Week Five Blog
Audre Lorde talks about the differing levels of oppression on women of different ethnic identities. White women, she notes, are more likely to focus on purely women’s issues and seem to consider all women equally oppressed as a collective. She also says that white women are more likely to join the oppressor because of the level of privilege already held by white women. Lorde discusses the way oppression is not always the same for white women and women of color. Because white women are more privileged due to their closer likeness to the norm, they are less limited in their everyday performance. Lorde says that people of color have less freedom to express discontent. Bad attitude in a person of color is often taken as dangerousness or hostility. Also, she she says that women of color face specific challenges in gender relationships because they seem to take the brunt of sexual violence, by both black and white aggressors. For women of color, this implicit sexual victimhood puts large limitations on their gender performativity.
I don’t think Lorde would identify patriarchy as the primary force of oppression for all people like Johnson might. Lorde focuses on race relations in her analysis of oppression. Her status as a minority greatly affects her interpretation of oppression. For Lorde, patriarchy is one of those sisterhood issues that affects all women. I think Lorde would argue that patriarchy is just one source of oppression for women of color like herself. Lorde would rather we consider the differences of all oppressed parties and make it our responsibility to be conscious of the way these differences affect the ways in which these different groups feel oppression. She uses her own position as a black lesbian to talk about the different ways in which white and black people think about lesbianism. She says that because lesbianism was once viewed as something culturally white, black lesbians are less accepted, even in their own black communities, and therefore less likely to freely express their sexuality.