Who Said Intersectionality Was Simple?


We all have that one friend who just needs to make you feel sorry for them because they think they have it worse than everyone else. Next time they start to guilt-trip you about their lives, send them a link to "Who Said It Was Simple" by Andre Lorde. Her poem is about how everyone experiences oppression differently.

Photo from https://agnesarnold-forster.com/2013/10/14/in-conversation-with-the-womens-liberation-a-review/

Originally, the feminist movement was about bringing justice only to white middle-class women.  This movement was leaving out women of color and low-class women. The white middle-class women were so focused on their own abuse that they forgot that there are many other factors to oppression and that ignoring them is leaving out many women.

Intersectionality is an idea that race, gender, and class are all connected.  People have layers to their mistreatment.  Women can be persecuted not only for their gender but also for their race and socioeconomic class. White low-class women are more mistreated than white middle-class women, but women of color are even more burdened regardless of their economic class.  Yet, only the middle-class white women were the ones who were being fought for. 

Lorde wrote, “the women rally before they march/ discussing the problematic girls/ they hire to make them free” (lines 5-7) which is commenting on how the only reason these women were able to go and fight for their rights and freedoms was because they hired women of color to take care of their house while they were gone.

86c4c-black-maid
Photo from https://afamdomesticworkers.wordpress.com/richard-wrights-black-hope/

The thought that white women should have gotten their rights before people of color did is sad.  Everyone deserves their God-given rights, regardless of their gender, race, or class. No one is better than another, and no one should be thinking that they need to place their needs as a priority over another person’s. End of story.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 13, 2019 at 4:47 PM

    I really enjoyed this post! I can clearly understand what you were trying to say about this movement and the poems connection to all of it. The last paragraph was the best!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Darlene WisecupOctober 13, 2019 at 4:51 PM

    I love that's you picked this poem as well! This poem was really powerful to me, I love how your blog is so down to earth and it made it fun to read. I found your comment interesting, talking about how they could only fight for their rights because they hired women of color to work in their place.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Portrait in Georgia: A Commentary on the Dangers of Interracial Relationships

Image
Let’s clear the air now by saying that "Portrait in Georgia" by Jean Toomer, is my favorite poem that I’ve ever read. This poem is incredibly complex with its imagery comprised in similes and character building which only makes it more interesting to compare interpretations of the piece. It’s describing the image of a white woman by comparing her features to a lynched black man’s corpse. As creepy as that sounds, it’s quite beautiful, thought-provoking work. For this post, I only want to discuss a single interpretation of and first two lines of the poem. Toomer starts by describing the woman’s hair as “braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope” (lines one and two).   This produces two simultaneous images of braided hair and a rope.   One of my classmates pointed out that this could be a symbol of how many black men were killed just for liking a white woman because Toomer’s choice to compare the woman’s hair to a lyncher’s rope is conveying that white women were a ...
Read more

STELLA!!!

Image
In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the main focus tends to be on the characters Stanley and Blanche, and not much gets said about Stella. Today, I want to discuss Stella’s character since she’s so underappreciated in most analyses. Photo found at https://www.pinterest.com/pin/475059460667263213 Stella is the wife of Stanley and the sister of Blanche .   I’ll give you a quick recap of her backstory.   Stella grew up on a plantation and was raised, along with her sister, to be very proper and refined young ladies. She moved away from home to New Orleans and married Stanley. Now she is pregnant and her sister has to come to stay with her and her husband because she lost the family plantation after all their relatives died.   Now that you’re up to speed, let's focus more on Stella now that her sister is staying with her. From the start of the play, Stella was caught in the middle of her husband and her sister. Both Stanley and Blanche were ...
Read more