crucial the LGBTQ Intern Team is to the Center's success and our sustained collective work.

Full Statement:

The Center for Women’s Studies Intern Team would like to share our vision of what “moving forward” means to us. We envision the Center as a space where we aim to be our authentic selves. To embody this vision, we welcome anger, rage, frustration, annoyance, fear, disappointment, and pain. We hold space for people who do not see unity with those who have violently denied their humanity as an immediate possibility.

We ask of ourselves and our communities to recognize that we are at very different positionalities and points in our activism and that we are not all impacted by our current sociopolitical context in the same ways or to the same degrees. People of color, trans and queer people, undocumented people, Muslims, Indigenous peoples, women, disabled people, and especially those at the intersections are especially vulnerable and our privileged identities impact how actually vulnerable we are.

We recognize that this has been, is, and will continue to be LIFELONG, ONGOING work. We’re in it for the long haul, and we hope you are, too.