This week’s readings revolved around identity and identity politics. In The Power of Identity Politics by Alicia Garza, she begins by setting the scene at a bar. Garza explains there is a woman complaining about how a man she was talking to said that representation is important. The woman was annoyed by his statement saying that we shouldn’t focus so much on race and rather just accept one another as human. This blindness to race is a harmful approach that usually only leads to the furtherance of racism and microaggressions. Garza goes on to explain why this is a dangerous perspective and talks about power. Garza defines power as “the ability to make decisions that affect your own life and the life of others”. Garza also clarifies that there’s a difference between being empowered and power. Not all those who are empowered actually have power. 

  Garza then continues to explain identity politics. She says it is a way to describe the lives of those not in the “norm” of America. The norm being described as a control group in the United States. Then Garza mentions the reading from last week, The Combahee River Collective Statement.  She goes on to say that black feminists examined the women’s movement and eventually led to them defining identity politics. They observed that black women were not considered when white women were participating in said activism. 

  Garza continues with the story of the white woman at the bar and says that white people have brought this need to better represent and even have this conversation unto themselves. This is due to the categories created by white people that they have divided each skin color, class and sex into. Garza brings up another argument that people tend to make which is that we must move forward and away from the past. The author argues that this just leads to maintaining the harmful effects of racism. Garza refers to this as “amnesia” and declares it as harmful to those subject to oppression. 

  Then Garza begins speaking on the position of the right and says they are about principles based around “perseverance, rugged individualism, faith, and hard work”. The people that do not fit this notion of the norm threaten these ideals. Garza ends by saying power is to be distributed more equally.

  The second reading, Too Latina to Be Black, Too Black to Be Latina by Aleichia Williams speaks about her race crisis after moving to North Carolina from New York City. She did not realize how she was perceived would change so much when she moved. Her peers would say offensive things to her and she did not know where she fit in. Throughout the piece she writes that she was too Latina for her black peers and too black for her Latino peers. Ultimately though, she learns to embrace both aspects and does not let her identity be defined by just one thing. 

  I’d like to highlight Emily D’s post. I feel like it really connected to the piece by Alechia Williams. The image depicts what I interpret to be an identity crisis. Each of the fragments of each face makes up one shared identity. 

  This week’s content was very emotional and charged with strong realities. Paris is Burning is a documentary following the lives of various transgender women  and gay men. The documentary talks about ball culture in the 80s. Balls were big events with men in drag and trans women performing in various categories. They dressed up and modeled and did theatrical performances. Some described it as a “fantasy of being a superstar”. One of the people introduced was Pepper LaBeija. Pepper was one of the people that performed and had great fame within the community.

  These balls held categories for everyone. The trends in the balls also evolved from people wanting to emulate Las Vegas showgirls to movie stars to models. Later in the documentary, a drag queen talked about intersectionality and how it affects the members of the community. They spoke about the executive narrative which is that a black man often can’t make it as an executive and if they do they are straight men. Looking like an executive at the ball was the closest they could get to fulfilling this role of a gay black man as an executive. 

  There was also a quote that stuck out to me. “When you’re gay, you monitor everything you do”. This continues to be an issue because as much as we wish it were not true, people’s perception of an individual can and will affect their place in society and if they can progress. Many of the people in the community also spoke about the perception of their families. Many had faced rejection from their family or left them.

  A key person interviewed was Venus Extravaganza who is a trans woman who expresses her desire to have a sex change. She gives insight into what many of the people from the balls want which is acceptance and appreciation which manifests as fame and wealth. Unfortunately in the end of the documentary we learn she tragically passed away. They also speak about family dynamics which are described as “mutual bond(s)”. A form of family is the houses they divide themselves into. These are sorts of groups with individuals in each that participated in the balls together. Some of the houses were the Xtravaganza house and the Ninja house. 

  The documentary also mentions terminology of the ball such as voguing, shading and reading. Readings are an art form of insults while shading is more subtle. Vogueing is a dance between two people in a competitive fashion. The documentary was very informative and truly gave great insight on this culture. 

  The second content was a collective statement of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. Their work is to push back against “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression” and “major systems of oppression are interlocking”. The women’s origins lie in the will to overcome adversity in order to survive and be liberated as Afro- American. The text writes that black feminism 

born from the reactionary forces working against black women even within feminism, where their work was overlooked.

  In the entry they write that after World War II, black youth could have some form of an education or better job opportunities allowing them to rise a bit in economic status which aids their efforts against oppression.

Their beliefs were that black women have been harmed for ages and the only people willing to defend them against this oppression is themselves. 

They also spoke on intersectionality, citing that sexual politics cannot be separated from the oppression faced based on race and class because we cannot separate those categories of our lives from our person.

  Thirdly the spoke on the problems in organizing black feminists. There is a struggle to organize because the problems being addressed reach great lengths; it’s not just one issue. They say that feminism feels like a threat to black people because it questions some standards that have been put into place.Black men generally have a negative action to feminism because it puts them in an uncomfortable position and in a position where they have to give up some power.

