“Social Justice Must Be Complicated, Because Oppression Is Never Simple”
“Systemic oppression is built throughout all of our most important systems — our education system, our workplaces, our government, our arts and entertainment. It is in the air that we breathe and it is upheld with almost every action we take. That is how it has lasted so long…
Do you think all unvalued women are unvalued for the same reasons?
Because a black woman is not poor simply because she’s a woman and the patriarchy undervalues the role of women. She is also poor because her skin color and hair texture labels her as unprofessional, unreliable, volatile, unskilled, and unintelligent. She is poor because society sees her as someone from whom labor is to be taken, not compensated. She is also poor because she is more likely to be the sole caregiver of children in a system that locks away black men. Any efforts to address the poverty of women that do not address these issues will leave black women behind…
People look at the last election and say that we failed to come together against Trump because we were all too caught up in our “individual” wants. If our failure in 2016 was anything other than massive amounts of white people deciding to vote for White Supremacy (and it’s really not much more than that), I’d say it was the insistence that people all pretend they were on the “left” for the same reason, and that we would all rally around a very narrow set of goals that would only meet a very narrow set of needs.”
