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Kalamu ya Salaam's information blog

 

Sunday Nov 12, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

attribution: Getty Images

Isabella “Belle” Baumfree was born a slave in upstate New York in 1797. The daughter of slaves, she spoke only Dutch while being raised on an estate in a Dutch settlement. Baumfree was sold, along with a flock of sheep, for $105 when she was 9 years old. She learned English the hard way: her new owners only spoke English, and beat her repeatedly for her failure to comply with the instructions she could not possibly have understood. Eventually she became the property of John Dumont, of New Palz, New York.

New York was one of the first states to abolish slavery, with the legislative process beginning in 1799 and achieving full implementation on July 4, 1827.

Dumont had promised Isabella freedom a year before the state emancipation, “if she would do well and be faithful.” However, he reneged on his promise, claiming a hand injury had made her less productive. She was infuriated, having understood fairness and duty as a hallmark of the master-slave relationship. She continued working until she felt she had done enough to satisfy her sense of obligation to him — spinning 100 pounds of wool — then escaped before dawn with her infant daughter, Sophia. She later said:  

“I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.”

Later, while working for Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen, who paid Dumont $20 for her last year of servitude and then freed her, she learned that Dumont had illegally sold her 5-year-old son, Peter, to a man in Alabama. With help from the local Quakers and the support off the Van Wagenens, she sued Dumont in court and won. Her son was returned to her from Alabama. It was the first time that a black woman won a court case against a white man. 

She changed the world.

In 1843, answering a religious calling to go out and preach her faith, Isabelle Baumfree took the name of Sojourner Truth and spent years fighting for her beliefs and speaking widely in favor of the abolition of slavery, prison reform, pacifism, and women’s rights. She was a powerful advocate on their behalf.

In 1851, at the Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention, Sojourner Truth gave one of her most well-known speeches, often referred to as “Ain’t I a Woman?”: 

“I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint, and a man a quart — why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, — for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold. The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble. I can’t read, but I can hear. I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again. The Lady has spoken about Jesus, how he never spurned woman from him, and she was right. When Lazarus died, Mary and Martha came to him with faith and love and besought him to raise their brother. And Jesus wept and Lazarus came forth. And how came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and the woman who bore him. Man, where was your part? But the women are coming up blessed be God and a few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.”

More than 100 years later, Candace (Candy) Lightner was a divorced mother of three, living with her children in Fair Oaks, California. On May 3, 1980, while walking to a church carnival, her daughter Cari was hit by a drunk driver who left her to die.

She was struck with such force that she was knocked out of shoes and thrown 125 feet. Cari died not long after the accident.

The driver that hit Cari never stopped, and it was later learned that he had been drunk at the time of the accident. This wasn’t his first drunk driving accident. He had been arrested a short time earlier for another incident related to drunk driving. After police officers told her that the driver likely would receive little punishment for killing Cari, Lightner became enraged. She decided to channel her anger and grief into fighting drunk driving. “Death caused by drunk drivers is the only socially acceptable form of homicide,” she later told Peoplemagazine.

She changed the world.

Within months, Lightner was lobbying politicians in Washington and had camped out at Gov. Jerry Brown’s Sacramento office until he was willing to see her. Joining with Cindy Lamb, whose daughter was paralyzed by another drunk, they formed Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

Through MADD, Lightner helped get new anti-drunk driving legislation passed in individual states and nationally. One of the group’s most significant accomplishments from this time was the national law that raised the legal drinking age to 21.

But more importantly than the laws she changed, she also changed the very atmosphere of this nation. Jokes about drinking and driving were no longer as funny. Designated drivers became a thing, and were often served free non-alcoholic drinks at bars. Two-martini lunches became a relic of a different age. It was no longer socially acceptable to drink and drive. All because Cindy Lightner became enraged.

On January 21, 2017, the historic Women’s March occurred in cities all over the country, with a particularly large one held on the Washington Mall. Attendance at that protest over the election results exceeded attendance at the inauguration itself, which was held the day before. Women were not happy about the election of a small-handed pussy-grabber as commander in chief.

In Atlantic County, New Jersey, sitting Republican county legislator John Carman …

… posted a meme on the day of the Women’s March that featured a woman in a kitchen and the message, “Will the women’s protest be over in time for them to cook dinner?”
“Just asking?” he wrote alongside the meme.

While he may have found humor in mocking the millions of women who were demanding the respect one unquestionably grants to anyone who possesses a penis, most of us failed to appreciate his post. One woman in particular, Ashley Bennett, a constituent of Carman, found his remarks offensive. The 32-year old political neophyteand psychiatric emergency screener who worked at Cape Regional Hospital decided to do something with her anger.

“I was angry about [the Facebook meme], because elected officials shouldn’t be on social media mocking and belittling people who are expressing their concerns about their community and the nation,” Bennett said in October.

On Tuesday night she won his seat on the Atlantic County Board of Freeholders.

She is changing the world.

Bob Marshall, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, has not only earned his self-proclaimed title of Virginia’s “chief homophobe,” but he has been needlessly and intentionally cruel.

