Thandiwe Abdullah helped to bring an end to random searches in the Los Angeles Unified School District and to create the Black Lives Matter at School program. She is also the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard.

Here’s a quote from Thandiwe Abdullah’s I March For Black Girls & The Black Women Who Marched Before Me published by Refinery 29:

But what has women’s rights movements looked like? To be quite honest, I never felt as if I had a place in the women’s rights movement. It seemed like all I saw were majority white women who spoke about their wage gap or micro-aggressions.

While I on the other hand knew that Black women were paid 21% less than the average white woman and was 99% sure that they didn’t know how it felt to have a random hand in their curls. I felt out of place. Erased. There was a privilege in that movement that went unnoticed and still is being kept quiet. This isn’t only an issue within the women’s rights movement, but also others such as the environmental movement. Women of color most of the time have a completely different set of experiences than that of our white counterparts. This definitely isn’t meant to be an erasure of the struggles of white women because the struggles of all women are definitely present. It’s a wake up call. While we must counteract the oppression we face we must also be aware of our privilege in every space we occupy. I’m tired of women’s rights movements and other movements not reflecting all of the people who fall within it. And yet today, Black women and girls are still targeted, hyper-sexualized, and criminalized. It is a fact that there is a constant erasure of women and girls of color in activist spaces.

Read more from I March For Black Girls & The Black Women Who Marched Before Me, TIME, Elle and Seventeen.