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.
Continue reading
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
When I was growing up in the 1960s, it was a particularly difficult time to be a child discerning a gender-identity different from one’s gender assigned at birth. In a time where everything our culture saw as normal and “just … 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
