empowerment

She stands tall, her hands wrapped around her iconic torch and tablet. Her green, dashiki-inspired dress is accompanied by an Afro that peeks out from under her crown; her large hoop earrings cascade down her shoulders.

“Beauty has no skin tone.” “My culture is not your costume.” “Eliminate girl hate.”

What you saw: A white man harassing a group of black students while shouting “White people built the modern world!” As his shrill voice fills your ears, you are surprised that racism exists on your beloved college campus. You discuss it over a meal with friends the next day, but as you focus on finals, the events in the video are quickly forgotten.

When my mother immigrated to the United States from Japan at age 19, she found that the English language was her key to upward social mobility. Just as my mother desired to become literate in English, my desire was to become “financially literate.”

In the midst of the #MeToo movement, when new allegations of sexual harassment regularly make national headlines, the Women’s March on New York City brought more than 200,000 people of all ages to the Upper West Side. Held on the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election, people took to the streets to call for change in the White House as well as in their day-to-day lives.

At Columbia, you’d be hard-pressed to find any woman afraid to call herself a feminist.

Barnard has no rival school. We have no college we’re trained from NSOP to hate, no big matchup game to travel to every year, and no decades-long dispute about which school is clearly superior to the other. Instead, Barnard has the Seven Sisters: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley.

When East Harlem native Janiqua Codrington was growing up in the Abraham Lincoln Houses on Madison Avenue and 135th Street, she didn't fully appreciate the intensive curriculum she was studying at Frederick Douglass Academy, a high-performing secondary school on 148th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Founded in 2006 by writers Shelly Baer and Vanessa Silverman, the Raw Beauty Project was originally conceived as a fundraiser for the Center for Independent Living in Miami. The project, which was first exhibited in Miami's Dorsch Gallery, features portraits of 22 physically disabled women along with self-written captions about their lives.

Sheryl Sandberg is still doing her feel-good-corporate-neoliberal-faux-feminism thing, in case you'd forgotten her in the five minutes since her last project. This time, she's paired up with Getty Images to produce 2,500 images of women and families looking "empowered." The three most-searched terms on Getty's site according to the New York Times are "women," "business," and "family," yet the images that existed before Sandberg and Getty's holy union were too wrapped up in stereotypical tropes of femininity. Enter Sandberg-Getty.