Growing up in a predominantly white, middle-class environment as a black woman didn’t have an explicitly negative impact on my formative years. While I could see that my skin colour was different to that of my peers, the implications of my blackness weren’t something I was acutely aware of until I entered my teens. It was only then that I realised I didn’t fit neatly into the stereotypical perception of a black woman.

From here on in, my actions were scrutinised. I was called a “bounty” for speaking “white” – as though my speech was a foreign dialect. I used slang but not too much, and I was loud but not too loud, making me a “different” sort of black girl. My white friends called me “black beauty”, as though being black and beautiful were normally mutually exclusive. And to my black male friends I was borderline acceptable: I didn’t quite possess the idealised caramel complexion, but I wasn’t considered “too dark” either.

In response, I tried playing up to black stereotypes, and, when that didn’t work, I tried the opposite. I tried to separate myself from characteristics considered overtly “black”, forever conscious of how I was perceived.

These questions and expectations along gender and racial lines were my first insight into why black feminism exists, though I didn’t immediately connect the dots or understand their significance. Instead, such micro-aggressions became entrenched in day-to-day interaction and therefore normalised parts of everyday life, a common experience among women of colour. It wasn’t that I was brought up without a feminist moral compass; while the word “feminism” wasn’t a part of my vocabulary yet, notions of “girl power” were established in my behaviour. It was obvious that women could do all that men could, but I was yet to examine feminism through a critical lens. Throughout school, my engagement with politics, feminism and race continued, though I was yet to go further than the gender pay gap – a problem centred in the white feminist experience.

When studying these issues at university, however, I quickly became aware of how often issues facing black, Asian and minority ethnic, queer, disabled and trans women were bypassed by the mainstream feminist movement. My texts centred on ancient white men’s voices, heralding them as the “founding fathers” of social sciences, while women such as Simone de Beauvoir were only held up as the “founders” of feminism. Quite frankly, I couldn’t identify with much of what they were saying. I wondered whether feminist academia was for me, only to realise that it wasn’t really trying to be.

The feminism I was seeking was one that explored how young millennial women navigated multiple identities, one that addressed blatant discrimination and silent oppression, and one that refused to treat women as a homogeneous entity, I felt that only through celebrating and acknowledging difference would emancipation for all women be achieved.

This wasn’t something that was at all apparent in mainstream feminism, centred around campaigns such as #FreeTheNipple, showcasing conventionally attractive white bodies only. This is where I began to seek alternatives, not only from black feminist academics but also outside of academia: in the Twittersphere, Instagram, blogs and other forms of social media where women of colour from varied backgrounds were able to connect. But many of these sources are painfully American-centric, with few UK-based publications centred on the voices of young women in the UK.

Setting up the website gal-dem has gone some way to resolving this; through authentically representing the diverse body of voices of black and brown feminist millennials, our team is able to deal with complex and varied identities. By taking control of our own narratives as a diverse group of young women, gal-dem counters stereotypes that permeate much of mainstream media and academia.

Existing in white spaces can be alienating, and the creation of our site was a response to this. Having young women of colour from all over the globe reach out to us and express how much our work resonates with them is an incredible feeling. The expressions of black, intersectional feminism and womanism are integral parts of our self-care and we will not wait for the next wave of mainstream feminism to acknowledge our existence. We are here and have always been. Our experiences are just as important as any other.