hotspotsss

The first hotspot I saw in this letter was paragraph two on page seventy-four. King talks about how it is easy for those who have not felt the oppression faced by blacks to think it is easy to wait for change to come to them. The examples King uses are extremely strong, from the twenty million Negros in poverty, to having to explain to his daughter why she can’t go to the “white” amusement park. When a writer can put his audience directly in the shoes of that author, you can tell how much they want you to understand what they are trying to say. All these situations expressed by King show legitimately how impatience is all that can be offered by Black people. The injustices are too strong to be fought “weakly,” or civil rights may never get where they need to be.

The Second hotspot I saw was when King talked about the White moderate impeding progress more than the racist oppressor. The reason for this King says, is because “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” It is the white moderate who undermines the black movement whether he does so directly or indirectly is irrelevant. Another great quote from this section would be when he says “lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection.”

The article titled “Sexual Violence as a tool for Genocide” is Andrea Smith’s approach to women of color who have to face oppression for both their race AND gender.

Andrea starts off by discussing how rape is “nothing more or less” than a tool for patriarchal control. She criticizes feminist Kimberle Crenshaw’s critical race theories for what she calls a “lack of attention to racism and other forms of oppression. Crenshaw looks at how male-dominated conceptions of race and white-dominated conceptions of gender stand in the way of a clear understanding of violence against women of color. Smith argues that examining race and gender oppression separately is inadequate. Instead, she argues, an “intersectional” approach must be supplanted for such analyses. I find this intersectional method as the first hotspot in the essay

The next hotspot to me would be the historical overview of rape being used as a tool for racial aggression. “African American women were also viewed as inherently rapable. Yet where colonizers used sexual violence to eliminate Native populations, slave owners used rape to reproduce an exploitable labor force. (The children of black slave women inherited their slave status.) And because black women were seen as the property of their slave owners, their rape at the hands of these men did not “count.” This demonstrates that for centuries rape has been the ultimate tool of dehumanization, exploitation, and humiliation. Nothing may be more effective and disgusting then rape as a weapon for the ruling class and the fact that it has gone on for so long is despicable.