I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.
Gloria SteinemRead
The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.
Interpretation
The oppression based on sex and race is interconnected and must be addressed simultaneously to achieve true equality.
Gloria Steinem's quote highlights the idea that the social hierarchies created by both gender and racial discrimination are closely linked. To dismantle these oppressive systems, efforts must be made to address both issues at once, recognizing that they influence and reinforce each other in society.
In practice
During a panel discussion on social justice, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for comprehensive reform.
I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.
If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?
Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.
All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.
Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.
I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.
I began to understand that not only was there was a social justice agenda, there was a policy agenda. For every justice campaign there was a policy initiative associated with it.
When a country doesn't respect Black lives, maybe it doesn't deserve to be entertained by Black athletes.
It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere...That's the world! On which hope sits!
Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?
Growth is essential and must be sustained. But rapid growth alone cannot address the problems arising out of continuing disparities. Tackling these is not just a matter of social justice but, more importantly, an existential necessity and a moral imperative.
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