ESSAY CONTEST

Between a Hawk and a Buzzard

Incite Change Contest #2: Racism in Feminism

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Martin Luther King Letter from Birmingham, Alabama jail, April 16, 1963.

But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard. — Sojourner Truth

1. What can a Karen say about racism in feminism? Nothing- but that never stopped me before.
2. “Man, where is your part?” asks Sojourner Truth. “Women’s rights are human rights,” said Hillary whom they want to go away.
3. “Women’s rights are human rights,” said abolitionist and proto-feminist Sarah Moore Grimké in the late 1830s.
4. Helen Keller, best known for learning to spell “w.a.t.e.r.,” was a radical agent of social change, a human rights activist who put her privilege to work by co-founding the NAACP and the ACLU. I didn’t know that.
5. Does gender or race come first? It’s kind of like being stuck between a hawk and a buzzard.
6. I have feelings about alleged infidelities of prominent men like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I relate to Jacqueline and Coretta, the wives that stood by them.
7. Anita Hill testified before Congress about the sexual harassment she’d endured working as an aide at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In a 2019 New York Times article, Professor Hill said after the 1991 hearings “most of the people polled, regardless of race, regardless of gender, believed that Clarence Thomas should be confirmed for the Supreme Court.”
8. Divide and conquer with blame and shame, or listen and find common ground.
9. Like Maya Angelou told Oprah Winfrey, “When you know better, you do better.”
10. If I am not a woman’s rights, what am I?

Thanks to Jonica Bradley, Marla Bishop, Edward Anderson, Melissa R. Mendelson Demeter deLune, Marilyn Harris, Reuben Salsa and https://ko-fi.com/thebadinfluence for the Incite Change Essay Contest.

I like writing for The Bad Influence because I am a natural born trouble-maker.

I love a thrifty word challenge like this one.

Karen’s goals for 2021 include finishing her MFA thesis and dressing like a Star Trek alien from a utopian planet. Her Creative Nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Brevity, NPR’s The New Normal, Straw Dog Writer’s Guild Pandemic Poetry and Prose, Multiplicity and Voices of the Valley Anthology.