Audre Lorde Pt. 2

In addition to being a poet, Audre was a teacher, speaker, wife and mother, and become an influential presence in the feminist movement. She also wrote candidly about her battle with cancer in her groundbreaking work, "The Cancer Journals."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm tre C V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry, and
we're going to continue the second part of our two
part episode about Audrey Lord today and community building and

(00:24):
solidarity were major themes of Audrey Lord's poetry and her life,
and because of the role that she played in the
feminist movement in the community of women that she worked within,
we'd really be remiss if we didn't at least mention
a few of her lifelong friends. These included Audrey and
rich In, her lifelong partner, Michelle Cliff, both poets and

(00:47):
professor Blanche Cook, and playwright Clear Costs. For most of
Audrey's life, her partner and co parent was a woman
named Francis Clayton, and she spent her last year's with
a woman named Aria Joseph. And Audrey was also a
teacher and a speaker. She worked at a number of
colleges and universities during her career, and she became an

(01:09):
influential presence in the feminist movement. She edited literary journals,
helping to give a voice to emerging black poets, and
when white publishers didn't want to publish the work of
people of color, especially women, and doubly especially lesbians of color,
she and other women started their own presses. She was
also a policy panelist for the National Endowment of the

(01:29):
Arts Literature Program. Also an activist, Audrey helped found a
number of social organizations, including the anti apartheid organization Sisters
and Supportive Sisters in South Africa, and the Women's Coalition
of St. Croix. With Barbara Smith, she co founded Kitchen
Table Women of Color Press, which was the first publisher
run by women of color in the United States. Not

(01:51):
long before her death, she was also the first black
person to be named the New York State Poet. So
in this episode, we'll talk about her personal, political, and
poet lives, including her world as a wife and a mother.
When she was twenty seven, Audrey met the man that
she would later marry, Edward Ashley Rollins. He had graduated
from law school at Columbia earlier than that. At the

(02:13):
age of seventeen, he had run away from home to
join the Navy, although he had to have his father's
commission to do so because of his age and coincidentally,
both Ed and Audrey were having an affair with the
same woman before they met uh one of several women
that Audrey was involved with at the time. Ed wanted
to have children, and long before they were in a
physical relationship with each other, Audrey had also thought about

(02:36):
having children with Ed, and they both had their own
pretty serious internal struggles about their relationship, and they had
to do a lot of soul searching before committing to it.
Audrey was black and identified as lesbian. Uh Ed was white,
and while he didn't really identify as gay, he had
mostly been involved with men for a number of years.
Their whole existence as a couple had all kinds of

(02:58):
social and political implications for them and basically any anyone
they would ever encounter. Uh Ed's mother and many of
Audrey's friends were also opposed to the idea, and they
loved each other, but they weren't really in love. To
quote Audrey as a black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage,
there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend

(03:18):
everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be. They got
married on March thirty one, nineteen sixty two, with the
idea that they would work together to have children and
raise a family according to their own rules and principles,
and this was not an overwhelmingly popular decision among either
of their personal lives. No one from Ed's family attended

(03:41):
the wedding, and several of Audrey's lesbian friends made the
same decision. The pair had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan.
Audrey's ideas about birth and child raising were also quite
progressive for the time. She wanted ed to go to
childbirth classes with her and to be in the room
when she gave birth, and she of the baby to
stay with her rather than be in a hospital nursery.

(04:03):
She also wanted to breastfeed, which did not have nearly
the level of social insistence or acceptance that it does today.
As they got older, she made homemade whole grain bread
for the children and limited how much sugar they could have,
and she talked openly with both of them about social
issues ideas that are pretty commonplace today but in the
early sixties were not so much. Yeah, I see a

(04:26):
lot of the things that at the time we're really
progressive are today pretty much a given. When it comes
to a lot of the things that she thought about
giving birth and raising children. In nineteen sixty three, Audrey
and Ed attended the March on Washington for Jobs at Freedom,
at which Martin Luther King Jr. Delivered his I Have
a Dream speech, although they had left by the time

(04:47):
he started, and they listened to it in the car
on the way home. Um Andre wrote, though, that she
found the march an immensely moving experience. At Christmas time
of nineteen sixty three, their apartment burned in a fire
after Ed left a cigarette unattended. Then, in June of
nine five, Audrey was rear ended at a red light
while baby Jonathan was in the car with her. His

(05:10):
injuries were minor, but because of her injuries, Audrey was
unable to pick up her children or write for months.
So their relationship, apart from all of the social issues
that were inherent in it, which put their own pressures
onto the two of them, it gradually became strained. Both
of them were having relationships with people, which on its

