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It’s always interesting to interview an interviewer. Not because they’re cagey—quite the opposite. They’re too relaxed. Anna Deavere Smith is gratefully accepting an espresso as I sit down and ask if it’s okay to open my laptop for my notes. She’s seated across from me, maintains excellent eye contact, a formal but gracious presence, with a […]
The post BGN Interview: Anna Deavere Smith appeared first on Black Girl Nerds.
Happy Black History Month! For each of the 28 days of February, we at The Mary Sue will have a post about a black woman you should know about—some you may have heard of, some a little bit more obscure, and some fictional who still deserve a lot of love.
(Credit: K. Kendall on VisualHunt )
Day Twenty-Three: Audre Lorde
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” –Audre Lorde.
Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants parents who settled in Harlem. She was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, but she chose to drop the “y” from her first name while still a child, explaining in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the “e”-endings in the two side-by-side names. I think Anne Shirley would have appreciated that argument.
Lorde’s relationship with her parents was difficult, especially because of colorism. In particular, Lorde notes her own relationship with her mother, who was “deeply suspicious” of black people with darker skin than hers, Lorde herself was darker than her mother. In fact, the only reason that Lorde’s father was “allowed” to marry his wife, despite being darker than her family would have preferred, was because of his charm and ambition. Lorde’s mother herself was light enough to pass for white.
In 1954, Lorde spends a year at the National University of Mexico, where she came to confirm herself identity as both a lesbian and poet while beginning to craft a writing style that explored what those identities meant.
In 1977, Lorde became an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. She did this while also teaching at Lehman College from 1969 to 1970, then as a professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice from 1970 to 1981. During her time there she fought for the creation of a black studies department and then in 1981, she went on to teach at her alma mater, Hunter College.
In 1981, Lorde was among the originators of the Women’s Coalition of St. Croix, which was an organization dedicated to assisting women who have survived sexual abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV). In the late 1980s, she helped establish Sisterhood in Support of Sisters (SISA) in South Africa to help black women who were affected by apartheid and other forms of injustice.
Within her academic work, Lorde focused her discussion of “difference” not only on differences between groups of women but between conflicting differences within the individual.
“I am defined as other in every group I’m part of,” she declared. “The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression”
Lorde considered herself a “lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and used her poetry as a way to express all of the different ways her identity intersected within the world.
Lorde’s poetry became more exposed and personal as she grew and became more confident in her sexuality. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Lorde states, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought…As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas.”
The Cancer Journals (1980)and A Burst of Light (1988) both reflect on Lorde’s breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Lorde deals with Western notions of illness, treatment, and physical beauty and prosthesis, as well as themes of death, fear of mortality, victimization versus survival, and inner power. Lorde’s novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), described as a “biomythography,” chronicles the evolution of Lorde’s sexuality and self-awareness through childhood to maturity.
Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender, and health as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued that, although differences in gender have received all the focus, it is essential that these other differences are also recognized and addressed. That ideaology is the root of intersectional feminism as we have come to know it today.
Her focus on these different identities would lead to her having conflicts with notable white feminists. In her crucial essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde attacked racist white feminism: “If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color?”
Lorde even vocally critiqued womanism because of its failure to explicitly address homosexuality within the black female community. According to Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” “the need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity.” She writes, “A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves.”
From 1991 until her death, she was the New York State Poet Laureate. In 1992, she received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle. In 2001, Publishing Triangle instituted the Audre Lorde Award to honor works of lesbian poetry.
Lorde died of liver cancer at age 58 on November 17, 1992, in St. Croix. In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means “Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known.”
Recommended Reading:
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – A Biomythography (Crossing Press Feminist Series)
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press Feminist Series)
This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga
(image: K. Kendall on VisualHunt )
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After a video alleging that a Parkland shooting survivor was a “crisis actor” spent a while at #1 on YouTube’s hugely influential trending page, the streaming site foundered in trying to explain why actual humans couldn’t help out.
YouTube’s trending page has come under scrutiny as of late, after its algorithm allowed content like Logan Paul’s video in Japan’s “Suicide Forest” to reach #1 as well as promoting actual fake news conspiracy videos (not Trump Fake News) in the wake of tragedies.
Of course, Internet denizens who are clicking and sharing awful stuff like this bear some responsibility, but we start getting into serpent-eating-its-own-tail territory here: tons of people visit YouTube’s trending page, and so that bad content gets clicked on all the more the higher it rises, and it seems to have a patina of respectability by being on the trending page in the first place. YouTube really should have a hand in moderating what shows up and is promoted on its most visible and most visited portal.
YouTube’s argument for why it can’t is … silly at first glance and terribly insincere after further consideration. As CNBC reports:
The Trending tab features videos algorithmically, factoring in things like view count, rate of growth in views, and the age of the video. YouTube’s position is that because it has country-specific Trending tabs all over the world that update approximately every 15 minutes, it would be impossible to have humans moderate that section.
CNBC spoke with an expert who poked massive holes in this assertion immediately:
“This is an absurd excuse,” Christo Wilson, an assistant professor in Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science, tells CNBC.
“YouTube implemented the Trending algorithm, and if it is updating too fast to moderate, then the solution is to simply slow it down. This is a technical change that is well within YouTube’s control.”
In the same way that YouTube makes the decision to give Trending such a high-profile spot on its home page, it can make the decision to tweak how it works.
“If Trending videos were currently being picked by a team of people, those people would be getting fired after today,” Wilson says. “Why do we expect less from an algorithm?”
To say that “whoops our algorithm goes too fast so we’re not responsible for what we promote” is preposterous. As Wilson points out, this is entirely within YouTube’s power to change. They have access to the world’s finest computer engineers. This would not be a big tweak.
I understand YouTube’s reticence to have a human team selecting these videos—they probably shouldn’t let moderators choose and curate the trending page. But it’s something else entirely for moderators to be able to ensure that guidelines-violating content doesn’t trend in the first place.
I’ve worked as a moderator for social media sites, and I’ll be the first to say humans can be problematic moderators. We all come with opinions and biases, and no one is perfect. But we are, at this point, better equipped to judge context than machines. I’ve gone over thousands of pieces of content that were flagged by users or algorithms that turned out to be just fine once I evaluated it by the site’s standards. That’s why human moderators exist. People think of moderators as censorious, but they’re also working to rescue content that might otherwise be removed by a confused machine or outraged viewer. It goes both ways.
YouTube should have a system in place where its trending section is slowed down so that this influential content can be evaluated by real people. These people should be there to ensure, simply, that that content does not violate YouTube’s guidelines. It’s not political to say that a video accusing a Parkland survivor of being a crisis actor should not trend. That falls under the company’s harassment guidelines.
YouTube cannot wait to take action retroactively when the damage is already done. And they don’t have to. They have Google’s practically infinite resources on hand to create all the tools that they need and hire teams of skillful people. To claim that their hands are tied here is disingenuous and flat-out wrong.
(via CNBC, image: Google)
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