# data[].attributes.headline
"Yeah. Can't be silent" The Hate U Give 

# data[].attributes.subject
"Yeah. Can't be silent" The Hate U Give 

# data[].attributes.body
Silence is a hard concept to grasp. Humans are social creatures. Humans are not meant to be silent, especially about subjects that affect us the most. But silence has a way of making us feel safer, like if we are quiet, we might protect ourselves from the harm that comes from speaking up for what we feel is right.
In particular, women suffer from the idea that they are supposed to be silent. From a young age, girls are taught that they should be the more subtle, meek gender. Boys are excused for being loud and rowdy, while girls are criticized for acting the same way. As we grow up, the idea of feminine silence becomes more prominent.
The Me Too movement and sexual assault awareness has added to this idea of silence. While the movement has most definitely encouraged women to speak up, we have also seen damaging backlash as a result. "She was asking for it," "Why is she only talking about it now," "No one will believe her," "She's obviously lying," etc. These words can scare women into shutting their mouths about what has happened to them, myself included.

# data[].attributes.headline
"Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present." Citizen

# data[].attributes.subject
"Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present." Citizen

# data[].attributes.body
In an age of social media, language has become especially powerful. People whom you have never met can comment on your appearance or your presence without any thought. We can sit behind a screen and degrade others without any consequence.
Growing up in this time of an increased focus on social media is an experience that previous generations did not go through. As social media platforms have grown, we have also seen a spike in the mental health crisis.
While social media has its benefits, we need to become more aware about its dangers. It can spread positivity and awareness on social issues, but it can also make it seem impossible to get away from negativity.
Sexism, racism, ableism, etc runs rampant on social media platforms. As we move closer to equality for everyone as a society, we must also take into account that discrimination will always have a home in online communities with little restrictions.

# data[].attributes.headline
"Sometimes I make up an ending, a happy one. But most of the time I just say: "I don't know how it ends yet." 

# data[].attributes.subject
"Sometimes I make up an ending, a happy one. But most of the time I just say: "I don't know how it ends yet." 

# data[].attributes.body
Tell Me How it Ends

This quote expresses a very real, overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. I'm sure that at some point in their lives, everyone has thought "when is it going to get better, when is this going to end." For me, this has been my struggle with my brain injury.
I have seen endless neurologists, cardiologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, the list goes on. I have found myself drained by the thought that maybe this is just how it's going to be, that I won't ever get back to the Liv I once knew.
Despite this, I have tried my best to stay hopeful. Even though I have an injury that might affect me for the rest of my life, I know that I write my own story. I have learned throughout my life that we simply can't focus on what we can't change, because stressing about it won't do anything for us. Our stories and our struggles might not have a happy ending yet, but we can do everything in our power to make sure that we get there.

# data[].attributes.headline
Taking Apart My Childhood Piano, Rebecca Macijeski 

# data[].attributes.subject
Taking Apart My Childhood Piano, Rebecca Macijeski 

# data[].attributes.body
This poem struck a chord with me (pun intended), as it talks about reminiscing on your childhood and leaving behind the things that used to make you who you were as a child. I also played piano for thirteen years, so I can relate to this poem in a more tangible sense as well.
As we grow up, we realize that life and humanhood is not exactly what we thought it was. When I was a little girl, I worried all the time that I didn't practice enough for my piano lessons, that an 85 on a test wasn't good enough, that the boy in my math class didn't notice me, that my mom would find out I had eaten chocolate when I shouldn't have. As life happens, our worries, goals, and identity change. We figure out that other people struggle more than us in some ways, and that we struggle more than others in some ways. In leaving our childhood behind us, and stepping out into the world, we find out that the way that life unfolds is not as cut and dry as we once thought it would be.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Taking Apart My Childhood Piano by Rebecca... | Poetry Foundation

# data[].attributes.body
Let's talk about suicide. Suicide is horrific, and becoming more and more widespread. I am willing to bet that everyone reading this knows of someone who has committed suicide.
For me, one of my closest life-long friends attempted suicide this year. At the time, it broke me. I felt so helpless. They had texted me the night that it occurred, but I wasn't awake to see their message. I was riddled with guilt, and angry that I didn't do anything to stop it. I wanted to yell at them for being so stupid.
The increased rate of suicide, especially in men, goes to show that our society had gotten increasingly brutal towards some. When we talk about sexism, we usually talk about its effect on women. As I define myself as a feminist, I have grown to realize that we have to take into account sexism's effect on men as well. Men are pushed to keep their emotions to themselves, and belittled if they are seen as weak. Not only do we have to stop the cycle of crippling mental health issues, we also have to look extra carefully at the way that we treat men in regard to their mental well-being.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays....

