In a speech given at a women’s studies conference, Audre Lorde narrates a structural critique of racist heteropatriarchy given her intersectionality as a Black lesbian. Heteropatriarchy can be described simply as straight male dominance. Although they have different amounts of melanin in their skin, Lorde describes the similarities White women and women of color face in regards to misogyny, men, and institutions. She brings up anger and the role emotions have played in the contemporary United States and in the women’s movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. Most of the time anger is often dismissed as irrational, useful, unproductive, and immature, in an attempt to invalidate the feelings of the oppressed by trivializing, minimizing, and dismissing
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In the excerpt, Gilmore offers a detailed case study on the effects neoliberal social policy has on the criminal justice system and one family affected by it. In A Mother’s Plea for Help, Gilmore depicts the story of Bernice Hatfield, whose son was wrongfully arrested on six counts of attempted murder. In an attempt to not spend 91 years in prison, her son, Stick, pleads guilty and waives his right to appeal, only to have the prosecutor increase the minimum term from six to nineteen years. One day when driving home from visiting Stick, she heard about Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC) and decided to attend a meeting in the hopes of getting help from other mothers in the same situation. Mothers ROC is a community based activist organization, primarily made up of working-class women of color that challenge California’s legal system. While Bernice argued that Stick had never been in trouble with the law before, the state was only concerned with his status as a gang member. This is mostly due to the California Street Terrorism Enhancement and Prevention Act (STEP Act) of 1988 as part of California’s “war on gangs.” While the task force’s analysis of gang violence included white middle-class “Heavy Metal” and “Satanic” gangs, and concluded that Black and Brown youths were the most likely to be gang members, it completely ignored the growing skinhead and neo-Nazi gangs in the same area. Many mothers worried that this behavior was likely to people on the basis of race and space. This relates to Grzanka’s earlier unit about Space, Place, Communities, and Geographies. In his unit the mentions he ways “in which particulars of landscape and geographies create
In the excerpt, Gilmore offers a detailed case study on the effects neoliberal social policy has on the criminal justice system and one family affected by it. In A Mother’s Plea for Help, Gilmore depicts the story of Bernice Hatfield, whose son was wrongfully arrested on six counts of attempted murder. In an attempt to not spend 91 years in prison, her son, Stick, pleads guilty and waives his right to appeal, only to have the prosecutor increase the minimum term from six to nineteen years. One day when driving home from visiting Stick, she heard about Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (ROC) and decided to attend a meeting in the hopes of getting help from other mothers in the same situation. Mothers ROC is a community based activist organization, primarily made up of working-class women of color that challenge California’s legal system. While Bernice argued that Stick had never been in trouble with the law before, the state was only concerned with his status as a gang member. This is mostly due to the California Street Terrorism Enhancement and Prevention Act (STEP Act) of 1988 as part of California’s “war on gangs.” While the task force’s analysis of gang violence included white middle-class “Heavy Metal” and “Satanic” gangs, and concluded that Black and Brown youths were the most likely to be gang members, it completely ignored the growing skinhead and neo-Nazi gangs in the same area. Many mothers worried that this behavior was likely to people on the basis of race and space. This relates to Grzanka’s earlier unit about Space, Place, Communities, and Geographies. In his unit the mentions he ways “in which particulars of landscape and geographies create