(05:31):
own was fine with both of them and was sort
of part of the deal. But Audrey was open about
her relationships with women and disclosed them to Ed, and
often they were with people that she was friends with.
Ed on the other hand, tended to carry out his
affairs in secret, which Audrey found upsetting. Uh In their
disagreements with each other, Audrey could sometimes become violent. Another

(05:55):
source of stress likely had to do with Ed's privilege
as a white man. Audrey was perpetually aware of their
presence as an interracial couple during the Civil rights movement.
She knew that their relationship was a risky one to
be in and that they faced criticism and judgment from
both black and white communities. Ed, on the other hand,
didn't really even consider his sexual orientation and his marriage

(06:17):
as a potential obstacle to his work in law. When
Ed's career as a lawyer didn't really take off, they
ran into financial trouble. Audrey had stopped working while she
was pregnant with their first child, and so she got
a night shift job and started trying to help with
her father's old real estate business as well. Her mother
had inherited it. After his death, Audrey started using in

(06:39):
betamines again an effort to keep up with all of
these responsibilities and also her children. She didn't write much
during her children's youngest years, but then a man taking
a class on black writers asked to interview her for
a paper, and she agreed, and the paper Portraitor as
someone who had given up on writing to become a
wife and mother, and after reading it, she really rededicated

(07:02):
herself to writing. She set up a desk in her
bedroom and insisted that ed would take over the household
for three hours a day so that she would have
time to just focus on her writing. At first, as
she was trying to get back into the world of poetry,
she didn't have a lot of success getting published. But
then the black arts movement evolved from the Civil rights

(07:22):
and Black power movements. A number of new black publications
started to take shape, and in nineteen sixty seven, independent
publisher Poets Press contacted Audrey with interest in publishing a
book of her work. Her first published poetry collection was
called The First Cities, and it came out in April
of nineteen sixty eight. The following January, Audrey received a

(07:44):
call from Galen Williams, who would go on to launch
the literary organization Poets and Writers, and in this call,
Galen was telling her that she had been recommended to
receive a National Endowment for the Arts grant to be
a poet in residence at a historically black college called
two Galuu College in Mississippi. She was really reluctant to
go at first. She you know, she was a mother

(08:04):
and her children needed her. She had also been sick
for several months following a particularly bad case of the flu.
The South itself itself was still reeling from the Civil
Rights movement and desegregation. The Deep South at that point
was an enormously dangerous place for black people as a whole.
To Blue itself was also the scene of pretty violent

(08:27):
racial hostility. There were always there were frequent reports of
shots being fired by white people along the edge of
town into the black areas of town. But she decided
to go, and later she said that the experience of
teaching there changed her life. So for six weeks at
Too Glue, Audrey taught a poetry workshop, and it was

(08:49):
her first work as a teacher. In her workshops, they
talked a lot about identity and the nuances of race
and making a personal connection to writing and learning. It
really became a collaborative environment in which Audrey learned more
about her own work. While teaching and writing, They all,
including Audrey, wrote a huge amount of work and Audrey
worked with Galen Williams during this time to publish a

(09:10):
literary magazine for the students. Audrey's work at TULU was
part of what convinced her to use poetry and language
as a force for social change in the world. Following
teaching there, she wanted to use her own writing to
open people's hearts and minds and to raise awareness of racism, sexism, homophobia,
and other forms of discrimination, and she wanted to teach

(09:32):
other people to read and think and write as well.
She went on to have teaching jobs at City College
in New York, Herbert H. Lamon College, John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, and Hunter College, as well as lots
of other visiting teaching roles. She taught writing workshops as
well as classes and workshops on racism and identity all

(09:53):
over the place. And while she was at two Galue,
Audrey also meant Francis Clayton, and although Audrey had had
many other relationships while married to Ed, the depth of
her relationship with Frances was quite different. She couldn't do both.
She couldn't maintain her marriage and this relationship. She loved Ed,
but she was really increasingly in love with Frances and

(10:14):
When she returned home to New York, her relationship with
Ed became even more strained than it had already been.
But they had two children together and her children's well
being was a huge priority, so Audrey wanted to go
to couples therapy, but for a long time Ed was
resistant to the idea. In the spring of nineteen seventy,
Audrey and Ed had a trial separation, and that fall

(10:36):
she asked him to move out. They finalized their separation
their separation agreement in nineteen seventy one, and started divorce
proceedings in nineteen seventy two. Their divorce became final in
nineteen seventy five, and it was not really amicable by
this point. Although Audrey and Ed weren't living together anymore,
her relationship with Frances was for a while long distance.

