Kalah Mingo is a 20-year-old journalism student at the University of Georgia. Mingo shares her experiences as a woman of color in America.

Mingo talks about personal experiences of discrimination on an intimate level in her early years of college when she encounters her friends saying “the n word with the hard r” around her without considering how it might offend or affect her.

“It hurts a lot more to know that even though they are supposed to be your friend, that they would say such a derogatory term.”

Mingo says the biggest threat to black people in America is the cyclical phase of poverty and lack of education. Additionally, she mentions that the way in which other people view black people is an influential thing that holds the black community back.

“People who get out of those situations are the exception, they’re not the rule. You can’t really change a whole pattern of people based on exceptions.”

Kalah also touches on how black women experience a form of racism through a reinforcement of certain stereotypes. The stereotype of being the loud, ghetto, angry black woman who is overtly sexualized in media and TV is something Mingo says is a burden her community must overcome daily.

For black men, Mingo mentions a different kind of stereotype they must face, “Black men are always viewed as the villain or the thug. People are trying to paint this narrative of black me being scary or thugs and it is just not true.”

“We matter, we exist, we are individual people who have lives and those lives matter.”