Submitted by: Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Professor, Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Dept of Africana Studies at John Jay College
To read online: “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Author says: “Much of western european history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women. As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as american as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes.”
This is a library resource, accessed using the John Jay login. It is from the database Black Thought and Culture and was published in the “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, Trumansburg, NY, pp 114-123, 1984,
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