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Suicide's Note by Langston Hughes | Poetry Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays....

# data[].attributes.headline
Martin Luther King on White Liberal Racism 

# data[].attributes.subject
Martin Luther King on White Liberal Racism 

# data[].attributes.body
As a white person, you have a few options in your life. You can choose to be a white person that condemns other races, you can choose to be a white person who considers themselves not to be racist but stands to the side and watches as other races are oppressed, or you can do everything you can to educate yourself and help in the fight for equality.
As a white woman, I would consider myself the third option. Throughout my life, I have struggled with what is the best way to be an advocate. I won't sit her and be dishonest and say that I have always been the best at it. I still don't know the best way that I can help, but I try my best to educate myself and my peers on the topic.
I am aware of the bias that our society can slough off on us. When I was younger, I was wrongfully more uncomfortable if I saw a black man approaching me rather than a white man. But I am always learning and growing. I actively express my opinion when I hear white "liberals" say something subtly racist. I have learned that antiracism is an active process, not something that you can say you are but not do much about.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in February 1968 at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. (Matthew Lewis/The Washington Post)

About US is an initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.

A black man named Marquette Frye was pulled over in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. When another officer began hitting Frye and his mother, the crowd that had gathered threw stones and bottles. Then came looting and fires. In response, police cracked down on the black community at large.

The year was 1965, and the Voting Rights Act had just passed. Many Californians were shocked by the uprising. Gov. Pat Brown maintained that California was "a state where there is no racial discrimination."

But Martin Luther King Jr. had come to Los Angeles numerous times before to join black Angelenos' struggles against police brutality and school and housing segregation. In an essay three months after the Watts uprising, King called out the disingenuous surprise, knowing firsthand how Californians, New Yorkers and others had brushed off years of local black movements.

"As the nation, Negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, and usually denied," he wrote. Leaders in Northern and Western states "welcomed me to their cities, and showered praise on the heroism of Southern Negroes. Yet when the issues were joined concerning local conditions, only the language was polite; the rejection was firm and unequivocal."

King's words resonate today.

In a United States where ethnic communities are experiencing violent attacks, where white nationalists parade with tiki torches, and where disdain for people of color spews from the White House, it is easy to focus on the crassest forms of racism infecting our nation. But to take seriously King's life and work, we also must reckon with his long-standing critique of the "polite" racism of his liberal allies, of the language and the policies they employed to excuse and perpetuate racial injustice. King called out the systemic cruelty of such racism, of allies who supported civil rights while criticizing its tactics, who denounced discrimination elsewhere but explained away prejudices at home.

This King has much to say about our contemporary moment, about this presidential campaign season and the injustices that plague our blue cities as well as our red states. More than 50 years after King called out white liberals, many are still employing the polite racism that he decried.

Presidential Democratic candidates former vice president Joe Biden, former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg have presided over policies that perpetuate racial injustice in law enforcement. All have offered glib apologies but have taken no aggressive action to correct the harm. In response to requests by the new Poor People's Campaign (the campaign King organized just before he was assassinated), several candidates have pledged to call for a presidential debate on poverty, but none have done so - evoking King's criticism of the "silence of our friends" as a crucial linchpin to injustice.

As polite racism seeps into the discourse of the most liberal politicians and informs the policies of even the bluest of communities, listening to King's challenge to his allies is increasingly urgent.

In 1964, some of King's fellow civil rights leaders called on him to denounce a planned "stall-in" by the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights group protesting job discrimination and housing and school segregation. Frustrated by local leaders' lack of urgency and minimal change, Brooklyn CORE sought to draw attention to rampant inequality by stalling cars to block highways leading to the World's Fair at Flushing Meadows, forcing people to stop and see the inequality and poverty they passed on the way.

Horrified, other activists attacked the idea, calling on King to do the same. But he refused.

"We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice," he wrote in a letter to civil rights leaders. "I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct action program alienating former friends. I would rather feel that they are bringing to the surface many latent prejudices which were always there."

Similar hand-wringing has erupted in recent years over activists who disrupt meetings, stop traffic and confront politicians. Calls for "civility" have followed, even from those who profess to support the activists' causes.

