Social Change Memo

A Chicana woman is a person of Mexican origin. Activist Cecilia Caballero falls into this category. Through a website that she cofounded, Chincana M(other)work, author Caballero writes to spread social justice to mothers who are minorities including Mexican women who are treated unlike white mothers. Caballero has good intentions when arguing how life is different being a brown mother by sharing a personal story and using emotional appeals, which in return makes her writing effective for her target audience. However, her writing would not be effective for other audiences outside the echo chamber because she fails to recognize other people’s point of views and circumstances, which ultimately would have made her writing stronger by appealing to a larger audience.

The readings for this week were an interesting mix of journal articles and a New York Times magazine article. The New York Times article; “The Case of Marie and her Sons” is about a Puerto-Rican mother’s battle with the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) to regain custody of her five sons. The journal articles; “A Social Worker’s Reflections on Power, Privilege, and Oppression” by Michael Spence; “Pregnant With Possibility”, Merlinda Weinberg; and Racial Macroaggressions in Everyday Life”, Derald Wing Sue, et. al.; have illuminated some common issues that can occur during my career that will have a profound effect on the power and control the profession can have in the public sphere.

In this journal entry Dr.Sarah Jackson, social movements professor at Northeastern University, reports her interview with Cathy J. Cohen an African American author, feminist, and social activist. Cohen’s answers are highlighted and observed because they help build a conclusion to the questions about the role of gender in BLM. This interview is only months old and can speak to a new generation of females who feel their stories don’t matter and can’t be heard. In the interview Cohen expresses different subjects that concern African American feminist in the racial struggles for equality. The main argument of the interview is that BLM is a growing movement and that it will address issues of gender- particularly violence against Black women while having women activist at the center of BLM strategies and tactics.

Women have had a rough way to go for many years when it comes to equality. They face many negative things in today’s society and that is the way it has been for many years. History shows that women have been fighting for equality for decades, because many people believe they just can’t do the things that men can. There’s a website that has been helping women fight for that equality since 1966. That website is www.now.org. Before then women never really had any help. They had to rely on each other to show everyone what they could really do. Women have fought to try and end discrimination when it comes to jobs and economic justice. So the status of women throughout history has changed,

People and communities can fight to demolish these preconceptions and promote more inclusive and equitable societies by realizing how they support power structures. Furthermore, Black women's emphasis on agency and resistance serves as a reminder of how critical it is to elevate marginalized voices and narratives in the continuous fight for social

    A Raisin In the Sun, The House On Mango Street, and A Yellow Raft In Blue Water all contain strong, defined images of women. These women control and are controlled. They are oppressed and liberated. Standing tall, they are confident and independent. Hunched low, they are vulnerable and insecure. They are grandmothers, aunts, mothers, wives, lovers, friends, sisters and children. Although they span a wide range of years and roles, a common thread is woven through all of their lives, a thread which confronts them day in and day out. This thread is the challenge they face as minority women in America to find liberation and freedom

Doetsch-Kidder’s (2016) monograph defines the important role of intersectionality as a defining sea-change in the way that women of color began to unify across racial and cultural barriers. Interviews with minority activists define the perception of the diversification of feminist ideology through the lens of intersectionality. One interview with a African-American activist named Donna illustrates the unity between women of color that evolved in the 1970s: “But overall, we are all fighting for civil rights, so there has to be some type of overlap with each one” (Doetsch-Kidder, 2016, p.103). This development defines the “overlapping’ ideology of different feminist groups, which soon began to devolve the racial and cultural barriers not only between women of color, but also with white feminist groups. In Doetsch-Kidder’s (2016) point of view, the civil rights movement laid the foundation for intersectional feminist principles to be practiced for women seeking greater representation in the workplace.

Similarly, Patricia Hill’s work “Black Feminist Thought” explains the need for black feminism. For Hill U.S. black feminism is needed in order for black women to survive, cope with, and resist their differential treatment in society. Black feminist thought creates a collective identity among this marginalized group of African-American women. Hill provides several features that make U.S. Black feminist thought different than any other set of feminism. The first feature Hill speaks about is ‘blackness’ it is this concept that makes U.S. black feminist a different group that suffers a “double oppression”. Thus, U.S. Black women collectively participate in a dialectical relationship which links African American women’s oppression and activism. Hill speaks on the U.S. black feminist thought and the dilemma they face in American society. During the women’s right movement there was a tremendous difference between black and white women’s experiences, “while women of color were urged, at every turn, to become permanently infertile, white women enjoying prosperous economic conditions were urged, by the same forces, to reproduce themselves”. It is this difference in attitudes that demonstrate why there is a need to focuses on the linkage of experiences and ideas experienced by the black women in America. Consequently, Davis analyzes the hypocritical differences of the government of the

