Mab Segrest- "Race Traitor"

Early in her life, then, Segrest was cranky to racism and increasingly opposed it. She notes that her mother's mysterious skin lesions were a symbol to Segrest of abnormal sensitivity to the environment, reflecting her own sensitivity to the " criminal" presence of racial and other injustices swirling around her in the entropy of the 1950s and 1960s. She also notes that from an early age she sensed in that value was something wrong with her father's having "organized a network of segregated hole-and-corner(a) schools all over Alabama" and she "made a commerce of being better than him" (Segrest 3).

There are many complications and contradictions and paradoxes in Segrest's politicization. The development of her political self was a process of fits and starts, break up by the kind of sudden awakenings which accompanied her accommodateance of her lesbianism. She underwent precise political awakenings and very personal awakenings, and experienced both individualist and collective aspects of politicization. For example, she writes that

To reflect what some of us know as collective struggle, the hard disagreements and fallings out among people who work toward a transformed world, is difficult enough, as is writing about reddish white kin I still live among. pass and family, the intimate and the historic, action and reflection . . . : I straddle chasms. . . . (Segrest 4).

At every moment of her political development, then, activity was occurring on some(prenominal) levels, from the most intimate and p

I "came out" with an energy that gave everything an intense charge. . . . Fury came up by dint of my feet when I suddenly saw all the evidence of woman-hatred in the world around me and in the culture I had studied---the rape, battery, forcefulness and the suppression of creativity (Segrest 40).

Weathersbee, Tonya. "Desegregation Efforts a 30-Year Lesson in Frustration." Jacksonville Times-Union. whitethorn 6, 1990.

The major awakening which led her to combine sexual and sex politics with racial politics occurred in the early and mid-1970s when she came to accept her lesbianism. Her falling in love with a woman hale her to confront an issue which she had previously tried to deny as cardinal to both her personal and her political identity.

However, as in her make out against racism and socioeconomic injustice, as with her open chip against the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and her own family's conservatism, when she came to face and accept her lesbianism, she held nothing back on that front either:

erson, to the familial, to the public and collective. At the same time, she was undergoing awakenings with respect to sexuality, gender, and race. She accuses herself of being a double-crosser to her race, but of course her central point is that we are each repositories of a race spirit which transcends our own specific race. Segrest is being not a traitor but a "patriot" to her race (the human race) by refusing to accept racial prejudice and being determined to fight such prejudice at every turn. Neither, for example, was Anita Hill a "traitor" to her race with her charge o sexual agony against Clarence Thomas. She was being a patriot to her greater race consciousness, as well as to her positions as a woman and as a human being worthy of respect. One considers as well the position of a black person who might be considered a traitor to his race by expressing the meet that O.J. Simpson is guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. Such a person would be recogni
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