Our human identities are complex, and we find meaning in the differentiations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, age, ability and social class. While diversity could be treated as something beautiful, essential and celebratory, it has led to a long history of conflict, power struggle and oppression. At their best, groups seeking justice and equity have worked to rid of such discrimination, but their approach has often broken down the complex human identity to one aspect, negating the whole person as well as the various ways people experience a particular identity.
The current fight for Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning/Intersex/Asexual (LGBTQIA) rights, for example, has hardly touched on the ways in which people experience their sexuality differently based on their gender, social class or race. (See this Colorlines article for more on this topic.) In other words, men experience sexuality differently than women, white women experience sexuality differently than women of color, upper-class women experience their sexuality differently than lower-class women, and so on and so forth. In the public eye, the LGBTQIA community has been most commonly depicted and advertised as being white, educated, upper-class, middle-aged and male, while the community itself is incredibly diverse.
Just as institutions have drawn a line between LGBTQIA people and people of color, so has the media. And it hasn’t done much besides pitting two oppressed groups against each other, while erasing the presence of LGBTQIA people of color. For too long, the need for unity has been misnamed as a need for homogeneity. But, as Audre Lorde said in her collection of essays, Sister Outsider, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” At long last, some people are throwing away those tools. Old methods of approaching equality are being tossed aside, and research shows that strategic partnerships that bond oppressed communities are not only vital, but can wield enormous power. The NAACP has formally supported marriage equality, as have celebrities of color, and activists are changing the philanthropic landscape by addressing the needs of the whole person. (Read more about these stories, leaders and collaborations.)
In the words of Audre Lorde,
“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
Share your thoughts! How do you see race and sexuality intersected in social, economic, and political spheres? In what ways are you asked to compromise pieces of your own identity in the guise of working towards equity?
By Sarah Super
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, numerous books of poetry, and is credited with a long list of plays, movies, and television shows. Wikipedia
Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s first novel, published in1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel for an edition issued in 1993, and this version was considered the definitive edition until 2009 when Erdrich re-edited it.Erdrich explores 60 years in the lives of a small group of Chippewa (akaOjibwa orAnishinaabe) living on theTurtle Mountain Indian Reservation inNorth Dakota.
Each chapter is narrated by a different character. These narratives are conversational, as if the narrators were telling a story, often from thefirst-personperspective. There are, however, five chapters that are told from a limitedthird-personperspective. The narratives follow a loose chronology aside from the first chapter (set in 1981). The conversational tone of the novel is representative of the storytelling tradition in Native American culture. It draws from Ojibwa myths, story-telling technique, and culture. It also incorporates the Euro-Indian experience, especially through the younger generations, some of whom have been forced by government policy to accept, if not possess, Euro-American culture.
Love Medicine begins with June Morrisey freezing to death on her way home to the reservation. Although she dies at the beginning, the figure of June holds the novel together. Similarly, a love triangle among Lulu, Marie, and Nector is a link among the narratives, even though it is not a persistent theme in the novel. There is also a homecoming (or homing) theme in the novel. The use of multiple themes adds to the storytelling effect of the work. Other themes include: tricksters (in the Native American tradition), abandonment, connection to land, searching for identity and self-knowledge, and survival.
(Via Wikipedia)
Articles are primarily composed of essays, investigative reports, think pieces, opinion columns, cultural criticism, fiction, and humor pieces.
Colorlines was established in 1998 by the Applied Research Center, a public policy institute.
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry.
A GREAT book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. Its simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
Throughout her harrowing ordeal, Melba was taunted by her schoolmates and their parents, threatened by a lynch mob’s rope, attacked with lighted sticks of dynamite, and injured by acid sprayed in her eyes. But through it all, she acted with dignity and courage, and refused to back down.
This is her remarkable story.