President Barack Obama's former chief strategist David Axelrod was " appalled " when the staff of a Virginia restaurant refused to serve then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders in the aftermath of the administration's family-separation policy. In June, Biden called for civility by citing his conciliatory relationship with segregationist lawmakers in decades past, and amid criticism, he refused to apologize, saying, "There's not a racist bone in my body."

'Not a racist bone in his body': The origins of the default defense against racism

In 2016, then-Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed invoked King to chastise a Black Lives Matter group's plan to disrupt freeway traffic, joining a chorus that has cast today's activists as too angry and reckless, not living up to the peaceful, respectable, unified legacy of the civil rights movement.

"Dr. King would never take a freeway," Reed said, admonishing the young protesters.

And yet, King did take a freeway, perhaps most famously in the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. He was arrested nearly 30 times while engaged in direct-action protests and said he believed in the necessity of disruption to upset the comfortable stasis of inequality.

In his 1967 book, " Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?," King reflected on reactions to those direct action tactics in the North.

"Our white liberal friends cried out in horror and dismay: 'You are creating hatred and hostility in the white communities in which you are marching. You are only developing a white backlash,'" he wrote. "As long as the struggle was down in Alabama and Mississippi, they could look afar and think about it and say how terrible people are. When they discovered brotherhood had to be a reality in Chicago and that brotherhood extended to next door, then those latent hostilities came out."

King long had highlighted the tendency of his Northern allies to identify problems elsewhere and overlook them at home. In 1960, speaking to an interracial audience celebrating the anniversary of the Urban League, he identified "a pressing need for a liberalism ... that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South."

King was familiar with being welcomed by leaders who saw themselves as liberal and anti-racist only to have them react furiously when attention turned to the need for local change. After an officer killed 15-year-old James Powell in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, sparking days of uprising in 1964, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. invited King to New York to help ease tensions between residents and city leaders. But those leaders roundly rejected King when he dared suggest the city would benefit from a civilian review board to investigate community complaints against police officers.

Today, New York remains a hotbed of inequality, home to segregated school systems and neighborhoods, as well as racial disparities in criminal justice and law enforcement. But resistance to change in the region persists.

In 2014, a report from the University of California at Los Angeles reported that school segregation remains rife throughout the country 60 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled "separate but equal" education unconstitutional. The report declared New York state's schools the most segregated, yet Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) has shown little willingness to make concrete changes, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) has run from the word "segregation." They've engaged in blame-shifting and little action, as a movement of New York City high school students who have taken it upon themselves to call the problem out.

King also highlighted the distorted obsession with black behavior in discussions about conditions in impoverished communities. Focusing on black crime, he said, was a way to avoid looking at the much greater crime of ghettoizing people in communities with insufficient schools, jobs and city services.

"When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos," he said during a 1967 speech to the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C. "He flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services."

But American leaders' focus on changing black behavior as the solution for urban problems has endured. Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative sought to push young black men into the middle class by providing them with mentors rather than providing their communities with excellent schools and job opportunities. Rahm Emanuel, then mayor of Chicago, called for "moral structure" as a solution to crime in the city's black communities.

All too many American leaders are "horrified not with conditions of Negro life," King observed, "but with the product of these conditions - the Negro himself."

In the last year of his life, King increasingly pointed to the "comfortable vanity" of Americans who saw themselves as friends of racial progress but were unwilling to take the necessary, substantial steps to close the gap. King called out his allies as well as his enemies. But we are often treated to the version of the civil rights leader who is a cheerleader of improvement, asserting that the "arc of the moral universe bends towards justice."

It is a gross misreading of King, who throughout his life explicitly called out the myth of time as an agent of progress. But there is a comfort in ignoring the minister who pinpointed our complacencies and the explanations we create to support them.

In 1967, King wrote that "most whites in America, including many of goodwill, proceed from the premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement. White America is not even psychologically organized to close the gap - essentially, it seeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects retain it."

On this King holiday, in this election year, we need to listen to the King who called out the hypocrisy of liberal allies who praised the struggle in the South while decrying disruptive black activism at home; the King who highlighted the ways police brutality was ignored or excused by many who considered themselves friends of the movement; the King who insisted that disruption and direct action were necessary to highlight the urgency of injustice, challenging his allies to act accordingly.

Today's Headlines

The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning.

