Speaking of Great Speeches...

Viola Davis gave one this week, too!

Viola Davis won the #SeeHer award, a new award in this year's Critics Choice Awards, and her speech was pretty great.

THINX did a great post about this one, too, so I'll link that for you here. [It even includes an embedded video of the speech itself]

So, the moral of this week is: women are amazing and relevant! Madonna's Woman of the Year Speech did a great job of calling out sexism [and ageism] in the music industry, and Viola Davis' #SeeHer speech did an excellent job of calling out sexism and racism in the film industry. 

And as important as calling out sexism is, calling out racism is probably [definitely] way more important for feminists.

Feminism as we've seen it in the past and as we're often seeing it now misses out on a lot of people. White feminists tend to forget their non-white sisters. And cis female feminists tend to forget their brothers and sisters who aren't cis females.

But we cannot progress while still leaving others behind.

So, always remember that there are others out there who are not like you, but are every single bit as deserving as you are of equality.

While Davis' speech was short because of the nature of the ceremony, she got some important points into there, namely that:

1. generally, roles for African-American women in film are roles such as maids, where the costume likely involves an apron

2. roles for African-American women aren't usually roles that get the label of "sexy"

And these are things that trace way back in history to the time of slavery and the justifications people gave for enslaving their fellow human beings.

And it's about time that this stops being the norm, because it's wrong. Anyone can be anything, and Hollywood needs to portray that.

One more time, for the people in the back: Anyone can be anything

xx,

Sienna

The Fierce Feminist