(10:58):
Audrey was in New York and for this was in
Rhode Island, where she worked at Brown University, and the
distance really became increasingly painful for both of them, so
they finally moved in together, with Francis moving to New
York uh since Audrey had to stay there due to
the divorce in nineteen seventy two. While she hadn't really
been hiding her relationship with women. In nineteen seventy three,

(11:21):
Audrey publicly came out during a poetry reading. Francis became
Audrey's partner and co mother to her children, and this
relationship lasted for most of the rest of Audrey's life,
although Audrey continued to be involved with other women, though
more discreetly than in her life with Ed, where she
was very forthright about it. The two women bought a
house together in one of New York, New York's more

(11:42):
conservative neighborhoods, and they were really frequent targets of racism
and homophobia there. The kids also had a hard time.
They were leaving this privileged world of private school to
attend a public school, and they didn't really fit in
with either the white children or the black children in
their new environment. It and as a mother, Audrey tried

(12:02):
to instill in both of the kids a sense of
social justice and a firm understanding of her values. She
wanted Jonathan in particular to grow up as an advocate
for equal rights, but sometimes this was a struggle. As
we know, kids don't always do with their parents in
vision for them. Uh and Audrey really worried about the
lack of a male role model in Jonathan's life in

(12:23):
their home. It also wasn't always easy for her to
put forth her own beliefs in a way that made
sense to the kids. She believed in non violence, for example,
but she was really outraged when she learned that the
children were being bullied at their new school and and
not fighting back, and her view, while non violence was preferable,
defending oneself was also a necessity. In nineteen seventy four,

(12:48):
Audrey's collection of poetry from a Land Where Other People
Live was nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry.
The other nominees included, among others, Audrey and Rich and
Alice Walker add Ran, Alice and Audrey all knew one another.
It's an illiterative crew to all be nominated together. It
is uh and they knew one another's work, and they
were all feminists. Before the winner was announced, they got

(13:10):
together and wrote a statement that would be read on
behalf of all of them should one of them win.
Audrey and richest collection, Diving into the Wreck Poems nineteen
seventy one and nineteen seventy two, co won along with
Alan Ginsburg's The Fall of America poems of these states
to nineteen seventy one. Here's part of the statement that
Audrey and Rich read when accepting the award. The statement

(13:33):
I'm going to read was prepared by three of the
women nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry, with
the agreement that it would be read by whichever of
us if any was chosen. We Audrey Lord, Audrey and Rich,
and Alice Walker together accept this award in the name
of all the women whose voices have gone and still
go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name

(13:54):
of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token
women in this culture, often at great cost and in
great pain. We believe that we can enrich ourselves more
in supporting and giving to each other than by competing
against each other, and that poetry, if it is poetry,
exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison. We symbolically

(14:15):
joined together here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition
and declaring that we will share this prize among us,
to be used as best we can for women. I
think that is a great sentiment, and we're gonna let
that sit for a second as we pause. So are
you ready to dive back into the world of Audrey Lord, Yes,
We're gonna start with lots of travel, alrighty. Starting in

(14:39):
the late nineteen seventies, Audrey started to travel, and she
would continue to travel pretty extensively for the rest of
her life. First, she went to Barbados, where her father
had been born, and one of the things she wanted
to do while there was to find evidence of his birth.
She was not really successful in that effort, but that
was one of her goals. The year that she turned forty,

(15:00):
she and her family traveled to the West coast of Africa.
Audrey was following an intuition that her ancestors had been
from there, so this trip and the trip to Barbadoes
were both in a way about her seeking out her
identity and her roots. Her time in Africa deeply influenced
her writing and her identity. After she returned, she increasingly

(15:21):
drew from African spirituality and dress, and African imagy made
its way into her writing. She continued to travel around
the United States and to other countries, including the Soviet
Union in Nigeria, to read, speak and attend conferences along
with themes of love equality and social progress that were
already prevalent in her work. She began to write about

(15:41):
the power of the erotic after seeing how differently eroticism
and physical relationships were approached in Africa than in the West,
and in nine, as her work was becoming better known,
she also began working with literary agents Charlotte Sheedy, whose
agency actually still represents lord work today. W. W. Norton

