This pandemic continuously rips off the veil that once disguised our social problems. Injustices galore, now stripped bare for all to see, cry out for attention and remedy.

In my last blog, “My Black Teachers Then and Now,” I invited readers to take a hard look at racism. Now, a glaring spotlight shines on sexism and misogyny—The Honorable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez serves as an educator for the ages on this deadly topic. Never has the collision of racism and sexism been more dangerous and never has a woman risen higher.

Briefly, a bit of background about teaching gender studies in Central Virginia at the community college. What an education for me! I researched and created a course that was adopted by the Virginia Community College System, but only after my original title, “Woman and Philosophy,” was changed twice by state authorities. Its first weakening, “Women and Philosophy,” quickly shrunk to “Women and Western Philosophy.” Would a GPS limit the readings to a hundred-mile radius? Male colleagues, my friends, went out of their way to deride the new course. “Is this a credit course? Does it meet on the weekends?” Spotting my text book, Philosophy of Woman, my angry colleague fumed, “I know what that’s about, the only good man is a dead man.” (75% of the essays are written by men.) A male student confided: “My advisor told me not to take this class, said it was a waste of my time.”

Once the class was underway, I explained that gender roles are a social construct, a man-made creation much like the manufacture of innate racial differences. I defined sexism as dehumanizing discrimination based on gender. While the assumption of intrinsic male superiority hurts mostly women, men can be victims as well. Systemic, ingrained sexism, designed by and for men, often goes unnoticed and unquestioned by some women as well as men—of course, it’s natural that men make more money than women for the same job, rule the roost, run corporations, work construction, handily win elected offices, have the upper hand, get the last word. Misogyny takes this assumption further, devolving into an actual dislike or hatred of women that shows itself in thoughts and actions. As French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir writes in 1949 in The Second Sex: “The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself.” Woman is “other” than man, a secondary being in relation to him.

Countless social constructs have existed throughout time and place. Imagine anything. Students join me in riffing on possibilities for another “normal.” Yum, okra pancakes and beet juice on the rocks, hooray for public school teachers and plumbers, all hail children and the elderly. Chief among exotic pet birds, the crow. Gender fluidity standard fare. Badminton the national pastime. Pale skin a curiosity. Silence truly golden, compassion cool, wealth measured in relationships. Why not? All of our social constructs warrant scrutiny—if what passes for “normal” causes harm, tear down the construction and build again. It’s up to us to challenge the status quo, examine our own behavior and assumptions, stop projecting our biases on others—girls can’t throw a baseball, boys don’t do ballet, blondes have more fun, kinky hair needs straightening, men don’t cry, and women blubber nonstop.

Each semester in every class meeting, students confirmed the damage inflicted by sexism, sometimes suffered by male students, too—physical harm, barrages of verbal hurt, job discrimination, inferiority instilled in childhood, coercion, employer intimidation, futile court cases, family rebuke, oh, the list is long and painful. One student, Darlene, reminded us at every turn of an undeniable yet overlooked truth: “Ok, y’all, now imagine that’s my brown-skinned self we’re talking about. Double the damage.” Mindless role-playing of stereotypes constricts everyone’s freedom. Maria Niguel Hoskin makes it compellingly clear in her article about “the ugly reality of violent misogyny” that it threatens women of color in the worst way.

Sexist behavior borrows additional poison from racism when it attacks women of color. But for girls and women everywhere, July 23rd on the floor of the House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, exposed and demolished misogyny.

You can read her speech, but there’s no substitute for watching and listening, witnessing her poise and hearing the cadence of her unwavering voice—eloquent and simple, direct and clear, steady and confident, a slow and measured truth telling drawn from these few notes. I’ve included several articles that detail the familiar storyline. As she walked up the steps of the Capitol to cast a vote, a congressman confronted her with accusations of “disgusting,” “crazy,” and “dangerous.” How dare she link poverty and unemployment to crime! Rep. Ocasio-Cortez called his behavior rude and continued on her way. Coming back down the steps, the congressman, accompanied by another male representative, hurled a parting epithet at her. That he waited for her chills. How many times has the former Bronx bartender heard this insulting phrase? Plenty, too many. Called “whatever-that-is” by the governor of Florida and commanded to “go home to another country” by his boss—she makes it clear that name-calling stalks her. What brought her to the floor of the House was not the incident itself, however, but the pathetic, self-serving, non- apology issued by her verbal assailant, speaking in the House only because a reporter overheard him. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez thanks him for proving that men in power can give permission to men everywhere to degrade women, even the women in their own families. How she honored her parents, Sergio and Blanca: “I am someone’s daughter, too.” What a tour-de-force gift, for all of us, girls and boys, younger and older, everyone. May her short speech, welcomed by Li Zhou and many others as “long overdue,” play in every drive-in theater, flash on brick walls and tall fences worldwide, translate into every language.

At the end of her speech, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez yielded her remaining time to Representative Pramila Jayapal, like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, one of the women of color stirring the Congressional teapot. Reps. Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, among others, infuriate those futilely clinging to white male dominance. Agents of change, irked by the juvenile foolishness of sexist behavior, these women are on the move for justice’s sake. Take a look at part of Rep. Jayapal’s questioning of the attorney general as he tried to talk over her: “It’s my time and I control it.” It cuts deep and wide, the misogynist treatment of women of color, the incessant “male incivility” put under a microscope by Rebecca Traister. How telling, the ongoing coverage of the brave “Wall of Moms” in Portland, yet nothing about Southside Chicago’s longstanding “Army of Moms,” two of whom have died protecting their children. Watch the “special” treatment of Vice-President Biden’s running mate, whoever she is. Already some have deemed Senator Kamala Harris “too ambitious,” quite a sorry marriage of racism and sexism.

Ah, but how beautiful the divorce of these twin bigotries in the relationship between Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and the ever-Honorable John R. Lewis. In his op-ed printed in The New York Times the day of his July 30th funeral, Congressman Lewis writes: “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” Mr. Lewis was someone’s son, too, his mother worrying about the dangers he faced in his relentless nonviolent protests. In an NPR interview, Ocasio-Cortez recalls her father’s stories about John Lewis, and Lewis’s youthful activism convinced her that her time is now. Here is a twenty-five-year old Lewis in 1963, five years younger than Ocasio-Cortez. Always calling him “Mr. Lewis,” she thanks him for teaching her the fine line in protesting—no matter your outrage, you must come from a place of peace. Lewis joined her in support of the Green New Deal, and she honored him in her speech delivered without rancor. She did what he calls on all of us to do in his last words: “Answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you believe.”

Representatives Lewis and Ocasio-Cortez have changed the soundtrack of this country. Often captured with their heads thrown back in laughter or dancing, these two messengers radiate joy in spite of it all. They inspire us to keep the faith, try harder, do more. And laugh and dance. How much lighter the attacking congressman, threatened by Ocasio-Cortez’s policies, and my male colleagues, threatened by a new philosophy course, could travel by dropping what Rep. Lewis calls “the burdens of division…the heavy burdens of hate.”

Soul food to close til we meet again. In Representative Lewis’s beloved Atlanta, the Morehouse College Glee Club promises that “We Shall Overcome.” Roy Brown, another champion of social justice, sings a Puerto Rican classic, “Boricua en la Luna,” a tale of Puerto Rican migration to New York. How about that drummer! Jamaican Linton Kwesi Johnson recites Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love,” an ode to the exhilaration of loving yourself just as you are.

"I'm Someone's Daughter, Too"

“Sit. Feast on your life.”