Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as ““Ain’t I A Woman?””

GBN’s Daily Drop: Black Lexicon – What “Intersectionality” Means (LISTEN)

GBN’s Daily Drop: Black Lexicon – What “Intersectionality” Means (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on March 1, 2022

[Image Source: Intersectional Environmentalist via YouTube]

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is based on the Tuesday,  March 1 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 to kick off Women’s History Month.

It’s in our Black Lexicon category called “Lemme Break It Down” and explains the term “Intersectionality”:

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Tuesday, March 1st, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

It’s in the category we call “Lemme Break It Down,” where we explore the origins and meanings of words and phrases rooted in the Black Lexicon and Black culture. Today’s phrase to kick off Women’s History Month? “Intersectionality.”

“Intersectionality” is the term coined by Columbia University Law School Professor and Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how race and gender create a unique form of oppression for African American women.

The term gave name to a key perspective which of course had been discussed long before. 18th and 19th century writings by Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech address the same concept.

Twenty-first-century usage has expanded to include class, sexuality, ability, religion or nationality as identities that can intersect to shape discrimination as well as privilege.

To learn more about intersectionality, check out the paper Kimberlé Crenshaw published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum where she first publicly explained her theory, entitled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”, listen to Crenshaw’s current podcast on the subject, Intersectionality Matters, and check out other sources provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing, and available at workman.com, Amazon,Bookshop and other online retailers.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

If you like our Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon,Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You could give us a positive rating or review, share your favorite episodes on social media, or go old school and tell a friend.

For more Good Black News, you can check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodb,lacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

R.I.P. bell hooks, 69, Acclaimed Author, Activist and Poet

R.I.P. bell hooks, 69, Acclaimed Author, Activist and Poet

By goodblacknews on December 15, 2021

[bell hooks at The New School. Photo: Spencer Kohn, 2013]

Professor, author, and activist bell hooks, who explored and dissected social, political, gender and interpersonal issues in addition to intersectionality in works such as All About Love, Bone Black,  Ain’t I a Woman, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity & Love,  Feminist Theory and Communion: The Female Search for Love, died today at 69.

She passed at home in Berea, Kentucky after an extended illness, according to a family statement from William Morrow Publishers and Berea College in Kentucky, which houses the bell hooks Institute.

Named Gloria Jean Watkins at birth, hooks was internationally known by her lowercase pen name ever since she published her 1978 collection of poems, And There We Wept. hooks took the name to honor her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. (She was told often as a child that her quick thinking and outspokenness was like that of “Granny Bell.”)

To quote from Los Angeles Times:

She attended segregated schools in Kentucky’s Christian County, then went to Stanford University. She later earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

She also founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College, which “celebrates, honors, and documents the life and work” of its namesake. hooks also served as a distinguished professor in residence in Appalachian studies there.

In 2017, she dedicated her papers to Berea College so that future generations would know her work and the impact she had on the intersections of race, gender, place, class and sexuality, the school said. The following year, she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

Read more:

BHM: “Ain’t I A Woman?” The Life and Legacy of Abolitionist and Activist Sojourner Truth

BHM: “Ain’t I A Woman?” The Life and Legacy of Abolitionist and Activist Sojourner Truth

By goodblacknews on February 1, 2019

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

It’s February 1st, which means it is now officially Black History Month! Although we here at Good Black News celebrate the achievements of Black people every day of the year, it is always lovely when the rest of the U.S. joins in to do the same for at least 28 of them. So, for #BHM2019, GBN will be highlighting the achievements of black women, past and present, who have and are paving the way to a better future.

Sojourner Truth Google Doodle (via google.com)

And what better person to start with than today’s Google Doogle, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, who, with “Ain’t I A Woman?” gave one of the most powerful and unforgettable American speeches of all time on what we now call intersectionality?

In 2014, Sojourner Truth was included in Smithsonian Magazine’s list of the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time” – yet the majority of Americans don’t know who she was, what she did, or they confuse her with Harriett Tubman.

Born Isabella (“Bell”) Baumfree circa 1797, Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, in 1828 she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.

