52
The first sudokus appeared in newspapers in the U.S. in 2004, when I was 52. I can honestly say they have since consumed more of my precious time than TV viewing, hair styling, and cooking combined. Or, to put it another way, I have shortened my life by 3 years and 5 months doing sudokus, so far and still counting.
“Intersectionality” was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights activist and legal scholar. In a paper for the University of Chicago Legal Forum , Crenshaw wrote that traditional feminist ideas and antiracist policies exclude black women because they face overlapping discrimination unique to them.
It’s probably honest to say that I didn’t hear the word intersectionality until 2004, because all the years up until then I’d lived in the country where I had a total of three Black friends.
But I immediately understood intersectionality. If the vertical column has Blacks and Women, and the horizontal column has Blacks and Women, then the square at the intersection cannot be about Blacks or Women.
Let’s talk about Carol Mosely Braun, first Black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate, and in 2004 was a Democratic candidate for president. If we’re talking about racism in the vertical column and feminism in the horizontal column, then we can’t consider Carol Mosely Braun for president. She was out of the running by January 15th.
A more lighthearted sectionality was in 1993: if we’re talking sexism in the vertical column and fashion in the horizontal column, then Carol Mosely Braun wasn’t allowed to wear pants in the Senate. So they changed the law and women were allowed to wear pants IF they wore a jacket. BEFORE women weren’t allowed to dress like men, and AFTER they were required to dress like men. No sexism or fashion here.
Here’s a puzzler: in the vertical column we have respect for Black females and in the horizontal column we have political shenanigans. So in 1998 a woman requested to change her name to Carol Mosely Braun to honor the original name owner, and the request was legally granted. But then 3 months later the woman ran for office with her new name and she was disqualified. Not the smart way to elect a Black woman to office.
One final puzzle: in the vertical column we have Black history and in the horizontal column we have U.S. history, so what do we have in the intersection? Well, Blacks were freed in 1863 but because they were enslaved, they didn’t learn about emancipation for another 2 ½ years! This year Carol Mosely Braun proposed declaring Juneteenth, the traditional date marking the occasion of the Blacks learning of their emancipation, a national holiday. While we think of national holidays as being a day to mark a great achievement, I find this holiday filled with cynicism and shame, and I quite agree, it should be a national holiday. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
