"Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying."

--Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”

(via WYSIWYG)

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Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

"Let's start by pointing out that intersectionality isn't such a scary word, and gasp, plenty of people who haven't been university-educated are capable of looking it up and understanding it. Here's a good definition. It's not that hard to understand. It's essentially a useful way of saying that things like sexuality, race, class, religion, and ability overlap. For example, a White woman's experience of sexism may be vastly different from a Black woman's. Has your brain died from exhaustion yet? It's so condescending to suggest that non-academics just aren't smart enough to get this."

--le projet d’amour: On Feminism: Intersectionality

(via Tudo Bom(b)) 

The previous post taught me a WONDERFUL new word!

It is the best new word I have learned in a while. It makes all the sociologist and feminist and race-scholar parts of me simultaneously happy.

If you were reading closely, I bet you saw it too, and were like, hmm, this word, what does it mean? 

Kyriarchy

(n.) a social system or set of interlocking social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission...coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza to describe interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others.

(via wikipedia)

Basically, it's like, yo, I heard you like intersectionality, so I put some intersectionality in your intersectionality. And I need to go read all the things that employ this concept like immediately. 

BIG Questions

I'm wrestling with two pretty big and somewhat linked issues right now, as I move towards a better and deeper self-understanding. I suppose it's somewhat impossible to study college's effect on student ide entity without pondering my own identity and the way Princeton is molding it. Anddddd I guess one of the purposes of even starting this blog was to get back in touch (or perhaps even in touch for the first time) with who I really am. 

Well I can't know who I am until I can definitively answer these questions:

1) Is my blackness or my womanness more important to me? Which comes first, and is that firstness justified?

2) Fact: I might actually be more non-black than I am of African descent. What does that mean for my identity as a black person? And for my ideas about black people in general?

Relatedly, I identify as a Black American. I don't like the term African-American as relating to ME, because I feel it should be reserved for first/second/third generation immigrants, like most other -American groups use the hyphenation, and that does not apply to me or my people. Not to denounce my African roots in any way, but I'm not even sure the majority of my blood comes from the motherland (I'm also German, French Canadian, Native American, Portuguese, and probably a few other random things). .I feel like the term African-American doesn't give respect to the fact that my ancestors are not all just from Africa. They come from... all over the world. My skin is not that of an African's. Neither is my hair. I know from conversations with my African friends, neither are the vast majority of my ideas and perceptions of the world. Those things and more all come from the eclectic blend of cultures and heritages within me, and within most of us who have descended from slavery--we all know that wasn't an institution built upon preserving the separation of the races--and I believe "black American" is the most fitting term (of those we have to choose from) to represent that blend. I also like "multi-generational African-Americans", a term Imani Perry tossed out in precept last week...