That’s a mouthful of a title, isn’t it.

I’ve been thinking about activism and anti-oppression work for a long-ass time, and that title is the best advice I’ve got.

I know, it might seem a little disheartening to a young, new thing, seeing the world all bright and hard for the first time and wanting to go kick doors down. But start with yourself. There are so many doors in our own heads that need to be smashed, so many little aspects of social conditioning that need to be broken.

As any 101 guide will tell you, the first step is to shut up, open your ears, and listen to the people who know. But we’ve all done some of that around here already. So what next?

For me, I try to make sure that even though I’ve done a lot of listening and learning, I am always trying to include new voices and faces in my media consumption. I made some comments to the Boyfriend that my music was veering way to heavily into the white boy territory. I am an Indy Pop Queen, that particular genre is seriously top heavy with skinny, upper-middle class white boys in tiny pants. So I am proactively trying to seek out non-white, non-straight, non-male voices to make my toes tap. Pandora is a big help for that. Also, I follow Female Rappers on Tumblr. I found Rye Rye there. She’s a young, single mother, female rapper with mad dance skills.

I do the same with movies and tv, which is made much easier with sites like The Hathor Legacy and Women in Hollywood and the Bechdel test as a bare minimum requirement.