- Love is at the source of everything for me.
I spent a lot of my time being angry,
but I had to realize that I can't do anything for anyone
else if I didn't love myself and if I
didn't love what I was doing.
If you can love yourself and you can
live authentically in your truth every day,
that's really all you need.
My life has always been one for activism.
I've always championed for the underserved.
I started when I was 19 fighting for, you know,
the rights for people to have affirmative action.
If any of us are struggling, we all are struggling.
And so we all have this humane obligation
to do something to try to make life better for others.
I focus on poverty and homelessness and hunger.
I've had my own experiences with that growing up,
and I just decided I was going to spend
my life trying to eradicate poverty as much as I could.
And as you get older, you learn that it's a lot harder
than that, but if every person could just chip away at it,
we eventually can get rid of it.
I don't like the fact that people go without food.
42 million people in this country are food insecure,
and a lot of it is because we are
so focused on individual wealth and success.
And I'm like, collective success, collective work
is really where the power is.
I'm not sure how we don't all commit
to that, how we all don't seem to want better for everyone.
As far as cultural commentary, I've
always had something to say.
I'm opinionated.
And so when social media came around I was like,
I can use this to reach people all over the world.
I could create a hashtag, bring people together,
get people moving out in the streets,
and we could actually change things.
And I started to realize that there
was power in telling stories--
telling your own story, telling other people's stories.
So I self-published my first two books,
and people really connected with what I was writing.
And so when I was approached about doing a third book I was
like, OK, I'm going to tell the story
of what we're doing now on social media,
and it's taking off.
Most of our old conversations would
happen in beauty salons and barber shops
and maybe the back rooms of our churches.
But to have these conversations publicly,
it involves people who may not feel comfortable speaking up,
but they're reading along and they're following
and they're learning.
Black Twitter is a community.
It is a culture in itself.
As the news comes up, we all discuss it
from our points of view, which are very
common across the diaspora.
Many of us have the same views on things.
And even when we disagree, we can have those conversations,
and we can even have arguments, right?
But that's what family does, and that's what communities do.
It doesn't weaken us in any way.
I think the strength of Black Twitter is its diversity.
I think it shows that there's a million ways to be black,
and it's representative of where we're going as a people.
I'm not sure if my work will ever be done because I see
my work as part of a continuum.
I lean on my ancestors.
I lean on the people who have been working before me,
and we're talking centuries of work
that I feel like I'm just continuing
and I'm moving forward.
I tell people all the time, you know,
you see Feminista Jones now and you
love what it is she's doing.
She's been working on this for years and years and years.
We're going on 15 years of being a blogger,
right, and being a writer to get to this point.
There's a lot of work that had to be done
along that journey for me to get better not just at what I do
but at who I am.
I've made a lot of mistakes.
I've made a lot of missteps.
I've said things that I regret, you know, to this day.
But I think the key is to just own your mistakes,
acknowledge that's part of your humanity,
and try to move forward and commit to just being better.
Being a powerful woman means saying I made a mistake
and I'm OK and I'm going to learn,
but I'm still going to be a dope woman.