Hey Girls

Today was a day for deep thinking about experimentation and reaction.

After our conference, Professor Crenshaw and Harris told me that I had been invisible to the audience eyes as a white woman for sure, as an individual, perhaps.

Professor Harris was asked if the African American Policy Forum had white collaborators, and he bluntly pointed out at me, who had been there with camera on hands for the whole session. When racialization happened to my former colleague Dror, who is a white male and used to work and hang out with Professors Crenshaw and Harris and other scholars of color, I was surprised.

In my case, racialization came with a sense of disregard to the female presence. With this experience I moved closer to an intersectional space, where gender and race become a barrier for recognition, for acknowledgement, and for empowerment. As I left the room with my mind confused, with a sense of failure for myself and for my team, I also left the room with a better sense of self and with a better sense of the daily struggles faced by women, especially of the lower castes, in the predominantly-male academic environment of the Delhi of many religions (today our audience was predominantly Muslim). Perhaps, this dynamic is cross-sectoral as well.

In the context of India, I question myself how this experience translate to all Indian women, but especially to Dalit women -- as it especially affects women of color as well.

In a country where the denial of caste works in contradiction to the fact that one's possibilities and perspectives are arranged through caste politics, the intersectional engine of gender and caste is omnipresent. Caste is not as rigid as one would think when it functions for increasing oppression, especially against women. Caste is rigid when it functions in relation to upward mobility.

It seems that just like I was moved from calmer waters to a storm, Indian women have to make daily decisions -- of all scales -- which can easily place them in really unsafe seas. Marriage is just one of these decisions.

Few of them yet dare to face the storm right on, but I want to guess that most of them are aware of it, are affected by its collateral forces, and have already imagined themselves getting really wet!

Despite having seen so many times the intersectional engine working against women of color, today its power became visible in relation to Indian women (just as a side note, there was no women seated on the round table) more pressing against my friends and colleagues of color and, surprisingly and in a different way, against me.

Ps.: It is nice to see that our blog is becoming a space for honest reflection on how our learning makes possible a very urgent and rapid discovery of our own biases and understandings as well as of our role in this process; our role as conscious students; our role as engaged global citizens and our role as students of CRT.