Though its been over 30 years since Audre Lorde prophesied the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1984), the movement for a just, equitable society continues: a large, lumbering conglomerate creature, stuffed to the water-starved gills with organizations and leaders hell-bent on using every tool from the master’s box, tightly gripped in one hand, while extending the other to shake hands with the master’s gate-keepers. This, despite the cries—and the deaths—of the people. And, so it is; the empire grows bigger and stronger and fatter on the diseased fruits of its own planting, while the dream of a just peace flops and flounders, gasping for breath on the littered beach of the common good. Continue reading
From rape-culture college campuses to domestic relations, from corporate offices to doctor’s offices, from street corners to clergy offices and confessionals, from casting couches to ordinary job interviews—however subconsciously or unspoken—from back rooms to the Oval Office, the personhood of a woman is reduced to her body. Women are still colonized, on the landscapes of their bodies, by those who wish to occupy them.
Given this reality, it is not difficult, at all, to see how readily this belief system—rooted in the core belief of male primacy—morphs and twists into the colonization of other bodies.
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It’s that time of year when we are called to be still enough to reflect and express gratitude for all we have—even amid all that is troubling and not what we want, or perhaps, need it to be. These times … Continue reading
“Wake up, you who are in sound sleep, and slumberous people: stop hibernating, look into your deeds, repent and remember your Creator. Those who forget the truth in the vanity of time and wander in their sleep through nonsense and … Continue reading
(Or…the Soothing Sound of Katydids) It is evening here, in North Carolina, where House Bill 2 (the first of the “bathroom” bills) once loomed heavily, casting a storm of attention over our lives and giving the shelter of darkness to … Continue reading
Perhaps, the reason we struggle to create a society of equitable diversity is precisely the result of the language, and thus the thinking, we use to frame it. To create something different, we have to think something different. We have … Continue reading
Include: from the Latin root, includere, to shut-in; 1. to shut up, enclose; contain between or within, as a whole does any parts or elements; 2. to place in an aggregate, class, category, or the like; 3. to contain as … Continue reading
All good people agree, And all good people say, All nice people, like Us, are We And everyone else is They. … Continue reading
Recently, in Great Britain, the world was offered yet another embarrassing example of the far-reaching, enduring human and sociopolitical damage done by the tired rhetoric of the Radical and Separatist Feminists. Primarily, the damage I am speaking of is that … Continue reading
