{"id":949,"date":"2014-01-20T15:53:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T15:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/01\/started-from-the-bottom-now-you-where-an-mlk-day-reflection-of-sorts.html"},"modified":"2014-01-20T15:53:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T15:53:00","slug":"started-from-the-bottom-now-you-where-an-mlk-day-reflection-of-sorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/01\/started-from-the-bottom-now-you-where-an-mlk-day-reflection-of-sorts.html","title":{"rendered":"Started From the Bottom Now You Where?: An MLK Day Reflection, of Sorts"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Cheryl Clarke once prudently instructed, \u201cSo, all of us would do well to stop fighting each other for our space at the bottom, because there ain\u2019t no more room.\u201d  Clarke, a poet\/scholar celebrated for fearlessly and brilliantly giving voice to the experiences of Black lesbian feminists, has always been acutely aware of the ways that myopic politics result in movement asphyxiation\u2014the ways that one\u2019s refusal to think beyond his own experience of oppression and liberation might easily result in the suffocating of those who are packed tightly in the lowermost regions of the US socio-sexual-economic order.\u00a0<\/span><br><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\"><br><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">She knew the price of a fight waged against the wrong enemy would be costly.  She knew, for example, as evidenced by the argument she articulated in her now classic essay \u201cFailure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,\u201d that the undoing of a world organized around White racial supremacy would be incomplete if Black folk, especially men, refused to do away with their own tools of oppression.  She knew that some Black brother\u2019s vision of \u201cfreedom\u201d could easily double as restriction in the lives of Black women.  She knew that some heterosexual feminists\u2014White, Black, and otherwise\u2014imagined a liberated anti-patriarchal future that did not include her queer likeness and that of other queer and trans people.  She knew, like some of us, that even though non-White, non-straight, non-abled, non-male, non-bourgeois, and other nonentities (as imagined by those in power) might be the everyday targets of structural violence, we are all differently situated at the proverbial bottom.<\/span><br><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\"><br><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif\">Read the rest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackyouthproject.com\/2014\/01\/started-from-the-bottom-now-you-where-an-mlk-day-reflectionof-sorts\/\" target=\"_blank\" class=\" decorated-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cheryl Clarke once prudently instructed, \u201cSo, all of us would do well to stop fighting each other for our space at the bottom, because there ain\u2019t no more room.\u201d Clarke, a poet\/scholar celebrated for fearlessly and brilliantly giving voice to the experiences of Black lesbian feminists, has always been acutely aware of the ways that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Started From the Bottom Now You Where?: An MLK Day Reflection, of Sorts<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Cheryl Clarke once prudently instructed, \u201cSo, all of us would do well to stop fighting each other for our space at the bottom, because there ain\u2019t no more\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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