Aarnav Tapan Deshpande - Week 2

Gender and Society

Reading Summary

Week 2

Paulette Caldwell in her essay, ‘A Hair Piece- Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender’ does exceptionally well exactly that what she sets out to be her goal through the title. Caldwell looks to bring to the fore in her piece, the double jeopardy that a black woman is put through, while faced with discrimination on the lines of both, sex and race. She does so using the case of Rogers v American Airlines and the court’s decision thereof, which serves as an exemplar for the continued assumptions of the courts construing racism and sexism as operating independently while completely ignoring the existence of the intersectionality of both of these forms of discrimination. Caldwell stresses on the fact that there exists an unmistakable interactive relationship between race and gender which flows from factual and logical examination of structures of dominance, both historical and contemporary, stereotypes, myths, and images relating to race and gender, and black women in particular, who have the onus of sustaining it. The piece is Caldwell’s expression of her state of perplex towards those committed to eliminate dominance based on race and gender, or both, and their continual failure in acknowledging or deriving strategies of liberation based on the fact of race-sex interaction