(16:02):
published her collection Cole in nineteen seventy six, and being
published by a major publisher marked a huge turn in
her prominence as a poet. In nineteen seventy seven, at
the age of forty three, Audrey went to the doctor
after finding a lump in her breast. She had a
biopsy which showed that the tumor was benign. She started

(16:23):
writing and speaking about this experience almost immediately. She delivered
a speech about it on a panel at a Modern
Language Association meeting less than a month after she had
been given the results. Less than a year after that,
on Labor date nine, she found another lump and she
went for another biopsy. This time the lump was malignant

(16:43):
and unlike the previous lump, which had really taken her
by surprise. She had really been living with the idea
of cancer for almost a year. This time, she had
already researched her options for treatment and had a list
of questions prepared for her doctor when she went in.
Her decision was to have a mastective and that took
place on September. And after the mastectomy she really changed

(17:05):
her diet and lifestyle dramatically uh and began taking supplements.
She also began writing about her experience with cancer, as
well as the sexist treatment she witnessed in the world
of medicine and cancer treatment, and the pressures that were
placed on women to conform after having a mastectomy. Her
journals from this period were published as essays and then
as a book called The Cancer Journals, and that came

(17:27):
out in The Cancer Journals was a really groundbreaking work
for a whole lot of reasons. One is that it
approached breast cancer from a black lesbian perspective, which was
pretty much absent in the discussion about breast cancer at
the time. It also discussed cancer, mastectomy and reconstructive surgery

(17:47):
surgery within the medical establishment, and a really frank and
probing way. She did not pull any punches in the
way she wrote about how doctors spoke to her, how
nurses spoke to her, how people would sort of show
up in her room with the presumption that it was
time for her to have a prosthesis now, like there wasn't. Really.

(18:08):
She was like that that that's not made about lots
and lots uh. And there were also times when she
would like she would get copies of her own medical
records and she would see just deeply judgmental and cruel
things that doctors had written about her in her medical records.
She's not sugarcoat any of that. And her decision not

(18:32):
to have reconstructive reconstructive surgery and also not to wear
a breast proscesis is one that a lot of people
would still consider subversive today, sort of an automatic assumption
that if a woman has a mastectomy, she is then
going to attempt to appear that she still has two breasts,
And Audrey Lord was like, no, I am not doing that.
You cannot make me. She instead adopted that as part

(18:58):
of her whole identity. She would sort of dressed in
an asymmetric way to uh incorporate the idea that like
her body was different now, um, which is not. It
was not not common at all. Even now when those
sorts of issues are discussed more openly in people do
make that choice a little bit more than they may

(19:19):
be used to. It's still viewed with sort of a
at best, like a quizzical reaction from people, why would
you choose that? But why would you not want to have?
But that this is what I'm doing. Yes. So in
the seventies that was hugely outlier thinking. And despite going
through all this, later in eight she was one of

(19:41):
the speakers at the first National March on Washington for
Lesbian and gay rights. In one she had another cancer
scare when the doctor found blood in her stool, but
that turned out to be a false alarm. In three
the United States invaded Granada, which could definitely be its
own podcast, in Operation Urgent Fury. The prime minister had

(20:02):
been deposed and later murdered, and a communist leader took
the home. The invasion was in part a piece of
the Reagan administration's attempt to rid the world of communism. Audrey,
who at this point had really started to consider the
Caribbean her home, wrote a scathing essay about this called
Granada Revisited, an interim report which appeared as part of

(20:24):
her collection of essays Sister Outsider. Her position was that
American foreign policy was rooted in racism and that the
invasion of Grenada was a racist act meant to subjugate
and dominate people of color. With his essay, she also
clarified her own identity as Grenadian American. She took another
trip to Grenada after the invasion to make sure that

(20:45):
the nation had survived the American invasion. In February, she
started having pain and trouble with digestion. During a cat
scan to evaluate her gallbladder, doctor Shaun a tumor on
her liver almostly metastasized from her best breast cancer. She
knew that a malignant tumor was going to mean radiation

(21:05):
and chemotherapy, which she did not like the idea of doing,
and at the time that would still have pretty low
odds of survival, so she decided not to have a biopsy.
She traveled. She went to Mexico and St. Croix, and
she wrote about how important it was to her to
be somewhere warm and bright. In April, she traveled to Germany,

(21:26):
and that was a trip that had been in the
work since nine when filmmaker, writer and activist Dagmar Schultz
had asked her to come to speak at the Afro
German community at the Free University of Berlin. This trip
turned into a speaking community building journey through several countries.
While she was in Europe, though her health started to decline.
She started seeing a homeopathic and anthroposophic doctor who agreed

