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“What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

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“Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

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“Again Serena’s frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip. Every look, every comment, every bad call blossoms out of history, through her, onto you. To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background. “Aren’t you the one that screwed me over last time here?” she asks umpire Asderaki. “Yeah, you are. Don’t look at me. Really, don’t even look at me. Don’t look my way. Don’t look my way,” she repeats, because it is that simple.”
― Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

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In this exhibition we look at how strong women truly are. Some people see women as less that they cant do what men do, which is wrong. Women are stronger then you think. With the following songs, articles and videos that I have chosen to represent the power of women, I hope you enjoy and that you find the true power in women.

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Ariana Grande wrote this song to discusses the sexual power a woman possesses and how it's so strong.

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Ariana Grande - God is a woman (Official Video)

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Why belittle someone when they have done good in this world? Serena Williams is a star tennis player but still is harassed.

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In Mark Knights' cartoon of Serena Williams, she is portrayed as bestial. Her black features are exaggerated. Her athletic body is drawn bulkier as she jumps up and down on a racket. Her opponent, Naomi Osaka, a woman of Japanese-Haitian heritage, is depicted as a demure, slim blonde lady.

This is all because Serena Williams called an umpire a "thief" at the U.S. Open. She was penalized for doing so, and it cost her the game, and she lost the match to Osaka. As many people pointed out, men have called umpires far worse things than "thief" and not been penalized for it. It's another reminder of the racist, sexist history of tennis.

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For a very long time, tennis has been a game for well-bred white ladies to channel their aggressive impulses into. In what may be the realest moment Sex and the City's Charlotte ever had, for example, she remarks that her parents thought you could cure mental problems with enough exercise, and "that's why I'm really good at tennis." Notably, when Charlotte goes on to marry a man with a tennis court, you never see her play. She is resigned to the sidelines, watching her husband play with other men. Ditto, Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives. In it, the protagonist, a feminist who is having a hard time adjusting to life in Stepford, meets another woman with a tennis court. They begin playing. When that woman becomes a robot, she destroys her court, remarking that her husband hated tennis.

You are not expected to express your anger while playing tennis, young WASPy girls learn growing up. Tennis is where you are supposed to put your anger. Until you grow out of anger altogether.

"For many people, the idea of being ladylike still means being white, petite, and preferably blonde."

Until then, the least you can do is express any aggressive impulses you might be feeling in a pristine white dress with your hair tied back into a neat ponytail. You're permitted to play provided you also uphold an incredibly antiquated view of ladylike decorum as you do so. And for many people, the idea of being ladylike still means being white, petite, and preferably blonde.

Hell, the notion of wearing tennis whites-which is still required at a lot of clubs, and at Wimbledon-was instituted because of a horror of seeing women sweat. Perspiration would show up on darker fabrics if women ran around the court too vigorously. It was "quite unthinkable that a lady should be seen to perspire," fashion history Valerie Warren wrote in Tennis Fashion: Over 125 Years of Costume Change.

"The notion of wearing tennis whites-which is still required at Wimbledon-was instituted because of a horror of seeing women sweat."

And that rule is still in place today. Often it's just about policing whether women seem rule abiding and ladylike enough. "I had all white on, with white bloomers, but they had red ruffles," Chris Evert, a three-time Wimbledon champion told New York Times. "They weren't noticeable at all because our dresses were longer. But the guy, he lifted up my skirt and looked at the red and told me to go back to the changing room and change them." This notably did not happen to, say, Bjorn Borg when he wore a tennis shirt covered with green pinstripes.

Meanwhile, former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash told the , "Some of the girls have been told to go back and change their bras and tops because they had slight color on them," he said in 2014. "I believe some of the girls didn't have suitable sports bras and had to go without them."

So, basically, this is a sport where men are going be closely checking women's underwear to make sure it's spotless enough to meet their standards.

Someone who, mercifully, does not appear to give a shit about these archaic standards is Serena Williams. She was taken to task for wearing a black catsuit at the French Open. She described the suit as "Wakanda-inspired" and explained she wore to prevent blood clots and keep blood circulation going following her pregnancy. "I feel like a warrior in it, like a warrior princess kind of, queen from Wakanda maybe," she told Reuters.

Her description of that outfit as "warrior" like is wonderful, and it says a lot about how she's perceived. She does not play this game in a way that even so faintly alludes to a debutante at a country club who is afraid of perspiring in public. She plays like a warrior. She plays to win.

This is not really what some people want when they look to female tennis players. You can see as much from the 2009 column in Fox Sports, in which a reporter remarked sadly that she had "drop-dead looks" but "She's chosen to smother some of it in an unsightly layer of thick, muscled blubber."