  The work they do varies, they have worked on “sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape and health care”. They also began addressing the racism in white feminist movements. The statement ends by restating their vision for change and efforts to do so. 

  Isabella Celentano submitted an interesting photo form Pose, a show that talks about ball culture. I thought that was appropriate because its like a modern day take on the documentary, Paris is Burning. 

  This week we looked at women’s rights and worker’s rights. In the first video, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, we learned about a New York City sweatshop in the early 1900s. Employees, who were mostly young immigrant women, worked 11-12 hours. On March 25, 1911, a terrible fire broke out in the factory. There was no working hose to stop it and the fire quickly spread. There was only one fire escape but it collapsed and one working elevator in the entire building that also eventually stopped functioning. The stairs in the building led to locked doors that only opened from one side and many were trapped. Unfortunately, fire fighting technology was not advanced enough to combat the high altitudes of New York’s high buildings. The whole event spanned for eighteen minutes and resulted in 146 deaths. Eventually this led to a funeral protest march that 350,000 people attended. The owners of the building however, were not found guilty of manslaughter.

   In the second video, Triangle Returns, we learn that 125 of the 146 dead from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were young women. This led to unions forming and demanding better conditions and rights. By 1938, all sweatshops had been eliminated from the United States. Unfortunately, the rest of the world has not been able to do the same. The video tells us that on December 14, 2010, a fire broke out in Bangladesh in a sweatshop. The fire resulted in 29 dead. The families of the deceased were paid $2,080 by the company for the deaths. The workers of the factory made only 28 cents an hour, barely any more than what employees made in the triangle shirtwaist factory in 1911. The workers of the Bangladeshi factory worked 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week with one day off per month. Bangladesh is the third largest exporter to the United States. Workers have tried to protest for 35 cents an hour but were met with violence by the police. History repeats itself here. 

  The TIME magazine article writes about the Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment says that rights should not be denied on account of sex and that congress has the power to enforce this rule. The amendment was originally written in 1923 by Alice Paul. In the early 1900s, Paul joined demonstrations for the British suffragist movement and returned to the US using confrontational techniques she learned and used over there. In 1913, Paul and Lucy Burns formed the National Women’s Party and four years later she was imprisoned for seven months for picketing the White House. An opponent of the ERA was Phyllis Schlafly, she began a movement called STOP ERA. Schlafly argued that ERA would destroy the traditional American family and would lead to gender neutral bathrooms and women being drafted into war. Moving forward to today, the amendment has still not been passed but would impact the fight against violence towards women, pay inequality, maternity leave and abortion rights. 

  My classmate, Hannah Nichols posted an interesting info graphic on child labor in the era of COVID-19. I think it’s very deliberate that companies are reaching out to smaller farms and factories for the production of their products. If they can’t trace it they won’t know and be held less responsible for who is making whatever makes them money. 

  In the video Untold Stories of Black Women, we learn about an impressive black woman, Ida B Wells. She was one of the founders of the NAACP and fought for black women’s equality. She was resilient after having lost her parents at the young age of sixteen. She helped look after her siblings having been born into slavery but later freed after the empancipation proclamation. She also co-owned and wrote for the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. 

  A major part of her work was dedicated to the fight against lynching black men. She wrote about this effort in her works. Unfortunately, her office was sabotaged and burned down. 

  Later on the National Association of Colored Women was founded by young college women. They also marched in the march for the women’s suffrage movement. 

 The video also discusses Susan B. Anthony and the controversy surrounding her for saying women deserve the right to vote before black men. 

   The timeline we reviewed gives a clear overview of the events that led to women receiving the right to vote. It begins in 1776, when Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John Adams, saying to “remember the ladies”. After in 1821, the first National Female Anti- Slavery Society convention meets. That same year Mary Lyon founds Mount Holyoke College as the first four-year college exclusively for women in the US. In 1844, female textile workers in Massachusetts organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, demanding a ten hour work day. In 1848, the first women’s rights convention is held at Seneca Falls, New York. The following year, in 1849, Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and helps free slaves. In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony form the American Equal Rights association dedication to the goal of universal suffrage. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony is arrested for attempting to vote. In 1891, Ida B. Wells launches her nation wide anti lynching campaign. In 1896, the National Associations for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in Washington, D.C. March 3, 1913, members of the Congressional Union organized a suffrage parade. Later in 1919, the 19th amendment passed both the House and Senate and went to the states for ratification. Ultimately, in 1920, the 19th amendment was adopted. 

  Hannah Nichols posted a quote for her snapshot from Anna Julia Cooper that reads “It is not the intelligent woman versus the ignorant woman; nor the white woman versus the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman versus man. Nay, this woman’s strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. Those words are so powerful and really resonate. In the topic of feminism and the patriarchy, we have touched on this notion of addressing the true enemy or rather the proper concern. It’s not a matter of division but rather unity in the ability to understand one another. At the end of the day, we all just want to be heard and understood.