June, a month filled with emotion laden history, both on the personal scale and the national scale.
Juneteenth, news of Emancipation reaches Afro/Americans in Texas, in the year of the 100th anniversary of American women winning the Right to Vote. The month of my father's birthday, Father's Day.
Patriarch, Patriarchy, Everything is complicated and the true lessons are often buried in obscurity and complexity. Every news event in regard to Black Lives Matter, makes me think of women's lives, Black women and white women, beige women, tan women, all women. So much of this big backlash that we are experiencing is wrapped in gender animosity as well as racial. Men are united in their brotherhood of maleness which is so often stronger than a bond to a lover or a wife, a daughter or a mother.
And as African American men are conditioned and molded by cultural expectations and projections, so, even more profoundly, are women of all shades.
We are confined within roles that many of us are never free-minded or brave enough to face the consequences of really seeing what is happening to us all the time as women in the world. We don't want to fight the power because we learned when we were very weak and little and powerless that we can't beat the power and the consequences are devastating, often violent.
We make laws because a fair, orderly, humane civilization is better for everyone, male, female, all races in all parts of the world, and we have been working steadily towards that goal for thousands of years. If only the physically powerful run things, everyone gets bullied and without cooperation and good will, it all falls to ruin. We know that. We have seen that in history.
A book I plan to buy called AT THE DARK END OF THE STREET, BLACK WOMEN, RACE AND RESISTANCE, talks about the uses and appeals of legalized rape which existed in the south before the Civil War. Since all enslaved African American Women were property, they could be and were raped at the will of the white overseers and plantation owners, slave traders and random criminals. Rape of enslaved women also gave the benefit of more children who could be sold. The depravity of ordinary white men in the pre-war south, is an extension of the depravity that many display today towards lower class women of both races, especially in the sex work and nudity bar dancing world.
The experiences of race and gender have a lot in common.
Just watching CNN for my one hour of television news programming, and the turmoil of the times directed my thoughts.
Every day, it comes into my mind that I am living, right now, in a historic moment with no clear precedent.
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
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