Colorful Prism Of Racism

OF THE THOUSANDS of venture deals minted from 2012 to 2014, so few black women founders raised money that, statistically speaking, the number might as well be zero. (The exact number is 24 out of 10,238, or just 0.2 percent.) Of those few that have raised money, the average amount of funding its $36,000. That’s compared to the typical startup, typically founded by a white male, that typically fails. These manage to raise an average of $1.3 million in venture funding.

This disparity comes even as black women today comprise the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the US, with over 1.5 million businesses—a 322 percent increase since 1997. These businesses generate over $44 billion a year in revenue. Yet in the tech world, investors aren’t taking a risk on startups run by black women.

Complex issues like racism and sexism mean Black women become victims more often

Naomi Sayers is an Indigenous feminist from the Garden River First Nations, just east of Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, who has also worked as a sex worker in the north of Canada. Naomi shared with A Kiss for Gabriela that some of her current work advocating for the rights of Indigenous people in the sex trade springs from a 2012 workshop organized by the sex worker organization Maggie’s in Toronto on public education and challenging stigma. After attending the workshop, Naomi started telling her own story using her own words and sharing about her own experiences in sex work, challenging the messages she had heard for so many years from authority figures–counselors, doctors, nurses, and the justice system–that indigenous women are victims and incapable of deciding what is right for them.

At a time when international adoption is on the wane in many countries, it is becoming a surprising — and controversial — growth industry in Florida, where some birth mothers are seemingly looking ...

In May of this year, I talked to Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision in New Orleans about her approach to organizing. WWAV scored a significant grassroots legal and political victory in the last year with the NO Justice campaign, which removed hundreds of cis and trans women from Louisiana’s registered felony sexual offender rolls. Deon is a longtime activist in the city of New Orleans, with a history of organizing low-income women of color around reproductive justice, harm reduction, and human rights.

...We are not all in the same boat. And if we keep playing like we are, we’re not really going to make the kind of change we’d like to see. Because the women I work with are never going to be able to jump into the sex workers’ rights movement. They don’t feel like that movement is for them.