Kimberle Crenshaw
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and
Violence Against Women of Color”
“…Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women – battering and rape – I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within discourses of either feminism or antiracism. Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within
discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both…
Where systems of race, gender, and class domination [come together], as they do in the experiences of battered women of color, intervention strategies based [only] on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to who because of race and class face different obstacles…[In 1990…] Under the… [Immigration and Nationality]
Act, a person who immigrated to the United States to marry a U.S. citizen or permanent resident had to remain “properly” married for two years before even applying for permanent resident status…many immigrant women were [afraid] to leave even the most abusive of partners for fear of being deported…Reports of the tragic consequences…put pressure on Congress to…[amend] the…rules to allow for [a] waiver for hardship caused by domestic violence. Yet many immigrant women, particularly immigrant women of color…are unable [get] the evidence required…[like]‘…reports…from police, medical personnel, psychologists, school officials, and social service agencies.’ For many immigrant women, limited access to these resources can make it difficult for them to [get] the evidence needed for a waiver. And cultural barriers often further discourage immigrant women from reporting or escaping battering situations…”
*discourse: conversation about a topic
*marginalize: treat someone as unimportant, to put in the margins
*waiver: document saying you don’t have to meet the usual requirement

Audre Lorde
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” 1979
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been [created] in the
[machines] of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes
[attacked], and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all [do well]. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those
Women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.
….
Simone DeBeauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting." Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and this time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.
*dismantle: take apart
*loathing: hatred

Cherrie Moraga
“La Guera” This Bridge Called My Back
What I am saying is that the joys of looking like a white girl ain't so great since I realized I could be beaten on the street for being a dyke.
If my sister's being beaten because she's Black, it's pretty much the same principle. We're both getting beaten any way you look at it. The connection is blatant; and in the case of my own family, the difference in the privileges attached to looking white instead of brown are merely a generation apart. In this country, lesbianism is a poverty - as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place. When the going gets rough, will we abandon our so-called comrades in a flurry of racist/heterosexist/what-have-you panic? To whose camp, then, should the lesbian of color retreat? Her very presence violates the ranking and abstraction of oppression. Do we merely live hand to mouth? Do we merely struggle with the "ism" that's sitting on top of our own heads? The answer is: yes, I think first we do; and we must do so thoroughly and deeply. But to fail to move out from there will only isolate us in our own oppression - will only insulate, rather than
radicalize us.
*comrades: fellow members of an organization/movement
*abstraction: existing as an idea, but not physically
*radicalize: move someone to try to create large social change

Gloria Anzaldua
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“…So if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language.
Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language.
Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.
Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always having to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate...
Si le preguntas a mi mama, ‘Que eres?’ te dira, ‘Soy mexicana.’
My brothers and sister say the same. I sometimes will answer “soy
mexicana’ and at others will say ‘soy Chicana’ o ‘soy tejana.’ But I identified as ‘Raza’ before I ever identified as ‘mexicana’ or ‘Chicana.’
As a culture, we call ourselves Spanish when referring to ourselves as a linguistic group and when copping out. It is then that we forget our predominant Indian genes. We are 70 to 80% Indian.
We call ourselves Hispanic or Spanish-American or Latin American or Latin when linking ourselves to other Spanish-speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere and when copping out. We call ourselves
Mexican-American to [show] we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun ‘American’ than the adjective ‘Mexican’ (and when copping out)…”
*linguistic: having to do with language
*legitimate: real or allowed
*copping out: to take the easy way out

Angela Davis
“Race and Criminalization” The House That Race Built
“…Most debates addressing the crisis resulting from overcrowding in prisons and jails focus on male institutions.
Meanwhile, women’s institutions and jail space for women are proportionately [growing] at an even [faster] rate than men’s. If race is largely an absent factor in the discussions about crime and punishment, gender seems not even to merit a place carved out by its absence. Historically, the imprisonment of women has served to criminalize women in a way that is more complicated than is the case with men. This female criminalization process has had more to do with the marking of certain groups of women as undomesticated and hypersexual, as women who refuse to embrace the nuclear family as [the best model]. The current liberal-conservative
discourse around welfare criminalizes black single mothers, who are represented as deficient, manless, drug-using breeders of children, and as reproducers of [a related] culture of poverty. The woman who does drugs is criminalized both because she is a drug user and because, as a consequence, she cannot be a good mother. In some states, pregnant women are being imprisoned for using crack because of possible damage to the fetus.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, women are far more likely than men to be imprisoned for a drug conviction.
However, if women wish to receive treatment for their drug problems, often their only option, if they cannot pay for a drug program, is to be arrested and sentenced to a drug program via the criminal justice system…”
*discourse: conversation about a topic

Patricia Hill Collins
Introduction to From Black Power to Hip-Hop
“…Currently, criticism of Black solidarity arise from surprising and quite diverse places. For example, Black feminists, LGBT Black people, biracial and multiracial people of African descent, and others who feel pressured to [silence] their specific interests for the good of
Black unity have increasingly challenged unquestioned
assumptions that racial solidarity is achieved by [silencing] differences. This view of unity through uniformity may have been necessary in situations where a lack of a united front [meant] danger for all. However, this vision of a Black community speaking in one voice becomes increasingly difficult to achieve under current conditions, if in fact, it is desirable. Black solidarity far too often leads to the interests of Black women, LGBT Black people, biracial and multiracial people, and other distinctive segments of Black civil society being routinely [silenced] for the [so-called] good of the group.
…Kimberle Crenshaw claims than an unquestioned racial solidarity worked against African Americans interests in the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
She notes that “the vilification of Anita Hill and the embracing of
Clarence Thomas reveal that a black woman breaking ranks to complain of sexual harassment is seen by many African Americans as a much greater threat to our group interests than a black man who breaks ranks with our race policy…”
*solidarity – working/standing together for one goal
*assumption – belief something is true without proof
*uniformity – a state of being the same
*vilification – to speak badly about, to treat like a villain/evil person

Chandra Mohanty
“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses”
“…It is the analytic leap from the practice of veiling to [a claim] of its
[importance] in controlling women that must be questioned. While there may be a physical similarity in the veils worn by women in
Saudi Arabia and Iran, the specific meaning attached to this practice varies according to the cultural and ideological context…Iranian middle-class women veiled themselves during the 1979 revolution to indicate solidarity with their veiled working class sisters, while in
[modern] Iran, mandatory Islamic laws [state] that all Iranian women wear veils…To assume that the mere practice of veiling women in a number of Muslim countries indicates the universal oppression of women through sexual segregation not only is
[oversimplifying], but also proves quite useless when it comes to the
[understanding] of [revolutionary] political strategy…
Universal images of “the third world woman” (the veiled woman…virgin, etc.) images constructed from adding the “third world difference” to “sexual difference,” are [based] upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as [non-religious], liberated, and having control over their own lives…It is time to move beyond the Marx who found it possible to say: They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.
*discourse: conversation about a topic
*ideology: system of ideas, belief or way of thinking
*solidarity – working/standing together for one goal