They were mad she had muscles. The kind you might need to win at sporting matches.

Unsurprisingly, tennis officials threw a fit over her catsuit, and French Tennis Federation President Bernard Giudicelli announced a ban on the garments claiming that players, "must respect the game and the place."

Serena responded by wearing a tutu and compression fishnets.

In case you were wondering, yes, that was a great response to that.

So tennis has always been steeped in a fair amount of misogyny and, as is always the case, it's worse for black women. Misogynoir -the term for the specific hatred of black women, coined by Moya Bailey-is its own special problem in arenas where antiquated views on femininity are supposed to be upheld.

And make no mistake, there's plenty of racism directed towards the Williams sisters to go along with the general sexism you see in tennis. In 2001, Serena Williams' father told "When Venus and I were walking down the stairs to our seats, people kept calling me nigger. One guy said, 'I wish it was '75; we'd skin you alive."

At that same match, people cheered every time she made a mistake. Later, in 2007, a heckler was ejected for shouting, "That's the way to do it! Hit the net like any Negro would!" When Serena made a mistake.

If Serena Williams is mistrustful of the tennis establishment, if she is angry, it is with very good reason. Who wouldn't be?

"Black women's anger is seen as especially threatening, especially to white people who aren't keen on women being terribly emotional to begin with."

But black women's anger is seen as especially threatening, especially to white people who aren't keen on women being terribly emotional to begin with. From the Antebellum South onwards, popular culture has contributed to the notion that black women are bad tempered, whether it's Mammy yelling at Scarlett O'Hara (bizarrely, it was once suggested that Serena Williams could play Prissy, Scarlett's other maid, if Gone with the Wind were remade) or in Amos 'n' Andy. It persists today in Tyler Perry movies like Diary of a Mad Black Woman and in reality television.

The consequences of those stereotypes extend across fields-not just in tennis.

A study of women in color in STEM fields reported that 50 percent of women of color received pushback when they expressed anger at work (interestingly, expressing anger is found to benefit's men's careers when they apply for jobs.) One woman in the study remarked: "I don't raise my voice.... Because if I were as assertive as some Caucasian colleagues that are male, I would be called a mad Black woman."

By existing, by asserting herself, by behaving like her male counterparts, Serena is doing more than just standing up for herself. She's hopefully changing the game for all women. And she intends to. After the loss at the U.S. Open, and congratulating Osaka, she gave an interview stating, "the fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions and that want to express themselves, and they want to be a strong woman, and they're going to be allowed to do that because of today."

I believe she's right.

And I believe at some point in the future, tennis is going to have to stop being a way to enforce traditional dainty behavior, and just start being a sport.

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In Mark Knights' cartoon of Serena Williams, she is portrayed as bestial. Her black features are exaggerated. Her athletic body is drawn bulkier as she jumps up and down on a racket. Her opponent, Naomi Osaka, a woman of Japanese-Haitian heritage, is depicted as a demure, slim blonde lady.

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Her work focuses on issues of oppression, feminism, race, and marginalization, as well as the African diaspora

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When Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet from Los Angeles, took to the stage on Wednesday, it was immediately clear why the new president had chosen her as his inaugural poet.

Gorman echoed, in dynamic and propulsive verse, the same themes that Biden has returned to again and again and that he wove throughout his inaugural address: unity, healing, grief and hope, the painful history of American experience and the redemptive power of American ideals.

Where Biden said, "We must end this uncivil war," Gorman declared, "We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another."

And where Biden called for an American story of "love and healing" and "greatness and goodness," Gorman saw strength in pain: "Even as we grieved, we grew," she said.

Gorman opened by acknowledging the reasons why hope can be challenging. "Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?" she asked.

But she continued: "And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished."

She acknowledged the power of her own presence on the stage in "a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one."

Like Obama inaugural poet Richard Blanco, who invoked the grand sweep of American geography in a call for unity in "One Today," Gorman dedicated a portion to "every corner called our country" from the South to the Midwest. She ended with an invitation to "step out of the shade."

"The new dawn blooms as we free it," she said. "For there is always light, if only we are brave enough to see it - if only we are brave enough to be it."

Gorman was following in the footsteps of poets like Blanco, Robert Frost and Maya Angelou as she composed the poem "The Hill We Climb" for the inauguration.

She also took her cues from orators like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. - people who knew a thing or two about calling for hope and unity in times of despair and division.

Gorman told NPR she dug into the works of those speakers (and Winston Churchill, too) to study up on ways "rhetoric has been used for good." Over the past few weeks, she composed a poem that acknowledges the previous president's incitement of violence, but turns toward hope.

"The Hill We Climb" reads, in part:

We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust.

