Osame Osayande > Recent Status Updates

There must be something I could do differently that would take care of everything, end my agonies of bereavement, return Muriel to reason. If only I could higure out how to convince her this was all ridiculous behavior, unnecessary. We could start from there.

Another piece of me insisted this could not possibly be happening, while images of murder, death, earthquake harrowed my dreams. The psychic discord was ripping my brain apart.

If nobody's going to dig you too tough anyway, it really doesn't matter so much what you dare to explore.

there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight. Unattractive, too, or so the ads in Ebony and Jet seemed to tell me. Yet I read them anyway, in the bathroom, on the newsstand, at my sister's house, whenever I got a chance. It was a furtive reading, but it was an affirmation of some part of me, however frustrating.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Loving hurt too much. You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.

Yet, I never once heard the name mentioned of the first man to fall in the american revolution, nor ever been told that he was a Negro.
What did that mean about the history I had learned?

I had spent four years at Hunter High School, supposedly the best public high school in New York City, with the most academically advanced and intellectually accurate education available, for 'preparing young women for college and career'. I had been taught by some of the most highly considered historians in the country.

The overwhelming racism of so many of the faculty, including the ones upon whom I had my worst schoolgirl crushes. How little I settled for in the way of human contact, compared to what I was conscious of wanting.

How meager the sustenance was I gained from the four years I spent in high school; yet, how important that sustenance was to my survival. Remembering that time is like watching old pictures of myself in a prison camp picking edible scraps out of the garbage heap, and knowing that without that garbage I might have starved to death.

Encouraged and inspired by ever loving memories of you

For suffragists and clubwomen alike, Black women were simply expendable entities when it came time to woo Southern support with a white complexion.

Black women had been more than willing to contribute those "clear powers of observation and judgement" toward the creation of a multiracial movement for women's political rights. But at every turn, they were betrayed, spurned and rejected by the leaders of the lily-white woman suffrage movement.

While their men's sexist behavior definitely needed to be challenged, the real enemy-their common enemy-was the boss, the capitalist, or whoever was responsible for the miserable wages and unbearable working conditions and for racist and sexist discrimination on the job.

Anthony's staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology's blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes.

Stanton insisted that the exclusion from the NLU proved "….. what the Revolution has said again and again, that the worst enemies of Woman Suffrage will ever be the laboring classes of men.