Standpoint Epistemology-February 24

The three assigned reading offer interesting insight into the processes and complexities that formulate the theories of oppression.  The poem "For the White Person Who Wants to be My Friend" describes Pat Parker's relationship with white people as a black woman.  Relying heavily on sarcasm, Parker criticizes how white people attempt to relate to her through overtly racist and vaguely sexist stereotypes, that result in her resentment of the effort.  Through Parker's poetry, we can begin to see the social boundaries created by misguided assumptions about black culture.  Similarly, Kimberle Crenshaw analyzes black womanhood to argue that the inability for those other than black women to understand the plight of intersectional identities creates many layers of injustice and oppression.  Furthermore, like the unsuccessful effort to remedy the social stratification between races as portrayed in Parker's poem, Crenshaw claims that the antidiscrimination laws fail to accommodate the complexity that exists in the intersection of sex and race.  This failure contributes to a double oppression for black women, which is manifested in the court's inability to judge black women's discrimination cases based on their combined identity.  Both Parker and Crenshaw emphasize black culture in their writing in order to argue that black culture, while in some aspects may be different than other cultures, does not define the individual, or rather, the woman, who supposedly belongs to that culture.  Aretha Franklin does not define Parker's world as a black woman.  Domestic abuse depicted in The Color Purple does not define the black family unit.  Understanding the complexity of the individual, separate from her respective culture, will permit the ending of discrimination.