Class, And Sex: Women Redefining Differene By Audre Lorde

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences,”- Unknown. William Kent Krueger uses this theme in his book Ordinary Grace. Acceptance is seen in Ordinary Grace more times than it is not. Ordinary Grace is a tremendous book with many ups downs and surprises.

Everyone has a place in the world, to think otherwise is naïve; this world is not owned by a specific race, class or gender. And yet, in a time where the world is seemingly at our fingertips we are still finding prejudices at every corner. Often, the differences of others are perceived negatively and this causes misconceptions and assumptions. If we could strip ourselves of this negativity and lose the impulsive perceptions, then we should be able to put forth greater efforts to understanding the lives of those from backgrounds which are different than our own, in doing so acceptance towards others would likely follow.

For this journal entry, I chose to compare Audre Lorde's Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference to the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. In Lorde's piece, she talks about how oppressed people are often taught to ignore the fact that they are oppressed. We are taught to handle the difference we face by either ignoring them, copying them or destroying them. Lorde says that society as a whole has failed to see differences as a "springboard for creative change." Her article focuses on the fact that refusing to see creative differences makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls women face. Some problems all women share and other problems all women do not share. For example, the experience of a white woman is different

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that throughout the book, she lives in houses, but never has a home. Lorde, being a double and sometimes even triple minority continues to experience hardship throughout the book. On page 255, Lorde again looks to her friends and lovers as a

Lorde was a minority in every group that she belonged to, and although she gained support and began to have the ability to self-integrate, she still faced hardships through discrimination. Lorde's feeling that she did not belong completely runs throughout the book: "The ‘time' when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic" (205). Here Lorde is pointing out that her struggle is not solely one of a lesbian. Lorde is a double minority in this case because she is a black and a lesbian. This point to the argument in the text as a whole, that Lorde is still a minority even in her own groups, for example, she is even a minority in her own family (the only lesbian) and therefore Lorde's battle of integration did not end at her finding a group of friends.. This emphasizes Lorde's argument that

Should people who are different be treated differently? In “Revenge of the Geeks?” by Alexandra Robbins, the story talks about how a geeks feel when people treat them differently cause they can understand more then the ones that are treating them bad. In the text about Examples abound “ Taylor Swift’s classmates left the lunch table as soon as she sat down because they disdained her taste for country music.” There many reason why I feel that people don’t like others, but I thinks they both should be equal.

It was the first time Lorde was confronted with racism and her family’s reaction to it. They had to take a train to go to New York City and when it was time to eat, they were not allowed to enter the dining area so they had to eat in their seats. Her mother told her that it is better to eat home cooked food anyway. Audre Lorde did not question her mother since she knew her mother was right. Though her parents made the incident look okay, it deeply bothered Lorde. There was another incident when they arrived to D.C from New York City; when Audre’s family decided to get some ice cream treats from a drugstore, they were told to order their food and eat it outside because they were blacks. Her parents ignore the comment and left. Lorde was outrages by their reaction. She knew what was going on but she was not allowed to acknowledge this racism. She saw that her family was just as upset but they chose to ignore it and walk away, hoping for the racism to go away. These incidents were carved inside Lorde while growing up. It was a hard journey for her until she found a way to deal with it.

Ray Bradbury shows us that people with a difference are ostracised and hated with the example of how the children treat Margot differently for being different to them. He explains by using contrasting sensory imagery just how much just the way that a person acts can make them look different to everyone else and how much they stand out in a crowd. He is also implying to us that just because someone is different it doesn’t mean we have to exclude them just because that’s what normally happens because you might just cost them the joy for the next seven years to

Audre Lorde was born in New York City the 18th of February 1934 of Caribbean immigrants. As a child, the author had difficulties in communication that made her acknowledge poetry and its power as a form of expression, allowing her to become a writer, a feminist, and a civil rights activist. Which is very strong in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” in which the author describes her feelings using a style of superior journalism with elements of popular culture that leads to racial issues. In order to emphasize more her sociological argument, Lorde uses personal experience as ethos. “As a forty-nine- year- old Black lesbian feminist socialist, mother of two including one boy, and member an inter- racial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong”(Lorde, 114). Audre Lorde strength is in her inferiority and points out very actual issues such as: distortion of relationship between oppressor and oppressed and the misnamed differences that still leads to racism.

In her essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Audre Lorde details multiple groups of people and their actions and attitudes. She focuses on and criticizes different demographics’ actions and how they impede the achievement of equality for people like herself. She portrays the disenfranchisement and underappreciation she receives multilaterally because of her race, social class, sexual orientation, age, gender. Lorde’s prevailing goal of the essay is to demonstrate that the marginalized should not nullify, ignore, suppress, or attack the expression of differences between themselves. Rather, she asserts that they should recognize and celebrate those differences to unite across demographic boundaries so they may together

Today a lot of society feels that there is a set example of what is socially acceptable. Recently many people have started embracing others and themselves for their individuality. However only a short time ago, people were treated much more harshly for who they were. Throughout history, society has gone through several significant instances of discrimination. Anyone who was flawed and did not fit into the ideal categories set up by the world were considered inferior. Anne Frank was personally affected by a large amount of discrimination and exile, which brought her and the ones she loved a lot of anguish.

In analyzing both essays, Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance by Bell Hooks and There Is No Unmarked Woman by Deborah Tannen the authors address societal problems that highlight and emphasize the differences that certain groups in society must face and overcome, although the targets in both of the examples of societal dilemma between the two are very different, they both accurately represent how unjust the modern social structure is.

Throughout history, women have constantly been objectified and forced into submission by the male dominated society. Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical work, The Second Sex, echoes the intense oppression of women and reflects the first wave feminist movement. Her existentialist decoding of genders resulted in the idea of the Other, which explores the phenomenon of women forced into the role of an object, while men are the subject. In the second chapter, “The Girl”, Beauvoir further studies the idea of this oppression during one’s transition from a girl into a woman. Beauvoir states that no matter how much freedom and sense of self a girl holds, she is always forced into the role of the Other in society. Beauvoir 's idea of the Other held

In the article “ Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” by Audre Lorde , she talks about the differences between people in our society, the differences between black and white women, the different isms of society, and what we can do to change.

In fact, man is seen as the universal norm whereas woman is “defined and differentiated with reference to man” (ibid.). Thus, man is defined as the One which entails the submission of woman as the Other (xxiv). This submission, however, is a result of natural condition rather than historical events or social change (xxiv-xxv). Moreover, it is due to the fact that woman do not form an independent unit as they do not have a past or history of their own which differentiates them from men. Hence, woman is the Other in a duality in which both elements - man and woman - are essential, as the division of the sexes is a biological fact not a historical event