By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 10 years ago

The Wednesday Weigh-In: How do you carry that weight together?

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Today is international Carry That Weight Day of Action. Students at schools across the country will symbolically support survivors gender-based violence by collectively carrying mattresses around campus, inspired by Columbia senior Emma Sulkowicz’s “Mattress Project.” We’ve written before about Barnard student Allie Rickard’s call for everyone to “carry that weight together” and take collective responsibility for the burden we’ve allowed survivors to bear alone too long. Now she and other Morningside Heights organizers have organized this international day of solidarity to spread the message to other colleges and universities.

Of course, the need to support survivors of campus gender-based violence doesn’t end at midnight. And often the most important ways to stand in solidarity and combat assault, harassment, and abuse are neither obvious nor easy. So, for the Wednesday Weight-In: survivors, how would you like your communities to carry the weight you carry? And allies, how do you carry the weight together every day? Let us know in the comments.

 

Alexandra

Alexandra Brodsky is an editor at Feministing, a founding co-director of Know Your IX, and a student at Yale Law School.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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