By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Perspective | Martin Luther King and the 'polite' racism of white liberals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About US is an initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter . A black man named Marquette Frye was pulled over in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

# data[].attributes.body
I have attached a short trailer to a film that really speaks to me. It follows three artists who are navigating the art community with a traumatic brain injury. Not only do I share in their physical struggle, but I have been an artist for as long as I can remember.
One of the worst things that occurred as a result of my injury was that I suddenly could not just sit and focus on my art like I had previously been able to do. I used to sit for hours and hours working on tiny details of portraits, and the way that I defined myself as an artist was suddenly changing. Art is one of the most prominent ways that humans can express themselves, and the way that we express ourselves changes as we change. Not only does this film relate to brain injuries and artists, but it gives us a look at how as we change and grow, the way that we present ourselves to the world also changes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who Am I To Stop It is a documentary about the traumatic brain injury community made by a filmmaker with disabilities from brain injury. It follows three artists as they navigate social isolation, stigma, and rebuilding their identities. They practice the arts to reconnect to their own sense of self-pride and to their larger communities. Rather than emphasize the injuries themselves or highlight medical aspects of disability, we explore consequences of institutional and internalized ableism. Through visual arts, music, and personal narrative, the subjects explore questions around poverty, sexuality, faith, family, success, and community. Using a biopsychosocial framework, Who Am I To Stop It deftly uncovers what lies beneath the surface for so many peers with brain injury and their communities.

This film contains mature themes and adult language.

The documentary weaves together three distinct stories that cross age, gender, sexual orientation, religion, class, family support, and disability. Despite their different life contexts, the film reveals how brain injury survivors are complex, dynamic people with creative drive and agency. In the film, we witness interruptions to career plans, relationships, education, and family ties. Likewise, the viewer celebrates a sense of accomplishment as all three subjects present their art publicly for the first time with their new identities as peers with brain injury. Each subject proactively works to challenge their own and others' views of their worth and value by creating and sharing their art. By emphasizing daily life and storytelling over expert interviews, viewers are invited to question their assumptions about people with brain injury and what role the community can play in ending stigma and unlearning ableism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who Am I To Stop It is a documentary about the traumatic brain injury community made by a filmmaker with disabilities from brain injury. It follows three artists as they navigate social isolation, stigma, and rebuilding their identities. They practice the arts to reconnect to their own sense of self-pride and to their larger communities.

# data[].attributes.body
The week we were assigned to read this poem, I could hardly get through it. I was only a few lines in when tears were running down my face. While I was not strong enough to write about it and discuss it at the time, I want to address my connection to it now.
Rape culture is no joke, and it is not explicitly about rape. Rape culture is about encouraging men to be aggressive and pushy, using harassment to get what they want. Rape culture is about teaching women that sexually, they are objects, that men won't like you unless you "put out," that wearing certain clothing makes you responsible for what happens to you, that no one will believe you. A society that promotes rape culture, that normalizes rape, also encourages rape to be included in humor.
I cannot count how many times I have heard rape jokes from men that I consider my friends. Each time it happens, my heart drops in my chest. As someone who has been sexually assaulted and raped during my lifetime, it makes me sick to hear it. While I do blame what happened to me on those individuals, I don't blame rape culture on individuals. As a society, we talk about rape like it is just something that happens, like it is something to be accepted. We hear that a woman was raped years ago, and we expect her to be over it, to let it go. Nearly 1 in 5 women are raped in their lifetime. I could say so much more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. "Ahhhh," it thinks. "Yes. A goatee."

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn't threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee's house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling "a soap opera for men." Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass's My Century, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said "he didn't have those urges when he looked at her anymore," not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father's high-school student - your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, "I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn't there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren't crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you're asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn't know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren't Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends - haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that's a little bit funny.

Admit it.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

(Octopus Books, 2012). Follow her on Twitter at @TriciaLockwood.
You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee. Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke.

# data[].attributes.body
When someone mentions Einstein, you immediately think "genius." The world views him as one of the smartest people to ever walk the Earth. It is not so well known that many experts believed his tendencies pointed toward autism.
While I will not sit here and compare myself to anyone who has autism, I will say that the way the world views you and the way that you view yourself can be completely different. I cannot speak for the legend himself, but I am sure that at times, he struggled with his differences, even though the world may not have seen that side.
Similarly, my disability is virtually invisible unless I am open about it. You would never know about my brain injury unless I said something. It has been extremely hard for me to remain a good student and someone that is perceived as "intelligent," but people do not necessarily see this struggle.
It is important for us all to remember that whether we perceive people in a positive or negative way, we never really know what they are going through on their own.

