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Source: WFC / Women’s Freedom Conference

WFC Organizer and Keynote Presenter Feminista Jones has a powerful online presence as an activist, mental health social worker, public speaker, writer, and creator of #NMOS14 and #YouOKSis. For Feminista, “Freedom is the ability to reach one’s fullest potential without impediments implemented and sustained by oppression.”

Underscoring another element to this multi-layered conversation, Feminista asserts that “it is hard to think of oneself as free when there are others who are not. I believe in the collective liberation of all oppressed people, so if even one of us is in bondage, we all are.”

She continues, “I’m not sure I can conceive of freedom, truly, as I don’t believe any member of any oppressed group has ever really experienced it or achieved liberation. When we can begin to conceive of liberation as something other than the opposite of oppression, perhaps we can then work toward achieving that standard.”

WFC Volunteer Coordinator and Director of Administration Melanie Dione is a writer and one-half of the Good & Terrible Show on CSPN, for which she also serves as Director of Operations. Melanie says, “Freedom, to me, means being able to express oneself fully, in confidence and fearlessness. That includes not only passions, but struggles. Voltaire says ‘Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.’  I say once a woman says she’s free, that’s what the hell it is. So yes, I consider myself free.”

Melanie says, “As someone who works in media, my motto is consistent: Let’s change the conversation. That goes beyond pseudo-polite tolerance, and into the core of how we choose to address one another and how we choose to walk away with a level of understanding.  Maybe you don’t ‘get’ someone’s culture or orientation, but you understand that those differences don’t allow you to take potshots at their humanity. I believe that’s what this conference will have a major hand in doing, which is why I’m all in.”

Source: WFC / Women’s Freedom Conference

Bassey Ipki is an internationally acclaimed writer and poet who will be speaking and sharing her poetry for WFC. Her production company, Bassey World Unlimited, produces works “from a uniquely diasporan perspective,” she’s toured the country with Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, and, as an avid mental health awareness advocate, she founded the brilliant non-profit organization The Siwe Project.

Bassey says, “Freedom is the ability to live an unobstructed life. In some aspects, I am free. I am able to craft the life that I want in a way that makes sense to my abilities and flaws. I exist within myself as a whole person– not as an infallible person, but as a person who is able to exist as cracked glass and still allow myself beautiful.

But by that same token, I was born Black and Woman and ‘foreign’ in this world, and those are things that are absolutely beautiful and freeing for me, but you can only be so free when the world insists that you remain tethered. It’s a constant battle to accept your freedom in this world.

That’s difficult and exhausting, but I have a saying; ‘allow yourself morning’ and to me that means, even if I go to bed exhausted and world weary, there is a sun and a morning and another chance to feel like freedom is the first time. It helps when my brain is lying to me. My brain will lie about a lot of things, but the truth is the sun. It’s there. Nobody can convince me that the sun doesn’t exist, so that is a truth I can hold on to. So I see myself as the sun. No matter what, I show up. I show up behind clouds and despite rain. You may not always see me but you know I’m there. That’s freedom to me.”

Bassey being wonderful Bassey, she then added, “that’s also really corny but… whatevs.”

Inaugural Women’s Freedom Conference Seeks To Elevate, Empower Women Of Color  was originally published on hellobeautiful.com

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