Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, often times, the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.

—CONGRESSWOMAN ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

In third grade I had an unrequited crush on a dreamy little boy named Isiah. I was absolutely certain I would marry him when I grew up! One day out of the blue, Isiah blurted out, “Eliza! You’re so pretty!” He then promptly hauled off and hit me, hard, really hard. I immediately started running to his house, tears streaming down my cheeks and absolutely determined to get him grounded for life.

When I reached the porch, my now not future mother-in-law, Bema, was waiting, a look of profound concern on her face. “What’s wrong, Eliza? Are you hurt?”

“Yes! Isiah hit me on the shoulder—really hard! It still hurts!” By this time Isiah was standing next to me, breathless, ready to make his case.

He didn’t have to.

To my shock, his mom looked relieved, then laughed warmly and said, “Oh, Eliza, don’t make him feel too bad about it. He hit you because he likes you, right, Isiah?” Isiah looked a little surprised, but then relieved. His mom looked at him with sympathy, as if he was the most endearing child she had ever met.

“It’s OK, Isiah.” She smiled, comforting him.

At first, I felt deeply, profoundly confused. Then I stopped thinking about my shoulder, which still hurt. I pushed my anger aside, ignoring that voice in my head that said, “But Eliza! You know this is not right.” I absorbed my new normal.

I guess it was good he hit me. It meant he liked me.

This is my story, and I’m pretty confident you have one like it. It’s a story as old as time.

Little girls learn a powerful lesson from these stories: the world is unsafe for you, and that’s OK. Learn to live with it, work to accommodate it, and sometimes don’t only justify it but embrace it. It’s OK for a boy to hit a girl, but only if he likes you. Push your own pain aside. Forgive, sympathize, and appreciate men who can’t express their feelings except through violence.

Violence = Love

Be nice. Be polite. And be thankful you are loved at all.

As little girls we learn quickly we do not have the right to exist safely in any space, sometimes even with the people who profess to care about us. We teach little girls the safety scale, a scale that dictates where we go, what we do, and how we live. When entering a space, we quickly place ourselves on the scale. How safe, or unsafe, are we? The safety scale is so woven into the fabric of our history and training that most of us don’t know we have it, much less that it can play a huge role in dictating our behavior.

The safety scale slides from total emotional safety to dire physical danger. Both extremes are rare, although they are more common for women in targeted groups. All of us, however, live much of our lives navigating the complex and sometimes terrifying realities of everything in between.

How emotionally safe is this space?

Is there a dangerous group dynamic?

Is there a particular person I need to carefully navigate?

Is this a “big blow up” danger or a “death by a thousand cuts” situation?

Sitting down in an airplane, a man spreads out, taking both armrests. You make an assessment with lightning speed. “If I push my arm onto the armrest, is it safe? Will I face fallout? Will he get annoyed? Become angry? Will he think I’m flirting? Will he even care?” Just how safe are you to claim the space you rightfully deserve?

On the other side of the spectrum are the big scary space stealers. The things that conjure up images of boogeymen jumping out of bushes, threatening our physical safety.

Is this space safe enough to be in at all?

If I shouldn’t be here, can I leave safely?

Do I need a male protector in this space?

Is it worth being in the space if I need a male protector?

What precautions must I take to mitigate my risk?

Walk to your car alone at night from a restaurant, and that boogeyman looms large. You know a shortcut, but the street is dark and unpopulated. No. That space is not safe for you. You cannot claim it. So you go the long route and for good measure call a friend because that seems to deter run-of-the-mill harassers. If you can’t get someone on the phone, you pretend you’re on the phone—it makes an unsafe space feel just a little safer. This is an issue women face throughout our lives, and it’s far more common than most of our male counterparts understand. I recently told my friend Alek that there are apps women use so their friends can track them and call 911 if necessary. The fact apps like that exist says a lot. The fact Alek, an enlightened intersectional feminist male ally, had no idea these exist shows the two worlds women and men live in.

The right to feel safe and secure in a space should be a fundamental human right. Yet for women, that right is rarely fulfilled. Often we live in a state of hypervigilance, navigating the best we can around unsafe people and institutions.

It’s also critical to note that White women and Black women have a different experience with space.

