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Being an “outsider” is a soft word for feeling like an outcast. I have felt like this for the majority of my life and I still struggle with feeling like an “outsider” to this very day. Most experiences I have had with feeling like a “outsider” are very violent and bring back terrible memories from my past. Sharing this information with anyone else wouldn’t be appropriate and necessary for a public college discussion. Instead I can give a more controlled and less emotionally felt experience in my life as feeling like a “outsider”. In elementary school I grew up in an impoverished and violent neighborhood. I didn’t have the proper hygiene products to make me a likable student in school and my eczema was untreated and most of the time bloody and unattractive. Wearing ripped, smelly clothing and being physically unattractive made people avoid me. No one wanted to socialize with me. I never went to a birthday party, a get together, a dance or anything. I didn’t have no school supplies and I hadn’t read a book at all in elementary school . So the feeling of an outsider  followed me as I moved from school to school, it followed me into my home and it follows me even today in different forms. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider within: The Social Significance of Black Feminist Thought” explains how these experiences teach black women about oppression and sociality. That being or feeling like an outsider allows them to realize how to distinguish themselves amongst other people and stereotypes like white women. That like the white women they too shared a similar source of oppression, the white man. Even though their oppression was felt in different degrees. Black women began to use their assertiveness and sass as functions that helped them survive. This enabled them to cope with and fend off oppression of being an “outsider”.