foraudrelorde

[foraudrelorde]

Experiences of a Black femme - I: A Bridge

"Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them."

-Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference

Throughout my life I’ve been told that I am “too fast”, “too aggressive”, “too angry”, and “too sassy”. Initially I believed that every statement was true, making me want to change the way I acted to be viewed in a more positive way. As I grew older I began to understand that no matter what I did to change myself, I would still be told the same statements. Until recently, I hadn’t realized that it was due to the intersections of my race and gender, which brought greater discrimination compared to my white peers. When relaying my struggles to my white femme peers, they were often brushed off, or they ignored the race component that came with the discrimination I faced.

Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her paper Demarginalizing the Intersections of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. Twenty years later, Crenshaw fully defines intersectionality: “a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” At the same time, the idea of intersectionality is also seen in Audre Lorde’s essay Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, as Lorde discusses her own identity and how she’s belongs to multiple identities within other marginalized groups: “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.”

Following the moments when my white peers brushed off the discrimination I faced, I often felt like I had to explain why it was wrong to educate them. I became a bridge to them, which is noted in Lorde's essay Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference: "Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions." This semester for my gender class, I remember I was assigned to read this poem by Donna Kate Rushin titled "The Bridge", which also sheds light on how tired it gets to educate them over and over again: "I've to explain myself / To everybody // I do more translating / Than the Gawdamn UN // Forget it / I'm sick of it."

Due to this recent understanding, as a femme individual, I'm continuing to try and shed light on my own experiences and how I am affected by them; however, I am still trying to find ways in my poetry, to share my experiences, as well as trying to share the concept of intersectionality as it still is not fully portrayed in a way that is not appropriated.

-T