The Story of Yopp the Social Justice Blog and How You Can Be Part of It

Welcome to Yopp the social justice blog! Let me tell you a little bit about what we do here and how you can get involved. 

Yopp is where you go when someone shouts, “Educate yourself!”

Yopp is where you go when you’ve suffered deeply at the hands of society and need to feel heard.

Yopp is where you go when your uncle makes a post on facebook completely misrepresenting what privilege is but this is the third time this week you’ve tried to explain privilege to someone and you are simply burnt out.

Today I wanted to tell you the story of why I created the social justice blog Yopp, what Yopp’s goals are, and how you can get involved in making those goals a reality.

Educate

In the world of social justice, one of the first things you learn is how, through no fault of your own, there is a huge body of info that you never knew existed. In school, we’re taught so little about the impact that oppression has on marginalized groups or how the history of social activism looks when told from the perspective of the marginalized. As a result, we end up pretty much being responsible for our own education and development.

Over the course of my self-education, it bothered me that there wasn’t any singular place that I could go for quality, in-depth, informative articles about social justice. I learned a little bit from here and a little bit from there, and even though I saw newcomers with the same questions over and over, I struggled to find single articles that answered our questions. It seemed like anyone was capable of identifying the harmful behaviors society had taught them but most people didn’t know where to start.

Consolidate

I also noticed that explanations about privilege and microaggressions and discrimination were always specific to one group at a time: In my journey, I learned about sexism first, and then racism, then later I added on homophobia, classism, transphobia, fatphobia, Islamophobia, and eventually ableism to my pool of knowledge. I noticed that treating these issues as completely separate topics that needed to be studied one at a time frequently backfired: “I have male privilege? Wait, I have white privilege? Now I have cis privilege? This is too many things to remember!” People felt overwhelmed by the constantly growing and evolving body of rules and terms and would throw their hands up after learning about just a few causes.

It bothered me that this piecemeal strategy was the default approach despite the fact that there were plenty of commonalities between the different forms of oppression that were pretty easy to extrapolate to other groups once you understood them. But because the different branches of activism were so separate, I regularly saw the same activists who would fight hard against certain behaviors in their oppressors, turn around and engage in the same behaviors against a different oppressed group that they weren’t a member of.

Validate

I also knew that many people found the way that social activists communicated to be preachy and judgmental. I understood that what they were seeing as drama was actually completely justified anger on the part of people who had been oppressed for hundreds of years. I firmly believed that people who had spent their life making themselves smaller and unobtrusive were fully within their right to express themselves exactly the way they needed to, and not just prioritize the needs of the people that had hurt them so many times. And I knew that non-marginalized people watching them didn’t understand that context.

I have this body of knowledge because I spent the last 8 years dedicating myself to learning everything I could from the sources that were available to me: Books by marginalized authors, research that has been translated and narrated into impactful articles available online, and most of all, from listening to the individual experiences of people that I’ve met. I did so out of a deep-seated sense of obligation to reduce harm whenever possible and my love for learning.

My personal experiences as a young woman that has had to manage disability, chronic illness, poverty, and several types of mental illness, gave me direct insight into many of the issues that I researched, but it also gave me compassion for the issues that didn’t affect me directly. As my knowledge grew, between my research, my compassion, and the skills I already possessed as a writer, I discovered people found clarity, understanding, and validation when I wrote about what I learned.

So, I made Yopp to accomplish the following goals:

• To provide an online school and an all-encompassing hub of resources that teaches the overarching principles of the mechanics behind social justice, in order to teach more issues, more efficiently.
• To validate both the perspective of the oppressed and the person just learning about oppression for the first time, since most of us will be both people at some point in our lives.
• To create connections between the different aspects of activism I found most important: Education, the touching stories of individuals, recommendations of media, criticisms of common faulty arguments, and calls to action.
• To maintain a platform for other marginalized writers to share their stories and perspectives.

I made the material free because I wanted it to be accessible to as many backgrounds as possible, and because I wanted to lower the threshold to you using the articles as references for when someone doesn’t understand a concept in social justice and you don’t have the words to explain it to them.

I called it Yopp after Dr. Seuss’s “Horton Hears a Who.” Yopp is the noise that the little Who made so that together with the noise of all the other Who’s, the volume was loud enough to convince the other animals that the Who’s were real and deserving of safety.

I cannot end any form of oppression by myself. No one can. My hope is that by creating these resources, I am effectively training hundreds or maybe even thousands of people how to be social activists themselves, thereby amplifying the power that I have as an individual into something much, much bigger than myself.

Why You Should Invest in Yopp

In April of last year, I started a Patreon for Yopp so that my community would have an opportunity to be financially involved in Yopp’s growth over time. Patreon is essentially a crowd-funding website that enables individual fans of a content creator to pay an amount of their choosing on a monthly basis. $5 a month from 50 different patrons is a really big improvement for creators whose work would otherwise go largely unpaid.

It’s always been important to me to keep the resources on Yopp accessible to everyone and not hide them behind a paywall. But although guest writers are always compensated for their work, I create the majority of the resources completely unpaid.

By becoming a patron, you would be acknowledging the value that these resources have brought to you, whether that is because of something they taught you or because linking or quoting an article enabled you to teach another person, thereby continuing this chain of spreading information.

Yopp is also a long-term project that is always in progress. I currently have 40 additional educational articles planned that will build on one another to create a fully functional curriculum of sorts. (​You can read the existing educational material here at Yopp Academy.) These articles are extraordinarily work-intensive to write and I am not always in good enough health to be working on them, so this educational foundation will likely take years to complete.

I don’t need a lump sum of money upfront, I need people who are passionate about my work and are in it for the long haul. I need investors that want to see me build Yopp up to its full potential, over a long period of time. I’m looking for supporters that recognize how much the work I’ve done already is worth.

I want you to come on this journey with me, with whatever it is that you have to offer, even if that is only $1 a month. If you have the financial privilege to do so, by investing in Yopp, you are supporting and enabling the education of future activists who don’t have access to that financial support. You are helping keep this content free and accessible to everyone. You are enabling me to offer you the best version of my work that I have.

Becoming a patron is super easy and bonus content rewards start at the $1 tier! Click the button below to become a patron and support Yopp.

Buy Our Merch

Another fun way to get involved in the Yopp community and support Yopp financially is to buy our merch. On our Zazzle store you’ll see our line of Ableism Bingo Cards, individually designed and hand-illustrated bingo cards with phrases and scenarios tailored to specific types of chronic illness and disability.

And on our Etsy Store, you’ll find a wide range of products with original designs drawn by me that follow themes of disability and chronic illness awareness, mental health, LGBT Pride, and social justice in general.

See our whole Etsy Store