bakahead

Invisibility may be defined as the ability or will of the power group not to acknowledge the presence or influence of another group. Being invisible as a black person runs the gamut from the daily experience of entering a room full of white people and not being acknowledged to the other extreme of erasure from history. Where would Mick Jagger or David Bowie be without Little Richard? (Or even James Brown or Michael Jackson for that matter?) Silence may be defined as the act of subordinating the expression of one’s needs to the will of the group in power. Sometimes the silence is strategic, as was Walter White’s. Many times, it is a suppression of one’s beliefs to accommodate what one has been told is the “greater good,” the ‘this’-now-and-‘that’-later philosophy. Many gay and lesbian people succumb to the oppression-ranking syndrome in groups whose politics are not anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, or anti-hierarchical. We spend our lives, as gay and lesbian people, calculating the costs of silence.

- Cheryl Clarke “Silence and Invisibility: Costly Metaphors”, in The Days of Good Looks: The Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980 to 2005 (via agradschoolbreakup)

(via agradschoolbreakup)

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