As a queer femme of color, I keep close relationships with people who go beyond allyship; they’re true accomplices in the fight against white supremacy, queerphobia, and misogyny. If you’re not going to support marginalized folks, then we can’t be friends, let alone date. The personal is political.

Beyond the lovely cushioning, happiness and support that we receive from our platonic relationships (which are, in all honesty, soul-feeding and essential), feminists also date! But there are questions we have to ask before we get close to someone.

The following list of questions is applicable to all relationships — certainly not just cisgender, heterosexual ones:

1. Do you believe that Black Lives Matter?

Yes? Wonderful. Let’s start here. There are three categories that are non-negotiables for me: an understanding of race, class, and gender. Not everyone understands how these three can be insidious, systemic and intertwined, but anyone who doesn’t take the time to learn how systemic racism works isn’t going to care about how racism affects me or people who are darker-skinned than I am.

I don’t want to have to have laborious discussions where I have to prove to someone that white privilege or non-black privilege exists. If they are willing to learn and listen and make the space to decenter their whiteness (if they are white), that’s a good place to start.

2. What are your thoughts on gender and sexual orientation?

The gender binary is a tiny box and I wish it didn’t exist, but it does. I wouldn’t want to be with anyone who is queer-phobic. One out of many important elements to dismantling patriarchy is to abolish gender roles as well as the limited understanding that we have about sexuality and gender itself. I can’t imagine being with someone who is transphobic; as a feminist and woman of color, it would be a betrayal of what I stand for. Ignoring trans-misogynoir would be to deny one of the biggest, most despicable problems that we face.

3. How do you work to dismantle sexism and misogyny in your life?

I’ve met cisgender heteronormative (cishet) men who hate women. They say they love women, but that love is conditional on not having their toxic masculinity questioned or threatened in any way. And they love us as a monolith, they love what women have to offer, whether it is sex, food, love, care, emotional labor: they love us for what we can do for them, not because of who we are for ourselves. It is crucial for cishet men to learn how to decenter their male privilege in order for them to understand the multitudes of interpretations of femininity and womanhood.

Beyond Misogyny 101, does the person you are with understand rape culture, systemic sexism, and misogynoir? Are they willing to learn if they don’t? Misogyny is more than the pay gap. Walk away from anyone who believes that “boys will be boys” and that women are supposed to be mothers because we’re nothing but ambulatory incubators.

4. What are your thoughts on sex work?

You may scratch your head at this one, but much like racism and misogynoir, being pro-sex worker is a necessary pillar of dismantling the patriarchy. I don’t mean pro-sex worker in the sense where non-sex workers write op-eds and think pieces about how sex work is amazing and feminist.

I mean the kind where we pass the mic to sex workers because they know their experiences better than anyone who hasn’t ever engaged in sex work. I mean the kind of pro-heauxism where you understand the labor of sex workers of color, especially trans women of color who engage in sex work, because their experience and knowledge is crucial to understanding the oppressive structures of our world.

5. Are you a supporter of the BDS movement?

BDS stands for “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” — an effort to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. I grew up with Jewish (Israeli and non-Israeli) friends and Palestinian friends. Before even understanding how power and oppression worked together, we understood the trivial hatred that colonized and put in constant danger the lives of Palestinians every single day.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

According to the academic article written by two communications professors,“whiteness-informed civility,” supposedly “functions to assert control of space” and “create a good white identity.”

“Civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm,” the C. Kyle Rudick and Kathryn B. Golsan wrote while citing “critical whiteness studies.”

Rudick and Goslan interviewed ten white college students and asked them racially based questions Campus Reform reports.

“What do you consider to be civil behavior?” and “How do you think your racial identity may affect your understandings of civility when talking with students of color?” were some of the questions asked by the two professors.

“First, participants stated that they tried to avoid talking about race or racism with students of color to minimize the chance that they would say something ‘wrong’ and be labeled a racist,” the professors write, as cited by Campus Reform. “Another way that participants described how they tried to be civil when interacting with students of color was to be overly nice or polite.”

According to the professors, students who attempt to be nice to minorities are only encouraging “white privilege” and “white racial power.”

Rudick and Goslan also targeted students who believe in equality.

“I feel like I treat everyone the same…To me, if you’re white or black…, then I’m going to treat you like you’re a human being. I guess I don’t see skin color whenever I see someone,” one student, told the professors, according to Campus Reform.

Rudick and Goslan claimed that this view of equality “functions to erase racial identity in the attempt to impose a race-evasive frame on race-talk.”

The professors called for other faculty members to intervene, stating “it is incumbent upon instructors to ensure that their classrooms are spaces that challenge, rather than perpetuate, WIC [whiteness-informed civility].”

“One way that instructors can challenge the strategies of WIC is by ensuring that White students and students of color engage in sustained, sensitive, and substantive conversations about race and racism,” Rudick and Goslan said before adding that professors should, “encourage White students to understand how using WIC to downplay issues of race or racism in higher education serves to elide their own social location and reinforce the hegemony of White institutional presence.”

They are communications professors, of course, or they’d know that asking ten students a question does not a study make.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the very agency tasked with saving and protecting the lives of the most vulnerable, are now under order by the Trump administration to stop using words including "vulnerable" in 2018 budget documents, according to The Washington Post.

In a 90-minute briefing on Thursday, policy analysts at the nation's leading public health institute were presented with the menu of seven banned words, an analyst told the paper. On the list: "diversity," "fetus," "transgender," "vulnerable," "entitlement," "science-based" and "evidence-based."