She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside “testifying the hope that was in her.” Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?,” a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect. Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language, and had a Dutch accent. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth)

There are a lot of other events and details in Truth’s life, of course, including collaboration with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, President Abraham Lincoln and varied suffragists and women’s groups – Truth was known for her persuasive speeches against slavery as well as sexism – she even once defiantly opened her top and showed her breasts during a speech when she was accused of being a man.  

But what is remarkable and often not mentioned is that she is likely the first black woman in the U.S. to attain national fame (she sold photos and autographs of herself at events to make money “I sell the shadow to support the substance”) and the first to have her voice heard in America. It is also rather ironic that many of the records of her speeches were written by white men, and thus often altered to their perception of a black, female, former slave.

Some would quote that she had 13 children who were sold away from her (she had 5 and raised most of them) or say she was raving when she was calm. Truth’s was a 19th-century case of what is all too familiar today – media distortion by the dominant culture trying to make sense of “the other”- and in her instance, white men trying to process the experiences and truths of black women.

However, Truth was self-possessed – she claimed her ownership of herself by renaming herself and writing her own Narrative in 1850. Truth traveled and spoke to hostile, indifferent and embracing crowds, fought for women’s rights and black women’s right to vote, fought for land grants and reparations for former slaves, prison reform and the end of capital punishment.

Truth was in her 80s when she died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan. In 1999, a 12-foot high monument was built in Battle Creek to honor her. The calendar of saints of the Episcopal Church remembers Truth annually, and the Lutheran Church calendar of saints remembers her on the same day as Harriet Tubman. 

In 2009, Truth became the first black woman honored with a bust in the U.S. Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton honoring Sojourner Truth as her likeness is added to U.S. Capitol (photo via sfgate.com)

To learn more about Truth, you can read her autobiography The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, the biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter, and for children, Who Was Sojourner Truth?  or My Name is Truth: The Life of Sojourner Truth written by Ann Turner and illustrated by James Ransome.

To watch a mini-biography on Truth on biography.com, go to: http://www.biography.com/video/sojourner-truth-mini-biography-11191875531

Abolitionist and Activist Sojourner Truth Honored as "Tail Fin Hero" by Norwegian Air

By goodblacknews on August 18, 2017

(photo via Norwegian Air)

by Judy Rife via recordonline.com
Norwegian Air will honor Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist and activist who was born a slave in Ulster County, NY, as a “tail fin hero.” Truth’s likeness will appear on the fourth Boeing 737 MAX 8 that Norwegian will take delivery of this month.
The airline, which began flights between Stewart International Airport and Europe in June, regularly honors historical figures from the countries where it operates on the tail fins of its aircraft. Last month, it honored its first American, Benjamin Franklin, as well as Sir Freddie Laker from England and Tom Crean from Ireland on the first three of the six MAXs that it will receive from Boeing this year. The remaining two planes will also honor Americans.
The six planes will be used on Norwegian’s new routes between three East Coast airports and Europe, including Stewart Airport, T.F. Green in Providence, R.I., and Bradley International in Windsor Locks, Conn. In announcing the selection of Truth, Thomas Ramdahl, Norwegian Air’s chief commercial officer, called her “an inspiration and a pioneer” for people around the world.“She is someone who pushed boundaries and challenged the establishment in more ways than one,″ said Ramdahl in a statement.
Truth, among the Smithsonian’s “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time,” was born into slavery as Isabella Baumfree around the turn of the 18th century, escaped in 1826 and changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843. A gifted orator, Truth is best known for her dedication to the abolition of slavery and women’s rights, but she also was a proponent of prison reform, property rights and universal suffrage. She died in 1883.
Source: Norwegian Air pays tribute to abolitionist Sojourner Truth

27 Years Ago Today: U.S. Postal Service Issues Sojourner Truth Stamp

By goodblacknews on February 4, 2013

On Feb. 4, 1986, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp honoring abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth as part of its Black Heritage series.

Sojurner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in 1797 on the Hardenbergh plantation in upstate New York. In 1826, Truth managed to escape to freedom and became known as a fearless advocate for enslaved African-Americans and women. 
She is best known for her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech that challenged gender and racial inequalities. During the Civil War, Truth became involved in the war effort by recruiting black troops for the Union Army. After the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.
article by Naeesa Aziz via bet.com