#BREAKFREE Week Six: Racism And Islamophobia

Sexism is everywhere in society – but experiences for non-Caucasian women are generally even worse. And that's not OK.

Somewhere between Twitter, Facebook and the end of 2015, you probably heard the word 'intersectionality' being discussed. You might have heard somebody saying it wasn't a big deal. You might have heard somebody saying it was. It's possible you zoned out, halfway through the second syllable.

But it's time to zone back in. Because intersectionality is a thing. And - multiple syllables aside - it's actually really easy to understand.

Intersectionality is kind of like a giant venn diagram, with loads of interlinking circles. Each circle represents a different experience.

So if there's a big circle in the middle for gender, imagine another big circle that overlaps onto it, for race.Then imagine another big circle that overlaps onto that, for disability. There are then three overlapping sections - one that represents disabled women, and one that represents non-white, disabled women. And everybody within each of the sections will have different life experiences - and different experiences of sexism, too.

And that's what we want to talk about this week. The fact that non-Caucasian women experience even more sexism than their white counterparts. We want to talk about Islamophobia - and the reasons why Muslim women experience nearly twice as much hate on the street as Muslim men. We want to discuss 'misogynoir' (misogyny that's specifically aimed at black women), and we want to analyse cultural appropriation, and the ways in which it holds us all back.

Sure, we've already discussed the truth about racism and the music industry, and looked at what really happened to Sandra Bland, but they're just the headlines. This week we'll be exploring your personal accounts of racism, xenophobia and islamophobia, discussing the things we can do to counteract all of the above, and shedding some light on racial discrimination, in all of its forms.

Because whatever your background or ethnicity, it's time to #BREAKFREE from racism.