Journal 1
Select that poem or poems that speak to you the most from this week's selections. In a thoughtful post, please respond to which elements have had the greatest impact on your thinking or have given you the greatest pause to consider something you may not have considered before.
I relate the most to Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic by Suheir Hammad. In this poem, Hammad portrays the frustration she feels due to being fetishized because of her race. As a Black woman, a bisexual woman, and a plus-sized woman, I can connect with Hammad's anger as those three sectors of my identity are often over-sexualized individually in American society. In my personal life, I have encountered various situations in which I later found out that a person's intention for initially connecting with me (in a way that I previously thought was platonic) was actually for the purpose of sex. It is a very dehumanizing feeling and makes me very frustrated that wholesome courtships and sometimes even friendships don't always come as easy to people who share my identities, or at least as easily as they might for someone who is not a part of those fetishized groups. I can definitely relate to the feeling of being "imprisoned" and "caged" in my fetishized identity as Hammad mentioned towards the beginning of the poem and I'm sure that many other women and people like me are able to tell the same tale.
Journal 5
In no less than 250 words, analyze and evaluate Gay's argument regarding respectability politics within the Black community.
Gay's argument in this essay, "The Politics of Respectability," is that respectability politics are not the solution to ending racism. The goal of ending racism is bigger than individual actions and instead requires larger and more systemic changes. She calls out Bill Cosby and Don Lemon, who have made statements that imply Black people should pull their pants up and stop littering in order to be treated better by white people. The problem with this thinking, though, is that oppression is bigger than individual counteractions. Oppression does not care to ask you if you put your trash in the garbage before it crushes you. It is often true that Black victims of police brutality did nothing to deserve the aggression they faced at the hands of officers. However, the truth still stands that they are victims.
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Gay is correct in saying that aspiring to whiteness is not the answer to solving the problem of racism. If we take this approach, we will lose what makes the Black community special-- only to be treated just the same. It is not worth changing our rhythm for the approval of whites because we will always be seen as sub-par until the natural progression of America's social climate promotes more acceptance. Therefore, the appropriate counter to this issue in the meantime is real, tangible, large-scale change. This is why Gay praises Obama for his relatively bold statements about race in 2013. He spoke about systemic change that will contribute to Black advancement, and for the first time places the responsibility on everybody; not just Black people. This is because solving racism is not the problem of Black people alone (or even at all). It is a burden that the rest of the country has to carry because it is not productive or lucrative to punch and fight our way upward.