The Lockdown Chronicles 23: Audre

Click on the image below to read the comic strip in full size. Sources and references on this post under the comic strip below.

 

A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. As described in her 1982 book Zami A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography, as a young person she worked operating an x-ray machine cutting quartz crystals in an electronics factory in Stamford, CT, in very dangerous conditions. [Wikipedia entry] [Poetry Foundation]

Text sources: Lorde, Audre (1982) Zami A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. Penguin; CT Department of Public Health COVID19 Dashboard; amFAR, COVID-19 Racial Disparities in U.S. Counties; Wadhera RK, Wadhera P, Gaba P, et al. (April 29, 2020) Variation in COVID-19 Hospitalizations and Deaths Across New York City Boroughs. JAMA. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.7197; Siddique, Haroon (1 May 2020) “British BAME Covid-19 death rate ‘more than twice that of whites'”, the Guardian;  Lorde, Audre, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, MLA, December 28, 1977.

Source image: photograph of Audre Lorde by Elsa Dorfman (1937–) via Wikimedia Commons. GNU Free Documentation License. This comic strip CC-BY-NC-SA.

References

Lorde, Audre (1982) Zami A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. Penguin. [Internet Archive]

Lorde, Audre, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, MLA, December 28, 1977. [Internet Archive] First published in Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978) and The Cancer Journals (Spinsters, Ink, San Francisco, 1980).
CT Department of Public Health COVID19 Dashboard. Available at https://maps.ct.gov/portal/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/48d54b859c8b4a8e87a0376af3513140 [Accessed 9 May 2020]

amFAR, COVID-19 Racial Disparities in U.S. Counties. Available at https://ehe.amfar.org/disparities  [Accessed 9 May 2020]

Wadhera RK, Wadhera P, Gaba P, et al. (April 29, 2020) Variation in COVID-19 Hospitalizations and Deaths Across New York City Boroughs. JAMA. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.7197 [Accessed 9 May 2020]

Siddique, Haroon (1 May 2020) “British BAME Covid-19 death rate ‘more than twice that of whites'”, the Guardian. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/british-bame-covid-19-death-rate-more-than-twice-that-of-whites [Accessed 9 May 2020]

Sanchez, Melissa (24 March 2020). ““Essential” Factory Workers Are Afraid to Go to Work and Can’t Afford to Stay Home”. ProPublica CT. Available at https://www.propublica.org/article/coronavirus-essential-factory-workers-illinois [Accessed 9 May 2020]

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The Lockdown Chronicles is a series of periodical comic strips made at night (in candlelight!) adapting and reusing openly-licensed or public domain items from online digital collections. Publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance. Historical sources are adapted and updated for the current pandemic; please refer to each strip’s references on each post for further context.  Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.