Amit's 3rd Blog Post

Audre Lorde’s Age, Race, Class, and Sex stands out to me as a powerful article that successfully argues and explains the reasons behind race and gender discrimination today. Her terms and examples are extremely clear and hard to counter-argue. For example, at the start of the article Lorde introduces the concept of a “mythical norm”. Like Messner describes in his lecture, we, as a part of American society, have a something in “the edge of [our] consciousness…[where] each one of us within our hearts knows ‘this is not me’. In America, this norm is usually defined as White, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Although such a though does not exactly describe the way I always feel as a brown-colored American, it does concisely portray the reason behind many colored people’s insecurities in our society. By simply not meeting the criteria of the “mythical norm” one becomes a part of a group that falls under the hierarchy of white males. Another interesting part of the article was Lorde’s relation to literature and how she used that as a tool to describe the differences in white woman compared to woman of a different race. I found it interesting and, to some extent, very true when Lorde stated, “one of the reasons White women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves.” Because there is a clear difference in the oppression white females face compared to the race and gender oppression black females do, coming to terms with such a reality can be difficult for the white-feminist figure who thinks only her gender is a problem. Many of Lorde’s theories can be seen in the movie we discussed, Boyz n da Hood. One of the reasons why the film is regarded as being very powerful is because it forces a mainstream audience, including those who are a part of the mythical norm, to see the realities of the struggle male and female African-Americans face in a society whites are not very far from.

Another article that I found particularly interesting was Ehrenreich’s Global Woman. In this article, the struggle of many single mothers’ face is presented; in order for them to provide for their families they often have to move far away from their homes to get jobs. Rather than praising the independence these mothers gain by working jobs, Ehrenreich shows the horrors of a working single-mom trying to keep up with the demands of a fast-paced metropolitan. This often leads to the mothers having to work corrupted jobs such as being maids, prostitutes, and underpaid nannies.

Situated knowledge is not an impediment to seeing the world clearly because in order to understand the world we must examine everyone’s opinions no-matter how “narrow-minded” they are. It would be impossible to expect everyone in the world to be tolerant to one another’s opinions and experiences and have the education to know what is right and what is wrong. Instead, a collage of everyone’s lenses of perception on the world would be the best way to gain understanding.