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.
From Audre Lorde in Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.
So, that Zimmerman verdict. Jesus. Of course, in Australia we have some similar verdicts happening. (More on black motherhood, the justice system and feminism on this blog).
[…] As the brilliant Audre Lorde wrote in Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference (h/t Blue Milk): […]
This.
It’s also true of other people of color: our solidarity with the Black community is important, but it’s equally important that we realize that we are all racialized differently, experience racist oppression differently, and that the US has a specific history of antiBlackness that is at the heart of this horror.
[…] day long (I’m writing this post on Sunday evening), I’ve been struggling with the quotation from Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Diff… posted at blue milk. We fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, […]
I’m disappointed in the Zimmerman verdict. While I understand that it hung on a technicality (the prosecution’s inability to disprove the idea that Zimmerman feared for his life/was acting in self-defense when he pulled the trigger), the reality is that Martin was predetermined to be aggressive due to his blackness – both in the sense that Zimmerman found him “suspicious” in the first place and in the sense that seemingly no one associated with the trial was able to conceive that Martin was acting in self defense when he got in a fight with a man who was stalking him. Self defense. The very idea that got Zimmerman off.
Apparently, the “stand your ground” principle doesn’t apply to black men/youth. The are not supposed to defend themselves.
This is so twisted.
Also that being in fear of your life means you can shoot to kill an unarmed person. This is so designed to make it easier to get away with murder.
It is, and given US history and reality, it’s clearly designed to make it easier for white men to get away with murder with a very thin veil of race-blindness not quite hiding that intent.
[…] Aus: Audre Lorde in Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. (Zitat über Bluemilk) […]