Coming Apart

I really liked this reading section because it presents, through a fictional story, an explanation of the complex relationship of an African American couple, the feelings of oppression because of race and because of gender. She feels oppressed because historically the black women was subjected to the power and aggression of the white man, she knows that women of her race were used and abused by white men exercising their power as slave owners, her feelings of oppression come from her race and the unfair treatment committed against her race. But I believe that besides feeling oppressed because of the unfair treatment her ancestors received because of their race, she feels oppressed and indignant because of the treatment she receives because she is a women. This feeling of oppression due to different gender perspectives becomes clear to me when she feels angry and horrified at what she observes while she and her husband walked down 42 second street in New York City on one of his business trips, while his reaction to the circumstances faced by them during that New York visit was merely curiosity and sexual interest " For her this is the stuff of nightmares-possibly because all the dolls are smiling. She will see them for the rest of her life. For him the sight is also shocking, but arouses a prurient curiosity. He will return, another time, alone." "Coming Apart." After reading the passage about the New York visit, I am convinced that the wife, a black women, feels oppressed by her husband, a black man, when she perceives from him that he has an interest in white women and reads pornographic material that is insulting to all women. "To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use Kleenex. And when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abused." "Coming Apart".

The other interesting aspect of the relationship between this couple is that the husband, in his wife's eyes an oppressor, feels oppressed by his wife because of her attempts to understand her feelings and react according to her new understanding of her circumstances. " He feels oppressed by her incipient struggle, and feels somehow as if her struggle to change the pleasure he has enjoyed is a violation of his rights." "Coming Apart." The husband's sense of oppression does not have the complexity of the dual level-race and gender, that the wife's sense of oppression has, because the husband's thirst for pleasure has made him forget that the objects of his desire are not merely female sexual objects to his eyes but black women as much as he really is a black man, even if he has forgotten that.