The world can benefit from seeing itself and then acting in a Black Queer Feminist Urbanist framework, even if that’s not exactly who they are.

This site has been a decade’s worth of me declaring my worth– how I specifically demand and define a world for myself in a Black Queer feminist body, interacting in urban spaces.

Here on this page, I will clarify a few definitions and principles of what I mean by Black Queer Feminist Urbanist, so that you, no matter how few or many intersections we share, can see, especially after I share the whys, how this exercise of my self-care, becomes a practice of community care.

Here are my definitions of Black, Queer Feminist, and Urbanist:

Black: A person of African descent, often with visibly melanated skin, who has been subjected directly or through ancestry to enslavement, colonization, discrimination, or mistreatment as a result of their ethnicity, past and present marginalization, and/or skin color. This also refers to the cultures derived from these activities and their adaptation to their environments.

Queer: A person who has a gender presentation, gender identity, gender journey/relationship, or sexual orientations that differ from traditional Western colonial thoughts on such ideas. Also refers to cultures that develop from this state of being.

Feminist: A person and a movement that honor genders marginalized under patriarchy, traditionally those tagged as feminine or outside traditional gender binaries.

Urbanist: A person and a movement that promotes the conglomeration of ideas, services, and objects in centralized locations, governed democratically, given freely and fairly, and connected by public transit and other people-powered transportation networks such as sidewalks and multi-use bicycle and pedestrian paths. Not mutually exclusive to rural expressions, but the natural output of natural and rural environments that have high levels of human interaction.

These are the definitions I came up with from both my heart center and from years of academic study, continuing independent education on and offline, and just observing the world around me and listening. Then as I thought of the specific areas of my needs around Black Queer Feminist Urbanism, I came up with these “whys”, because:

Spiritual Spaces: Our souls are weary and deserve comfort and uplift, in modes that affirm and honor us.

Housing: Shelter and housing are human rights, they should have never been and shouldn’t continue to be a commodity.

Transportation: We should never have to worry about how we will navigate this Earth, that’s just as much ours as anyone else’s.

Food: Our food and foodways should nourish us in abundance.

Health, Wellness, and Caregiving: We deserve to be in good health, practicing communal wellness and wellbeing. Our health, like our shelter, should never be a commodity, outside of fair trade to receive needed supplies and tools to maintain our health.

Work and Finance: In whatever skill or created object we choose to trade with others, we are deserving of that trade or product to be given freely and compensated for fairly. We should never be assumed to be incapable of any task we take on.

Natural Environments and Recreation: We steward this Earth and allow it to nourish and nurture us. We do not actively work against it or destroy it for our gain.

Arts and Cultural Space: Our dreams made manifest deserve to be seen, heard, and shaped, first in equitable measure and later equal measure.

Grooming and Adornment Spaces: Our bodies are beautiful and deserve to be adorned and adored in ways that honor who we really are and the gifts that come from the corners of the Earth we inhabit, no matter what corner of the earth that is.

Identity, Affinity, and Human Rights: We deserve to be, likewise others deserve to be and we should conduct ourselves and honor our innate and natural differences not as a reason to marginalize, but as a necessary part of our human ecosystem.

Education: We are lifelong learners and everywhere has the potential to be a classroom or a space of knowledge exchange. In addition, we learn from everyone, no matter their age or era.

Now I know you’re thinking, aren’t these just principles of human rights? Why label them this way? First of all, we need to meet our world where it is, that makes these distinctions of us. Secondly, until the day we are no longer marginalizing or worse, destroying or killing members of these overlapping communities, then we don’t need to start our focus here.