ch 3: identification and resistance: women’s civic discourse across the color line

At first, I started to read the other chapter about cyberspace because I’m really interested in the growing fields of technology. However, two pages in I decided that I wasn’t as interested because of all the political jargon. So, women’s discourse it was!

I related MUCH better to this chapter, anyway. As I’ve mentioned before, taking Black Lit: Novel has helped me in this class (RDA) whenever we’ve talked about black rights, rhetoric, power, etc. The class also helped me understand and relate to this chapter in Rhetorical Democracy. In this chapter, women were going to be the subject, plain and simple. Shirley Wilson Logan was going to incorporate both black and white women–across the color line–in her chapter, but she found that finding texts that discussed the black race and the female gender was easier than finding white women discussing race and gender.

On page 35, Logan claims, “My central claim is that effective discourse across the color line or the line of difference must always engage in both identification and resistance.” In short, her thesis is the promotion of both identification AND resistance. To present identification, or to find commonalities is great; but, resistance is also necessary when fighting for more rights for women and racial minorities.

“We need to speak our differences, all of our differences without fear of chastisement or group regulation” (35). I think this quote is important because lots of times people ARE fearful to disagree because they are afraid the group will gang up on them, so they simply agree with the crowd. Pointing this out is crucial for the fight.

While this chapter does explore race through blacks, it definitely exploites the idea that women are discriminated against more because of their gender than they are because of their race. This surprised me a little, because we see racial discrimination still to this day…a LOT. We see gender discrimination, but don’t acknowledge it as much as racial discrimination. Recently in my intro to sociology class I learned that for every dollar a man makes, a woman only makes between 77-78 cents. This is proof that women are facing discrimination.

I loved that Logan ended with an Audre Lorde quote.

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.