After reading this week’s material, at first, I had a hard time truly understanding and grasping what I was reading. The topic was interesting but I think it had to do with how long this week’s reading was BUT I did in fact enjoy it. Something that stood out to me from the reading was when the writer wrote “Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s:
We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. He is the leader of the house/nation because his knowledge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his understanding is fuller and his application of this information is wiser… After all, it is only reasonable that the man is the head of the house because he is able to defend and protect the development of his home… Women cannot do the same things as men—they are made by nature to function differently. Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world.” It had me thinking about how men and women seem to hold different levels of power. For some time it was always believed that men held more power than women and men had more advantages and opportunities given to them as compared to a woman. We’ve seen how white men and women are treated differently to than of a person of color. We’ve seen how men are treated differently to women. So it leads me to question if there will ever be a time in history when everyone will be seen as an equal. Would that even be possible in a society where one is constantly fighting for a change? We started off by breaking away from what roles we were assigned (women being given the role of only cleaning and providing while men had to work). We have slowly broken away from what makes a man a man and what makes a woman a woman (thinking back on how people used to say you are what you a born as). Yet it leads me to wonder and think about just how much longer it will take until we reach a point where everyone is equal regardless of gender and race.