Dr. Nia Nunn is a professor, researcher, and community leader who has created transformative antiracist modules, workshops, and talks to educate White people and empower and uplift the voices of young people, particularly Black women and girls. I also am very lucky to call Dr. Nunn a mentor on issues of race and equally lucky to call her my friend. Dr. Nunn has spoken with me at great length about issues of Blackness, “spaciality,” and Black womanhood. She pointed out to me that when White women walk into a space, it is being a woman that puts us in danger, but when Black women walk into a space, the experience is quite different.

“A student of mine described it perfectly,” said Dr. Nunn. “She said ‘My Blackness enters the space before I do’ when describing the challenge of navigating predominantly White spaces.”¹

For women of color, there is an extra layer of what does and does not make a space unsafe. I will address this layer in depth, with the help of Dr. Nunn, in the final part.

This part will teach you three critical skills:

1. Finding your center. Embrace your reality and know your value in a world that can undermine both.

2. Identifying different threats. Dissect, and name, the different challenges you face so you can better combat them.

3. Neutralizing unsafe environments. Implement strategies to optimize your safety without making yourself invisible.

I faced a philosophical conundrum when approaching this section. This part is about behaviors of others that make us feel unsafe. We do not do this to ourselves. So the question is this: If a woman is walking down the street and men are catcalling her, what should I do? Teach the woman how to handle catcalling? Perhaps. I would argue there is a fairer solution: teach men to self-reflect so they stop catcalling. Writing this part felt a bit like telling women it is women, and not men, who are responsible for managing men’s poor behavior. On top of this, many of the solutions historically offered to women may have made them safe but were incredibly damaging. Don’t want to be seen as a bitch? Offer fewer opinions and smile more. Want to feel safe from assault? Try not to dress like a “slut.” These victim-blaming solutions are psychologically damaging and diminish us. They tell us the solution to feeling unsafe claiming space is to make ourselves smaller. When we feel diminished, we feel less powerful. When we feel less powerful, we are less safe. When facing these challenges, we must not shrink; we must expand into our power. This part will give you powerful techniques to do that.

Claiming space is a hell of a lot harder than simply calling out the behavior. “Hey, if you could please stop [insert bad behavior], that would be just lovely!” seems like it should work. It often doesn’t. When we call out certain behaviors, the following can happen, in this order:

1. Denial. They refuse to see their own behavior.

Man: “What are you talking about? I never did that!”

2. Blame shifting. If denial doesn’t work, they shift the blame, insinuating it isn’t their behavior that’s a problem—it’s the woman’s mental state.

Man: “Calm down and stop being so crazy/bitchy.”

3. Gaslighting. The woman begins to doubt herself because she’s been convinced that what happened didn’t actually happen, or at least it didn’t happen the way she experienced it.

Woman: “Maybe I am crazy?”

4. Blindness. The woman begins to distrust her compass, questioning if she’s seeing the man’s behavior clearly.

Woman: “Maybe it wasn’t that big a deal. Maybe I made it up. Or it’s my fault.”

Once stages 3 and 4 are reached, neutralizing behaviors becomes close to impossible. If you cease to believe yourself, if you no longer see something clearly, stopping it can be extraordinarily difficult. Without the right tools, this is true even if you’re a committed space claimer. The crazy-making pushback we experience from calling out a behavior can be more unsettling than the behavior itself.

You will learn techniques to shut down behaviors in these chapters, but you will also learn to mitigate pushback you may get when you claim space in unsafe spaces. I have read many articles and books that blithely tell women to shut down behaviors without any understanding of potential fallout, or tools to circumvent said fallout. The chapters in this part will do both.

I believe both women and men, even the men who engage in this behavior the most, have little kids who live inside them who are crying out, “But Isiah! But Eliza! You both know this is not right.” Yet so much of society tells us to ignore that moral compass crying out for change. And so many of us gamely go along with this destructive narrative. We don’t have to.

We must reject the upside-down messages we have been told time and time again. Until every one of us is safe to speak our truths and walk with confidence in any space, none of us are safe. We must fight tooth and nail to claim our space however and wherever we can.

The little girls in us still remember what it felt like to believe we deserved better. Those little girls expected to become women who lived in a fair and safe world. They remember the painful and confusing mental gymnastics it took to accept the world as it is. The little girl in each of us still tells us that this is not right, that we deserve better, so much better. Let’s do right by them.