Economically, socially, and politically; black women are setup to remain at the bottom of society and whatever they do, society often find a way to keep them down. It is unfortunate that this is how our society operate. The fight towards a truly equal society is far in the future but many activists, writers, such as Bell Hooks, Alice Walker, and artists like Daniel Stewart have contributed greatly to bringing up the discussions around the black women’s experience and to push change in different shapes and

In an attempt to define Black Feminism, Collins clarifies that it must “avoid the idealist position that ideas can be evaluated in isolation from the groups that create them (Collins 385).” In reality, this forms her basis for why Black Feminism is necessary, and who it serves. Thinking about feminism historically, the concerns of black women were pushed aside in favor of fighting sexism, most notably during the Suffrage movement. And even when feminism began looking at other social injustices, such as racism and class issues, only prominent feminists were invited to the discussion. What resulted was, and often continues to be, a problem of white women speaking for oppressed people. It’s impossible, Collins argues, to have Black Feminist thought without examining the experiences and positions of African American women. Therefore, Black Feminism must be a movement that “encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women’s reality by those who live in it (Collins 386).” However, such a definition brings about many questions: who’s experiences are valued, how do black women take their voice back, and how can they center feminist thinking on their own unique standpoint?

Patricia Hill Collins’s work, Black Feminist Thought seeks to center Black Women into intersectionalist thought, addressing the power struggles that face them not only due to their race but also to the gender. Masculine rhetoric and powerful male leaders such as Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver have overshadowed Black Women’s stories, both in and out of the Civil Right Rights/Black Power

The speech Ain’t I a Woman? by Sojourner Truth and the interview with Kimberle Crenshaw on Intersectionality deal with the topic of intersectionality and black feminism. The authors want to prove how black women then and now struggled with being represented in the feminist movement and in society as a whole. The authors explore racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and how the two intersect together.

Although the text, Women: Images and Realities a Multicultural Anthology, has done a wonderful job of showcasing the diversity of women’s experiences, I find Beverly Daniel Tatum’s work “Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?”” to be the most striking. In the essay, Tatum describes how she (and many other feminists) define racism and who can and cannot be racist. Tatum argues that there are important distinctions between prejudice and racism, wherein racism is defined as a ‘system of advantage based on race” or more precisely “prejudice plus power” (388). Through multiple examples Tatum illustrates that if one accepts and uses her definition of racism then only White people (the group of people who ‘dominate’ society) are racist because “people of

Women’s history is a history of oppression. Throughout time, women have faced systematic domination, which has ultimately informed women’s identities and shaped their roles in society. However, the oppression of women is not uniform and different groups of women have experienced sexist oppression to different degrees and in vastly different ways. This is largely due to intersectionality, which is the idea that the convergence and interaction of various oppressed aspects of one’s identity uniquely affect individuals and social systems. As Kimberlé Crenshaw discusses in “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence Against Women of Color”, women of color are situated in such a way that they belong to at least two subjugated groups. Their particular position exemplifies intersectionality because they are victims of overlapping patterns of sexism and racism, leaving them completely marginalized. Furthermore, intersectionality highlights the interconnectedness and multiplicity of oppression in society. In her essay “’Intersectionality’ is a Big Fancy Word for My Life”, Mia Mingus explains how the oppressed can also contribute to oppression. This concept in culmination with discrepancies in discrimination within communities leads to a fraught and complex dynamic that has lasting impacts. Societies must recognize intersectionality in women’ history in order to fully comprehend and rectify the oppression of today.

For centuries and even today, gender inequality and racial prejudice continue to exist. Throughout time these concepts have overlapped and intertwined, each other creating complex interactions and a negative influence upon society. In the 1980s, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw through her article, named Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, introduced the term “Intersectionality.” Intersectionality, is the theory of how different types of discriminations interact thus, goes hand in hand with Judith Butler, in her article titled “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” which expresses the term “gender acts” and helps decipher a probable cause of the many discriminations faced in contemporary society. Since both gender inequality and racial inequality share a common thread, I believe that what intersectionality represents will help understand Judith Butler’s view on gender classification and the dynamic it’s caused on our social and political formation.