ERACISM
Minute 3/1/2020
Lauralee
Carbone
Good
morning. I’m Lauralee Carbone, here to present an ERACISM Minute, a
moment of consciousness raising, organized by the BUF Black Lives
Matter Ministry Action Team.
Yesterday
ended Black History Month and today begins Women’s History Month,
so I thought I would speak on the intersectionality between racism
and sexism. In both months, by the way, we study blacks’ and
women’s achievements as if they occurred separately from all US
history. While I am not against these history-themed months, it does
illustrate how white history and men’s history is the norm, and the
contributions of blacks and women lie outside the norm.
Robin
DiAngelo, in WHITE FRAGILITY, points out that women’s struggle for
the vote illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and
discrimination into structures of oppression. Everyone has prejudice
and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond
individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate
against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not
deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny
women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all
the institutions. Therefore the only way women could gain the right
to vote was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant the
vote to themselves.