For while we have our eyes on the future,

history has its eyes on us.

Gorman, like Biden, had a speech impediment as a child. (Biden had a stutter; Gorman had difficulty pronouncing certain sounds.) She told NPR's Steve Inskeep that her speech impediment was one reason she was drawn to poetry at a young age.

"Having an arena in which I could express my thoughts freely was just so liberating that I fell head over heels, you know, when I was barely a toddler," she said.

For Gorman, a former National Youth Poet Laureate, her struggle to speak provided a connection not only to the incoming president, but also to previous inaugural poets, too.

"Maya Angelou was mute growing up as a child and she grew up to deliver the inaugural poem for President Bill Clinton," she says. "So I think there is a real history of orators who have had to struggle with a type of imposed voicelessness, you know, having that stage in the inauguration."

Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy were the only presidents in the past who chose to have poems read at their inaugurations. You can read all the previous poems here.

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'Not Broken But Simply Unfinished': Poet Amanda Gorman Calls For A Better America

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When Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet from Los Angeles, took to the stage on Wednesday, it was immediately clear why the new president had chosen her as his inaugural poet.

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A promiscuous person : someone who has many sexual partners that is a slut. Calling women sluts is wrong and can break them down inside.

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2017 Women of the World Poetry Slam - GiGi Bella "Slut"

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Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour

Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power

Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part,

That well befits a lovely woman's heart!

Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great;

Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;

Our 'skins may differ,' but from thee we claim

A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

We are thy sisters, Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour

Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power

Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part,

That well befits a lovely woman's heart!

Ddare to be good, as thou canst dare be great;

Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;

Our 'skins may differ,' but from thee we claim

A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

We are thy sisters, - God has truly said,

That of one blood, the nations he has made.

Oh, christian woman, in a christian land,

Canst thou unblushing read this great command?

Suffer the wrongs which wring our inmost heart

To draw one throb of pity on thy part;

Our 'skins may differ,' but from thee we claim

A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

Oh, woman! - though upon thy fairer brow

The hues of roses and of lilies grow-

These soon must wither in their kindred earth,

From whence the fair and dark have equal birth.

Let a bright halo o'er thy virtues shed

A lustre, that shall live when thou art dead;

Let coming ages learn to bless they name

Upon the altar of immortal fame.

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An Appeal to Women by Sarah Louisa Forten | Poetry Foundation

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Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part, That well befits a lovely woman's heart! Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great; Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate; Our 'skins may differ,' but from thee we claim A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

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Lili Loofbourow has unearthed some satirical poetry by suffragist Alice Duer Miller and presents it over on The Hairpin.

Miller studied astronomy and mathematics at Barnard (back in 1895), wrote screenplays, worked with The New Yorker, and wrote a book of poems called Are Women People?, which quickly became a popular suffragist catchphrase.

Most of her poems, which mocked the anti-suffragists, were originally published in The New York Tribune, a now defunct newspaper but once one of the leading publications in the country. Here's a sample of her verse, called "O, That 'Twere Possible," which riffs on Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem of the same name and was written in response to a 1915 New York Times editorial which claimed, "The grant of suffrage to women is repugnant to instincts that strike their roots deep in the order of nature. It runs counter to human reason, it flouts the teachings of experience and the admonitions of common sense."

Oh, that 'twere possible
After those words inane
For me to read The Times
Ever again!

When I was wont to read it
In the early morning hours,
In a mood 'twixt wrath and mirth,
I exclaimed: "Alas, Ye Powers,
These ideas are fainter, quainter
Than anything on earth!"

A paper's laid before me.
Not thou, not like to thee.
Dear me, if it were possible
The Times should ever see
How very far the times have moved
(Spelt with a little "t").

There are many more Miller poems at the jump, covering chivalry, feminism, and why women should study math. You can also find the whole collection on Project Gutenberg.

Loofbourow concludes that, "you will marvel, and then- THEN- you will decide that there's nothing for it: the time has come to write singsongy poems about John Boehner's stand on abortion, because nothing makes the opposition look as vacuous and morally bankrupt than putting their arguments in rhyme."

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Are Women People? The suffragist poems of Alice... | Poetry Foundation

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Lili Loofbourow has unearthed some satirical poetry by suffragist Alice Duer Miller and presents it over on The Hairpin . Miller studied astronomy and mathematics at Barnard (back in 1895), wrote screenplays, worked with The New Yorker, and wrote a book of poems called Are Women People?, which quickly became a popular suffragist catchphrase.

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Know matter the age women need to stick together because together women can get so much done. We can get the change for women

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The true beauty of a women!

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Women run the world. Women have power

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Beyoncé - Run the World (Girls) (Official Video)