Note: I frequently feature readers’ answers to one or more of the questions Emma and I asked on our road trip. Find out how to submit here.

Javacia: 28, writer and educator, lives in Birmingham, Alabama, blogs at GeorgiaMae.com, where she writes about feminism, race issues, media, pop culture and more.

Do you consider yourself a feminist; why or why not?

I am a black feminist, though I’ve been told that phrase is an oxymoron. People have told me my feminist beliefs emasculate black men and have asked why I choose to associate myself with a movement started by “rich, racist white women with nothing better to do.”

But when it comes to the issue of feminism and race, my favorite poet June Jordan said it best: “I am feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.”

So while people ask how I can be black and feminist, I ask, “How could I not?”

I am also a Christian feminist, though men standing in pulpits have said my feminism is a sin. Yet, over two millennia ago Jesus was protesting the stoning of women and dispelling the notion that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. So I tell them Jesus was a feminist–this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

How is your experience of being a woman affected by where you live or where you come from?

I recently returned to my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama after living in the Midwest and on the West Coast for several years. I am very proud of my Southern roots, but I come from a family that bucked many conventions. My mom, who loves watching Spike TV and wears a skirt about twice a year, doesn’t exactly conform to old-fashioned ideas of what it means to be “lady-like.” My dad, who does all the cooking and loves watching soap operas, always encouraged me to be ambitious and independent. He once said he wanted me to be America’s first female president.

I became a writer instead. I write to tell my stories and those of other young women, which I believe can be as political as running for office because as poet Aracelis Girmay once said, “As long as we are living in a society or culture that says that it’s okay for some people to have voices and others to not have voices, then speaking is a political act.”