A response to one of Helen Lauer's suggestions:

"Ask rhetorical questions to support your argument, using racial parallels."


I'm not assuming I understand your cultural/political context there at U.Ghana, but in the U.S. context as I know it, I don't trust that strategy.  When one explains A by analogy with B, one has to be assuming that B is better understood than A.  Otherwise one is explaining the mysterious in terms of the more mysterious.   I do not assume that I or my white american interlocutors get it any more about racism than we do about sexism.   ...though we often enough get it that we are supposed get it about racism and are happy enough to accept the assumption that we do.   

I'll take credit for getting-it more/better now than I did forty years ago (the same for many of my colleagues who are white, whatever their gender politics)...I'm not entirely politically/morally stuck at mid-20th century white america.  But I'm a little shy about giving any of us too much credit in this department.

In sum, I'd be concerned that it's insulting to people of color to assume that we white folks are clear enough about racism to use that enlightenment to help us understand sexism. 

(I know others on this list have thought this through more-or-less as I put it here, but I can't think just now of who I should cite, who's worked it out in detail, in print. I'd welcome bibliographical references.)

Marilyn
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