The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches by Morgan Robin

Author:Morgan, Robin [Morgan, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497678286
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

A Paler Shade of Racism

A characteristic of feminist consciousness I’ve come to trust (sometimes grudgingly) is relentlessness. Once welcomed into the brain and heart, this consciousness is there to stay—and grow—at once dybbuk and shadow, conscience, curse, and blessing. There’s no convenient getting rid of it. Deny it, and it will outwait you. Defy it, and it will trip you up embarrassingly. Flee it, and it will follow. It is protean in its form. I sometimes think of it as a humble but pungent onion—with endless translucent layers.

The more I travel, the more I learn and re-learn basic lessons I thought by now thoroughly ingested. The further away I go from my own country, the more I discover its interior landscapes, especially those internal, determining ones—the shifting tectonic plates of sex and race.

This article was written as a plea to citizens of another country, a plea that they not repeat a particularly scarring moment in U.S. history. But more, it was written as a discovery—of yet another layer of racism in myself. Central to it is the deceptively simple realization that styles of racism and sexism differ, though the content remains the same. The essay was published in the New Zealand weekly magazine, The Listener, and provoked quite a few letters—some even sympathetic to the audacity of a foreigner daring to try and counsel across nationalities, hopefully without preaching.

Meanwhile, to this day, wherever I go, the layers of the onion skin that is consciousness keep relentlessly peeling away …

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