question #1 response

I believe that a lot of the points that Audre Lorde brings up in her “Age, Race and sex” paper are still relevant today. On the whole, racism and sexism still exists today. On a specific note however, some of her points are outdated. For example the point that she makes about Black and Third world people, Working-class people, older people and women making up the “dehumanized inferior” group is not relative today. I believe that blacks and women have definitely earned more rights and more equal opportunities today than thirty years ago since that paper was written. I do agree with another point that she made about the tradition of American society where members of the oppressed or objectified groups felling that they have to mimic the oppressor and adopt their language and manners to feel more secure and more accepted. This holds true today in my experiences. Everyone has to be politically correct when it comes to hot topics like sexuality, politics, religion and other touchy subjects. Ever since 9/11 it has become more difficult to have discussions about religion or politics because everyone is afraid to be politically incorrect or viewed as a terrorist or anti-America and we just watched as our country spent millions of dollars, and hundreds of lives on wars that left us in debt and an economic crisis but we responded to that change with fear (change being our country going to war), or some of us ignored it. I think this relates to Audre Lorde’s essay when she said, “institutionalized rejection of differences is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that’s not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is is subordinate” (115).