Radical CUNTS
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Sister Citizen: Shame Stereotypes and Black Women in America with Melissa Harris-Perry
MSNBC commentator, columnist for The Nation, and Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, where she serves as founding director of the Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South, Melissa Harris - Perry examines black women’s political and emotional responses to pervasive negative race and gender images in her new book, Sister Citizen. With wit and family anecdotes, Harris - Perry elaborates on how the shared struggle to preserve an authentic self and secure recognition as a citizen links black women together in America.
A must watch (and, judging from the video, a must read)!
So clearly what’s at stake here is the Black family. Not Black women’s happiness, not our ability to learn and grow as lovers and partners in a relationship or in marriage. What’s at stake is the responsibility that consistently gets laid on our back about the success or…
important tidbits from the article:
In the 1980s, Crenshaw was trying to understand why US anti-discrimination law was failing to protect Black women in the workplace, and she discovered it was because the law distinguished between two kinds of discrimination: gendered discrimination and racialized discrimination.
That is, US law distinguished between discrimination against women (on the basis of their gender) and discrimination against Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous people (on the basis of their race).
But in her study of discrimination in workplaces, Crenshaw observed that Black women were discriminated against on both bases – their gender and their race – at once.
So, for example, Black women were the last group to be hired at a workplace she studied – after white women and Black men. When the boss decided to lay people off, Black women were fired because they were the least senior – the last to arrive. But that they were hired last was itself due to discrimination. This group of Black women took the company to court and the judge said, “there’s no gender discrimination here because white women weren’t fired. And there’s no race discrimination here because Black men weren’t fired.”
So, Crenshaw concluded that discrimination against Black women in the workplace – as Black women – was invisible to legal concepts of discrimination that saw it in terms of “gender” only or in terms of “race” only. Black women’s experiences of discrimination were rendered invisible by these ways of categorizing discriminatory practices.
(via heavenrants)
(via crunkfeministcollective)