# data[].attributes.body
People who do not know me call me Olivia, but I call myself Liv. Liv is how I define myself, and this exhibition is how I define Liv. "Olivia" has always felt foreign, like a name that was given to me but is not quite mine. It is how people perceive me, but it is not how I perceive myself.

I perceive my identity as one of growth. My exhibition is about growing up: growing up a girl, growing up a white girl, and growing up enough to learn that age does not define how ready we are for life. My growing up has been about harsh realizations, burned bridges, and a massive brain injury that has changed nearly everything I know about myself.

When we look at each other, I firmly believe that people see what they want to see. That is why it is important to know who you are; to know your identity as it pertains to yourself. As we grow up in America, that the things that mommy taught you are different from the things that other moms taught other kids. You come to realize that your mom never taught you to be scared of cops and your friend John's mom never taught him that wearing a dress too short will make people think he is a slut. Your friends' doctors also never told them that an injury they thought was minor will affect them for the rest of their lives.
Life in America is ultimately about learning that what people think of you defines how you are supposed to live.

Don't be bitchy, Liv, women can't be so aggressive.

Be nice when you stand up for yourself, people do not understand what it's like to have a brain injury.

No one will believe you Liv.

You don't want to ruin his life Liv.

No one likes an outspoken girl.

# data[].attributes.headline
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso 

# data[].attributes.subject
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso 

# data[].attributes.body
This controversial painting by Picasso shows five nude prostitutes. The idea of femininity has changed immensely with time, but even in a time that we consider progressive, we still hold stereotypes about femininity. Women who approach their sexuality in the same way that men do are looked down upon, often viewed as promiscuous.
While the stereotypes against female sex workers are very niche, they still reflect on the feminine ideal. Our society wants women to be innocent and hard to acquire. On the other hand, we praise men when they have "acquired" women. Living in a society with these opposing ideals takes its toll on a woman's view of herself and adds to a quite confusing path of figuring out her own sexuality.

# data[].attributes.body
When you experience a serious traumatic brain injury, it changes your brain. It changes the way that you get up in the morning, the way that you talk to people, the way that you feel about yourself, and the way that you function. Learning to live with this is hard, to say the least.
This piece is a recreation of the iconic "Creation of Adam" by Michelangelo. For me, I saw the struggle between your body and your mind in this artwork. My body functions normally after my brain injury other than some minor things, but it is the change in my brain that makes my body feel different. In this way, I have felt a disconnect between my body and myself on the outside, and my brain on the inside. While this concept for me is a result of a physical change, I am sure that many people feel like their mind isn't exactly what it should be in relationship to their body.

# data[].attributes.body
It is definitely not unheard of for girls to hear that every aspect of their being is different from boys. I had always thought that sexism was just men who are extra conservative and degrading, but I quickly realized that this was not true. In a conversation with a group of my friends in high school, I was told flat out that women would never be as successful as men because "their minds just aren't built for ambition."
This article is extremely important, because it is so embedded in our society that women will never be able to achieve the same things as men. Scientifically, this article proves that there is nothing in the female brain that makes women inferior. This only goes to show that the concept of the inferiority of women is a social construct, and once we break down those ideas that women cannot do the same things as men, we achieve equality. One of the most important things in life is being confident that you can be the person you want be, so we need to stop discouraging women from reaching their potential.

# data[].attributes.headline
We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off, Ella Eyre 

# data[].attributes.subject
We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off, Ella Eyre 

# data[].attributes.body
As a girl growing into a woman, we learn rapidly how the world views us. Before I went through puberty, I was extremely skinny and not "conventionally" attractive. When my body started changing, and my hips, butt and breasts grew, I started getting a lot more attention from boys and men alike. Sometimes the attention was just normal flirting, but most of the time it was aggressive, sexual comments.
This song expresses that women do not need to be pressured use their body or have sex to impress a guy. It makes me sick that starting at such a young age girls are sexualized. If you do not do enough sexually with males, you are perceived as a prude. If you do too much, you are a slut. When it comes to sexuality, women have been told over and over again that they are not in control and can't seem to do anything right in society's eyes.

# data[].attributes.body
This song has been my anthem ever since I first heard it. Throughout our lives, it is not uncommon to go through things that make us want to absolutely give up. This song is all about picking yourself up again and again, and accepting that things will get better.
Not only is it a universal message to keep pushing through, it's specifically written for girls (as you can see by the title). As a woman, dealing with sexism and bias can be especially draining.
As women, we are also taught this concept that women are weaker than men. That women are not supposed to be strong. This song reminds women that you can be strong and you can keep fighting to be who you are.