Two Paths Align & Two Forms Merge

TWO PATHS ALIGN

 “Social Being Creates Social Consciousness,” so said Marx.

I was born into a progressive family of university-based intellectuals—in segregated Georgia Baptist Hospital. Doing his best on an assistant professor salary with my mother recovering from an ether-soaked delivery and suffering from post-partum depression, my Dad put me in a drawer and hired a young Black women to care for me. This was the care that I knew and she left me every night—borrowed love. She returned to her children across the tracks that divided the segregated town. I was born and cared for within the system of super-exploited invisible domestic labor. This was my ‘social being’—thus formed my ‘social consciousness’. Some joke that my brain is a powerful muscle. It is a muscle developed and forever strengthened by shifting my site of life. Some changes are unintentional side effects of forced migration of an academic. As I grew older, I learned to see the limits of my knowing grounded in my specific circumscribed experiences—white supremacy was the surround-sound even as my parents struggled the think outside of it. Born and bred a Baptist in Georgia, my father embraced the agenda of the Civil Rights movement and removed us from lived-segregation when I was twelve. I learned at an early age to change my location, change my experience, stretch my brain, and learn how lucky I am to be able to ‘change my mind’. 

As I grew into a young white feminist antiracist socialist second-generation architect, two paths aligned. One path appears to be that of an architect, culture theorist, fighting for bourgeois democratic rights. The other path appears as that of a communist woman, submerged in her assignments in social movements, devoted to a party line.

What I want to explain is the historical context of my birth and upbringing. 

Take one thread: The Urban Question is the National Question.

Another: The expropriation and super-exploitation of the invisible labor of social reproduction is the Women’s Question.

Hold the other many threads in your feminine dexterous fingers. Now, weave them together!

This ‘share’ is a work in progress—to be opened as ‘her wisdom grows’.