Gassing with the Galdem

It is a hugely stressful, emotional and triggering time for black women and many other women of colour. We wanted to create a safe space people to spend time, support one another, hang out and have fun. 

Gassing with the Galdem is a weekly meeting space for women of colour to speak freely without the emotional labour of having to self moderate or consider white feelings and create new connections outside of existing social circles, so please only book if this is how you identify. 

Meeting every Monday evening at 8pm, facilitated by members from both our Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield branches, this space can be as radical or relaxing, celebratory, silly, angry or chill as it wants to be from week to week, let's feel it out together! 

It can be a space to offload and/or organise, to laugh, vent, cry! To strategise, spend time, waste time, heal and or bond together.

This week's theme is...

Colourism in our Communities

Monday’s Gassing with the Galdem focuses on colourism and will touch on fetishisation, education, negative attitudes towards dark skin and light skin women, caste systems and colourism in the music and beauty industries. Facilitated by our babe @_etherealtruth

Discussions will include....

- Social cultural and economic disparities

- Education
⁃ Fetishisation of light-skin women - not appreciation, it’s aggressive, ignorant and insulting (fashionable - not a trend) “I love lightskin girls” “I loved mixed girls” “I want a mixed race baby”
⁃ Negative portrayal of light skin women: “You think you’re too nice”, prestige
⁃ Negative portrayal of dark skin women: aggressive, insensitive, angry, exotic (Black Panther - all black cast but black dark skin women were portrayed as aggressive, brutal, hostile and emasculated.
⁃ Preference vs colourism?

- Music and the promotion of light skinned artists
⁃ Lyrics:  “I wanna see a light skin gyal on the road” Wiley  “Or a lightskin chick with a smile, good style and pretty little face” Dave, “Pretty little light skin girl” Popcaan
⁃ Music videos: Light-skin, big bum, small waist, curly hair
⁃ 2016 Kanye West requested ‘multiracial women only’ for his Yeezy Season 4 casting
⁃ Beyonce’s father himself said it’s ‘no accident’ that most black women played on the radio have ‘lighter skin in common’ and that this helped propel Beyonce’s career

- Historical issues and causes
⁃ African vs Caribbean (diluted / purer)
⁃ Frantz Fanon: ‘the enemy of the Negro is often not the white man but a man of his own colour’
⁃ Brown paper bag test for acceptance and inclusion within social events and even churches
⁃ Caste system (4 castes and the bottom layer - untouchables) Lighter tones at the top, darker skin tones at the bottom

Beauty and fashion industries
⁃ Skin lightening and bleaching

Kimberly Mcintosh: ‘being spurned by your own race is another burden dark-skinned women don’t need’

This event is free to attend with the option to donate to support the work of Girl Gang Manchester (pay our facilitators) and/or raise money for racial justice charities each week. 

This month's charity is The Black LGBTQIA+ Therapy Fund, a UK based GoFundMe Page committed to funding 1 to 1 therapy sessions for black LGBTQIA+ people. Currently able to provide therapy for a year and working to register as a charity to continue this on a more permanent basis.

https://uk.gofundme.com/f/black-lgbtqia-therapy-fund

This space is catered towards women and people of marginalised genders. 

We would love to have you in our circle and help shape this space together xx

We love to know who's in our gang! When people book tickets with us we ask some identity related questions  so we can see who is attending our events.  Knowing about all our differences and similarities helps us feel more informed when striving to create events and content which is more relevant to our audience. Collecting data serves a few functions for us: 
1: We can keep an eye on who's in the room to brief facilitators if anyone has additional requirements or to ensure the session they are planning is relevant.
2: So we can be aware of underrepresentation and try to counter balance this where possible, (resources dependent as we are volunteer led.)

3: We can potentially use the data for future funding bids, which are some times catered to specific area's and/or audiences

This data is only stored on Tickettailor which is password protected and only used by one of our team. If you do not feel comfortable sharing this information with us, please simply write N/A in the boxes.