Sojourner's Truth, is Truth Indeed!

JUST SAY'n: I've recently had cause and opportunity to become more acquainted with the life and works of Sojourner Truth (1797-1883). There are several transcriptions available of her "Ain't I a Woman"  speech which was delivered in 1850 at a Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. 


One transcript in particular, provided by Francis Dana Gage, the then presiding president of that woman's convention, attempts to recreate Truth's impromptu delivery with it's original wording and inflections.  What I find particularly intriguing about the Gage rendering is the expanded overview of the crowd atmosphere evidenced both before and during the Truth presentation. "An abolition affair!" "Woman's rights and niggers!" "I told you so!" "Go it, darkey!" buzzed from the crowd as Truth made her entry into the front of the assembly. 

This prevailing attitude from a suffrage assembly is remarkably similar to the resistance that some Black feminist report that they receive from current mainstream feminist. And I will add, that it is a familiar barrier that many Blacks encounter regardless of sex. 

What I find redeeming was Truth's response to the resistance she encountered. She soared over it. She soared over it by deflecting the hostilities directed towards her with a piercing oration that targeted the real issues for which the gathers had assembled. 

She dismantled the "interlocking system of oppression" for Black women and extended it to cover all women who are held shackled in what Patricia Hill Collins calls the "matrix of domination" employed by the dominant culture to keep sub-dominate populations passively compliant in a system of submission. 

The same reasoning articulated then remains today. "Only We have been endowed with the strength to make the difficult decisions because you are weak and must be taken care of".  "Only We have the authority to Govern by God to receive his true word because Christ was like us". "Only We are justified in our actions because of your innate defections brought on by your progenitors". 

Sojourner Truth dashed these arguments by reconfiguring the prevailing paradigm of all in attendance. And that is how you take care of a bully. You rock the preconceptions of their world with the reality of who you really are...JUST SAY'n!