(21:50):
with her decision not to have a biopsy and started
her on a regiment of alternative treatments. In case you've
not heard of it, anthroposophic medicine combines conventional practice is
with spirituality and holistic treatments. It's kind of a mind,
body spirit treatment plan. And after traveling and speaking around Europe,
Audrey returned to the United States in July of nineteen

(22:12):
four and after she got back, she had another cat
scam and the tumor in her liver was the same.
She took this as an indication that her holistic treatments
were working, and she decided to continue with that regiment
and her dietary changes, which mostly focused on consuming fruits
and vegetables, and she continued to write and travel, sometimes
with Francis and sometimes alone to Cuba, St. Croix, Australia

(22:35):
and New Zealand, and the fall of ve she started
having abdominal pain and weakness. Another cat scan revealed another
tumor in her liver, and the first one had also
gotten bigger. She found another anthroposophic doctor in New York
that December. Hunter College named its poetry center after Audrey.
Not long after that, she and Francis went to Switzerland

(22:57):
so she could be treated at the Lucas Clinic in
anthropos topic Clinic for cancer treatment. Doctors there confirmed that
she had liver cancer and that it had almost certainly
metastasized from her breast. Audrey stayed through the start of
January of the next year, and when she got back
to the States, she saw her regular oncologist who talked
to her about conventional treatment options. At that point, she

(23:18):
had a prognosis of about five years to live. She
took a trip to the Caribbean with Gloria Joseph, whom
she'd known and been involved with for a long time.
Their relationship deepened, and Audrey began to pull away from Francis.
Their relationship, like all relationships, had its ups and downs,
and Audrey had already been questioning whether it should continue,

(23:39):
especially as she made pretty significant changes to her diet
and health regimen that Frances did not make as well.
They formally and finally split when they sold their Staten
Island home in Audrey decided to spend the end of
her life in Saint Croix, which had begun to feel
like home to her not long before her death. She
took the name gone Adisa, which means she who makes

(24:01):
her meaning known. She lived in Saint Croix with Gloria,
who was a Saint Croix native, until she died on
November seventeenth. Audi was cremated and she left instructions for
her ashes to be scattered in several places that had
meaning to her. Although she often wrote autobiographically, she called
her book Zombie a new spelling of my name, a

(24:22):
bio mythography. Uh. There is currently only one written biography
of her, which Tracy mentioned at the top of our
first part of this two parter, which is called Warrior Poet,
a biography of Audrey Lord, and it's by Alexis de Vaux.
It's very thorough, as Tracy said, it's really well sourced
and it includes a great deal of detail about her life. Yeah.

(24:43):
The the author I think must have read every scrap
of paper that was available to her that Audrey herself
had written correspondence all of her essays to construct a
pretty detailed glimpse of her life that goes into a
lot of detail that, uh, we haven't really talked about

(25:03):
here specifically. It also seems pretty silly to have two
episodes talking about a poet without actually including any of
her poetry. So I tried to find a poem that
would be both accessible to people um and also include
a lot of the themes that we've talked about in

(25:24):
and how Audrey lived her life, and the things that
she believed in, and the things the themes that were
common in her work. So the Charlotte Sheety Literary Agent
Agency graciously gave us permission to read this poem um,
which was originally published by W. W. Norton, which publishes
many of the other collections of Audrey's work, and us

(25:44):
also the publisher of the book Warrior Poet, and this
poem is called who said it was simple. There are
so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes
the branches shatter before they bear. Sitting in needics, the
women rallied four They march discussing the problematic girls they
hire to make them free. An almost white counterman passes,

(26:07):
awaiting brother to serve them first, and the ladies neither
noticed nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I,
who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed,
see cause in color as well as sex, and sit
here wondering which me will survive all these liberations. Was

(26:29):
originally published in I'm quite fond of Audrey Lord. Yeah,
her story is so interesting and it is one of
the things that always touches me When I hear stories
about people being so ahead of their time, particularly and
kind of uh social norms. I'm always fascinated because often
it seems like we don't hear that much about it.

(26:52):
I I majored in literature in school, as some of
you may know, uh, and a lot of times when
we're talking about poets and other writers, the focus is
really on their work, and and sometimes, at least when
I was in school, there was some conversation about the
factors of a person's life that led them to this work.

(27:14):
But that's often not really what most of the time
has spent time. So while I knew a few little
snippets about Audrey Lord's life. I really liked getting to
know more of it. Uh so yeah, maybe we will
talk about more writers at some point in the future.

