weneedtotalk

Every June, millions of people part of the LGBTQ+ community and their allies gather to celebrate the existence and beauty of different forms of love and connection. This month of wholesome, deserving support was initiated to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan, and soon turned into a movement to push forward the idea of equality of all people regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation.

In March of 2021, it was revealed that Facebook had plans to make a version of Instagram for children under 13. Currently, Instagram does not allow children under 13 to use the platform, but many simply lie about their age in order to gain access to the platform. Facebook says that this new site will provide a safe place for kids to interact away from content on Instagram that may be inappropriate for young children. The site will include parental supervision and not display ads.

The Olympics have been in the news recently, but not because of the world-class athletes participating. Several organizations related to the Olympic Games have come under fire for actions widely seen as racist, especially to women of color.

The second wave of COVID-19 has caused tremendous damage in India. In June of 2020, India had reported 10,000 COVID-19 cases and began adding around 35,000 more cases every day after that. Then, in February 2021, cases in India were rising by 22,000 daily. However, this only worsened after the second COVID-19 wave intensified causing nearly a daily average of 89,000 cases daily.

With the availability of media giving us insights from and about people across the globe, awareness about LGBTQ+ is getting better every day, but are our institutions doing anything to aid the children that are coming out every day? Are institutions even doing anything to at least try and understand and educate children about gender and sexuality?

Demand for online delivery has increased as quarantine suddenly struck society, and popular online retailer Amazon is no stranger to that fact. According to an employee tally at one delivery center, Amazon has been processing from 10% to 40% more packages than normal for this time of year. The company’s website had 639,330,722 visits for the week of March 9, according to data from Comscore, up 32% from the year earlier. This has put employees and workers there under immense strain as they try to process orders as quickly as possible.

Imagine looking at the current events as though you are looking through a glass dome. Imagine trying to speak and everyone looks at you as if you are talking in someone else’s voice. To simultaneously speak for both sides and yet be voiceless; this is what it feels like to be a white-passing Black person.

According to the Women in Law and Development in Africa, over 2.5 billion women and girls around the world are affected by discriminatory laws. These discriminatory laws can range anywhere from restrictions on marriage, citizenship, and applying for jobs. Even today, men and women are held to different standards, which often hold women and girls back.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January, 15 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. He was initially known as Micheal King Jr. and was the second child of Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. King had an older sister named Willie Christine and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel Williams King, which made him the middle-child. King was from a middle-class family. He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. His family resided on Auburn Avenue which was recognized as the “Black Wall Street”, which included America’s largest and most successful black businesses and black churches years prior to the civil rights movement. Although King was fortunate to live in a secure and loving area and have parents who desperately tried to protect him from racism, he often still encountered situations experiencing prejudices. When Martin was a child, his white peers refused to play with him because they were now attending segregated schools.

Insecurity plagues many of us, taunting our very being. It comes in several forms, whether it be through our physical appearance, gender, sexual orientation, or even personality. Sometimes, the anxiety takes over, the unreasonable thoughts storming your mind like a sudden tidal wave. Sometimes, we feel stuck, drowning, the hurricane closing around us; we’re right at the eye, helplessly thrashing about in an endless pool of doubt. Sometimes, we feel like all that’s left of us are the ruins. Left unchecked, these feelings can easily overpower us.