Words We Heard: 'There is no place for you here in Charlottesville.'

Since the early days of Women of Cincy, we've made a concerted effort to stay impartial. We're not here to advance a political agenda; we're here to start conversations between people who might – *gasp* – have different political agendas. There have been moments where we've had to ask ourselves: "Are we looking at this issue fairly? Might we alienate a reader by failing to see both sides of the conversation?"

This wasn't one of those moments.

The violence in Charlottesville yesterday was a gut-wrenching reminder of why this project came about in the first place. We saw people across America walling themselves in behind opaque beliefs, refusing to see one another, failing to discuss, understand, empathize. (Yes, lefties: Many of you failed, too.) We saw the need to celebrate individuals in the hopes of chipping away prejudice and reviving the human part of humanity.

Did you know that the driver of the car that killed Heather Heyer was from Ohio? Does that hit home, or what? It seems we still have a lot of work to do. If you have thoughts on what we (individually or collectively) can do to eradicate this kind of senseless hatred, drop us a note.

-Kiersten

• "Clearly not everyone is aware of the legal protection that women are afforded when feeding in a public space. Policies are important, but they only work if staff are supported to understand and carry them out." –Twitter user @vaguechera in an interview with the BBC after being asked to stop breastfeeding at the Victoria and Albert Museum
• "I hope my daughter, should she choose a STEM career, will not face the discrimination and misogyny I have faced." –Chryssy Joski, computer science student, in an interview with HuffPost
• "Success looks like different things to different people. If you’re coming in as an immigrant and you want to figure out what do you do and how do you do it, figure out what success looks like to you and then figure out how you translate that and what it looks like in the community you are in." –Priya Dhingra Klocek, president and CEO of Consultant On The Go, in an interview with Women of Cincy
• "If leftovers remain at the end of the week, concoct a creative recipe to use them. It’s amazing the delicious meals that can be created from seemingly incongruous ingredients." –Melanie Hayes, wellness professional, in her Conscious Magazine article "Zero Waste Kitchen: 5 Easy Ways to Decrease Your Food Waste"
• "[H]ow we use and interpret information – and where we're getting information from in the first place – are just as important, if not more so, than the fact that we're reading." –Hillary Copsey, founder of Make America Read, in an e-newsletter
• "We need to call it out for what it is. To the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis that came to our beautiful state yesterday, there is no place for you here in Charlottesville. There is no place for you in Virginia. And there is no place for you in the United States of America." –Virginia Governor McAuliffe as reported by CNN
• "I am not going to be a professional juggler or clown or silks acrobat. But I believe my years as a youth circus performer have given me confidence to achieve success in college and beyond." –Grace Schwarzer, Circus Youth in Action alumna, in an interview with ArtsWave