(27:35):
I had a very similar well, I had a similar
experience studying literature in college, which is that I realized
pretty early into my major, like, I like the literature,
but I'm really fascinated by the biographies behind them. So
do you have a little bit of listener mail? Listener mail?
This is another piece of listener mail about our Mendez

(27:56):
versus Westminster episode. This one is from a Skina who
noted that the last time she wrote to us was
back in the Pop Stuff days. Hi, we also missed
pop stuff? Uh? She says, I have listened to this
podcast since the fact or Fiction days, which is so

(28:17):
long ago, when when stuff you missed in history class
was called fact in fiction and had Josh Clark of
Stuff you Should Know is one of the co hosts.
Which sometimes when I send people a link to an
episode from that era that they've asked for, they get
completely flabbergasted at who the hosts were way back then.
She says. The Mendes versus Westminster episode finally prompted me

(28:38):
to write in so I can tell you my own
story of the lingering prejudiced against speaking a foreign language
in the United States. I was born in Poland, but
I was only six months old when my parents and
I immigrated to the United States, settling in the Philadelphia area.
My mom didn't speak English when we arrived here. She
did speak Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and German, but not English.

(28:59):
Not wanting me to learn English with an accent, she
and my dad only spoke to me in Polish. It
was my first language. I learned English from going to stores,
talking to neighbors, and above all, from Sesame Street. By
the time I was three, I was fluent, well three
year old fluent in both languages. I first heard my
mom speak English when I was five, and boy was
I surprised that she could. I went to elementary school

(29:22):
in the nineteen seventies, and I very much remember how
the kids liked to make dumb poll act jokes, which
I always found strange because I was a straight A student.
But the story I have is about my reading teacher
in third grade. So around nineteen seventy it was open
house night at the beginning of the year and I
guess because the school knew that many parents couldn't afford babysitters,
kids were allowed to come. I remember it looking over

(29:44):
and seeing that my mom and my teacher were having
a let's call it an animated discussion. There wasn't any
yelling or anything, but I could tell that my mom
was not amused. As soon as I could, I asked
her what had happened, and she wouldn't tell me. She
just said, teacher and I didn't agree on something, but
you don't need to worry about it. She actually said
this in Polish. Justina uh tells what it was in Polish,

(30:11):
but as I do not speak Polish, I'm not going
to mangle that. It was clear that my mom wasn't
going to tell me, and pretty soon I forgot all
about the incident. Had a good year, and I got
a solid a. It was only after the school year
was over that my mom finally told me what had
gone down. That evening, my mom had introduced herself and
my teacher had immediately launched into a speech about how
my parents needed to stop speaking to me in Polish,

(30:33):
that speaking a second language at such a young age
was interfering with my ability to speak English. My mom
was having none of that. After a little back and forth,
she ended with, if you were a good teacher, and
I think that you are despite what you just said,
then you will teach my daughter to the best of
your ability, and you will see that rather than making
her English weak, speaking Polish makes her English stronger. My

(30:54):
mom was very happy when she met with the teacher
at the parent conference a few months later, and my
teacher apologized to her for what she had said at
the open house. I don't know if you if polish
makes your daughters English stronger, but it certainly doesn't make
it weaker. She's my best student, she said. It made
my mom's day, week, and year. I'm not certain who
in attitudes about being bilingual changed in the United States,

(31:15):
but it happened right around oblivious to me. When I
was little, the fact that I spoke two languages was
considered a negative. By the time I headed off to college,
it was a positive and considered cool by my peers.
Thank goodness for that. Keep out the good work. I
always learned something new in every episode, so thank you regards. Justina.
Thank you so much, Justina. It's a really fun story.

(31:36):
I love this it's like I simultaneously loved this story
and hate that the teacher said that in the first place. Um,
And I think a point that we had made in
the in the Mendes versus Westminster podcast is it's it's
kind of strange to look back in history and see
what a huge prejudice there was against people who didn't
speak English when today, like parents will put their infants

(31:57):
on waiting lists for second language immercial schools in the
hope that they will actually be able to go. But
that's complete change in thinking. UM. So thank you again, Justina.
If you would like to write to us about this
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(32:18):
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If you come to our website and you want to
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will find top five feminist movements. One of these is

(32:39):
black feminism, and it discusses the way that that this
is different between white communities and black communities, which is
a whole other episode. Um that actually are our companions
at stuff I've never told you have also been speaking
about lately. You can do all of that and a
whole lot more at our website, which is how stuff

(32:59):
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