Marshall is notorious for introducing anti-LGBTQ legislation. After Congress repealed the federal ban on gays in the military, Marshall proposed a measure to ban openly gay people from serving in the Virginia National Guard. “It’s a distraction … and I’m worried about this guy who’s got eyes on me,” Marshall said. He also derailed the appointment of a judge solely because he was gay, and served as the primary sponsor of Virginia’s successful constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In 2015, he proposed a radical bill that would legalize anti-LGBTQ segregation in hotels, restaurants, businesses, schools, government agencies, and hospitals. And in 2016, he put forth a measure that would bar transgender students from using the school bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, and requiring principals to out gender-nonconforming students to their parents.

On Tuesday, Danica Roem, a 33-year-old Democratic transgender woman, won the seat that the 73-year-old Marshall had held since 1992. Marshall’s attacks on the LGBTQ community inspired the journalist from Northern Virginia to run against him in what became a contest of light versus dark. His sister, the actress Paula Marshall Nucci, posted on Facebook Tuesday night:

That was my brother who lost his seat in the House of Delegates race in Va. He wouldn’t debate her. He wouldn’t call her “her” or “she.” Maybe if he weren’t so judgmental and homophobic, he could have lost with dignity. I’m not happy my brother lost his job, but all I can say is, karma brother.

Danica Roem’s response to Marshall’s attacks on her character and sexual identity was as classy as her response to the question about Bob Marshall that was posed after she defeated him: 

This may be one of the best political ads of all time:

She is changing the world.

According to an investigative report in the Washington Post last Thursday, Leigh Corfman was only 14 years old when she claims she was sexually molested by Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Jeff Session’s Alabama Senate seat. (Moore is running against Democrat Doug Jones in the Dec. 12 special election.)

At the time in 1979 Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney who Corfman and her mother met at the county courthouse where he worked in Etowah County, Alabama. He watched over her while her mother went into the courtroom for a custody hearing. Flattered at his interest, Corfman gave Moore her phone number and began a brief relationship with him that ended up on the floor of his home with him in “tight white” underwear asking her to fondle him.

“I wasn’t ready for that — I had never put my hand on a man’s penis, much less an erect one,” Corfman says.

After talking to her friends, Corfman says, she began to feel that she had done something wrong and kept it a secret for years.

“I felt responsible,” she says. “I felt like I had done something bad. And it kind of set the course for me doing other things that were bad.”

She says that her teenage life became increasingly reckless with drinking, drugs, boyfriends, and a suicide attempt when she was 16.

She never reported the incident to the police, or her mother, although she did tell a couple of close friends at the time who verified her version to the Washington Post, which published the story on Thursday.

Over the years, her shame turned to anger.

There were times, Corfman says, she thought about confronting Moore. At one point during the late 1990s, she says, she became so angry that she drove to the parking lot outside Moore’s office at the county courthouse in Gadsden. She sat there for a while, she says, rehearsing what she might say to him.

“ ‘Remember me?’ ” she imagined herself saying.

Until now, her own behavior (which includes multiple marriages and financial issues) and the impact it would have on her children and family caused her to refrain from speaking about that chapter of her life. And while it was only in response to the Washington Post’s investigation that she finally told her story, it may change the outcome of next month’s election.

And that may change the world.

Society does not like angry women—especially angry black women (ask Sojourner Truth or Michelle Obama). They don’t like us angry women because they know we can change the world. And they also know that women have every right to be angry.

Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump both felt free to use their power to sexually assault women. They derived pleasure from the exercise of control that it represented. And they knew that there would be no consequences. After all, there never had been, and “when you are a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Much of our anger is based in our powerlessness. The fact is that Weinstein, Trump, Spacey, and all the other predators have carried on for years without anyone standing up to them. It took a long time for our shame, at our lack of power to protect ourselves from them, to turn to anger. It is an anger that still simmers under the surface in the hearts of women, and some men, all over the country. It is an anger that can change the world. 

We have to nurture that anger. We have to change the shame to determination: determination to enter politics and shake up our political system on local, state, and national levels. Determination to reclaim our bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice” needs to be more than a slogan—it has to be a way of life. No man or state, should be able to dictate the purposes to which our bodies are put. Nor should any man believe for half a second that he has the right to touch any part of our bodies without our consent. 

Gaining power in our politics will help lessen the anger, but until Donald Trump is driven from office by the women he assaulted, my anger will remain. Every time I see his face on a television set, or in a newspaper photo, I can’t help but be pulled back to the time I was 19 and faced with an employer who felt exactly the same way about my body that Donald Trump appears to feel about the bodies of women he meets. There is something very wrong with a society that rejects a well-qualified public servant who happens to be a woman in favor of an international laughingstock of limited intellectual ability and knowledge who just happens to pee standing up. People voted for him after the news of his sexual predations was made public. 

That is wrong. And it makes me very angry. Let’s hope that somewhere out there is another woman whose shame is even now turning to anger. And whose anger will give her the strength to come forward with the evidence needed to challenge the monster who sits in the Oval Office pretending to be president. 

She could change the world.

 

>via: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/11/12/1713851/-Angry-women-change-the-world