Loud Mouth Brown Girl

Trigger Warning

This post contains conversations about Abuse, Trauma, and the result of white supremacy…

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Trigger Warning

It was nine years ago, and I was on a train heading back to Surrey after a #SelfieDate. I see this beautiful woman standing across the aisle from where I am sitting.

She’s wearing a great black skirt with flowers, and a matching top, I think. She’s got long blonde hair, and she’s just biding her time, waiting to get off the train.

At her feet, a man is talking to his friend, but he’s also using his phone to take photos of her between her thighs, under her skirt. So I tell her, and of course she’s angry, and so am I.

She asks, “What did I do?” I say, “Nothing, you did nothing, it’s not you, it’s him.” I reported him, but I doubt they caught him; they never do. They don’t even try.

Respect for women from men and boys is not inherent. It doesn’t come as a built-in factory setting; it needs to be taught and fine-tuned over many decades. Learned, and then harnessed.

I think that it’s fair to say that by 2026, we’ll have learned this is true. I’ll say that we’ve also learned that lots of people choose on purpose not to care about the boundaries of girls, boys, women, and, eventually, yes, men.

I can concretely say that every single person I’ve had long-term relationships with, every single person I know in my offline and digital lives, is a person who deeply understands rape, sexual abuse, and trauma.

I haven’t spoken to anyone in almost ten years who doesn’t understand sexual assault on a deeply personal level.

Each of us has to find ways to navigate life after abuse on our own because no one prepares us for what happens when it does happen. No matter how hard you teach your kids “No means no,” some jackass out there is preconditioned to believe, and thus condition your child that “No means yes, do it harder.”

Each of us reading this has had to learn how to live life with a disability that we weren’t born with, and all of us know what life looks like under the weight of white supremacy.

The difference is that some of us are really comfortable with the way things are now, and I know this because they say things like “Why won’t Anonymous save us?” and “Can white people join the Black Panther Party, I think we’re ready…” instead of doing the work to dismantle the white supremacist colony we live under, so that they don’t have to ask such rediculously redundant questions.

Phew! As a person of colour, as a Black Biracial person and as a Black woman, I am fucking exhausted.

I thought I was spending my time educating people on how abuse happens, I really did. It was only recently, in the last few years, thanks to writers like Sharon Hurley Hall, that I learned that I am writing to fight against racism and the racist colonial society we live in.

My mom can’t stand my voice. It’s not that she doesn’t want me to have space to grow; it’s that she’s terrified that what’s happening in America could happen here, and then what will that mean for her only daughter?

I fully understand. I worry too. I worry that if I do have children, they will be raised in a society where abuse is normalized, and silence becomes the status quo. Again.

Sooo many people around the world want to say that “Child abuse didn’t exist in the early centuries,” I would argue that it absolutely existed, but the shame of coming forward was worse than living with the silence.

The difference now is that we don’t need to remain silent anymore, we don’t HAVE to be quiet. We’re allowed to say what happened to us, we’re allowed to put the onus on the people who hurt us, and we don’t have to live in quiet Hell anymore.

Human beings evolve, that’s a fact. But I think some of us enjoy being stuck.

I remember when I was eighteen, fresh out of high school, and completely traumatized by the previous years, that I didn’t even know where to start. I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t even try, I had no skills. I had no chance of college, and no one prepared me for a life of failure. They didn’t provide the tools I needed when I was growing up to do it on my own.

I had to turn back to the church where I learned how to work, I learned how to help people, and I learned how to navigate the system.

It would take many years before I left the church, the abuse, and the trauma behind. Abuse takes many, many, many years to heal from.

It’s not “Sexual abuse,” it’s “rape abuse.” Anything short of calling rape what it is, whether its’ a finger or his or her whole body, is just saying that we want to “Quiet the tone.”

Fuck quieting the tone. Rape abuse should make you uncomfortable, it should scare you, it should disgust you, so that it never happens again.

This week alone, I’ve seen reports of half a dozen ICE agents being arrested for being a part of a pedophile ring, complete with images and other evidence, and yes, it goes deeper than just photos.

Half a dozen. Why are the journalists of the world not talking about this? Because women have given the world no reason to take us seriously, and that’s the brunt of it. We are not nearly violent enough.

We as women need to be loud, and when we say “I as an individual stand for the collective of women and girls,” that MUST include trans girls. It MUST include disabled Girls, Queer Girls, it MUST include ALL girls, or what the fuck are we doing here?

I know that JK Rowling ain’t shit, but she has a billion-dollar empire built on shattering the dreams of children and Neurodivergent people the globe over.

She speaks for a lot of women who agree with the status quo and who think that because they benefit from white supremacy, there’s no reason for any of us to complain.

She is the dark cloud in the world, but she’s only one part of a systemic problem.

The world represents an idea, and that idea is failing miserably. We are so consumed with things that don’t matter that we’re destroying everything that does in the name of progress.

But my question is, progress for whom exactly? Who benefits from the deconstruction of Palestine? Who benefits from the destruction of the United States of America?

Who benefits from the global shit that is currently sucking the life out of every single one of us? Because you people, whoever you are, you suck.

Until the world is made safe for girls and women first, the world will never be safe for men.

XOXO

Devon J Hall,

The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl