Reflecting on The Girls’ Edit

On Friday 12th February us four girls from Year 11 attended we are the mainstream’s International Women’s Day student event, The Girls’ Edit, at Bankstown Arts Centre.

The day consisted of a mix of different workshops, slam poetry performances and discussion panels where a diverse group of women openly talked about their experiences as a woman of colour, growing up in a white-dominated society that values the opinions and stories of men over women.

It was a safe space for all women of colour, with a diverse mix of women from Indigenous peoples, South Asian, Pacific Islanders, Asian, African and Middle Eastern women.

There was also a performance by a group of trans women of colour, who established an unimaginable atmosphere and set the empowering mood for the rest of the day. The performance stuck with all of us attending because we had seen very little people of colour given the spotlight for creative expression.

The energy and power of sitting in a room full of confident women, who took pride in their heritage and embraced the complexity of their backgrounds, was something none of us had never experienced before and opened our eyes to the power we as women of colour hold.

Even though we have all had different experiences as women of colour, we all learnt how powerful our voices could be, and that we did not need to justify ourselves for simply being true to our identities. The day also showed us how we shouldn’t let anyone tell us how we were supposed to act, whether it was that we were not “ethnic” enough or that we needed to be more “Australian”.

Overall, this experience taught us how moving forward, it’s vital for us to support and cheer other women of colour on the potential they hold within themselves and how safe spaces like what “we are the mainstream” provided are essential for us to grow.

Sanjana D., Priya L., Chelsea M., and Joya S are students from Cherrybrook Technology High School.