Yes, There Are Women of Color in the DARPosted in Articles, Barack Obama, History, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2021-08-21 03:16Z by Steven |
Yes, There Are Women of Color in the DAR
Washingtonian
2021-04-07
 Reisha Raney at the headquarters of the DAR’s Maryland chapter. Photograph by Lauren Bulbin |
A Maryland researcher—and relative of Thomas Jefferson—is exploring their stories.
Reisha Raney had never listened to a podcast when she decided to start one last year. A mathematician who runs a systems-engineering company in Fort Washington, Raney has, as a side project, spent years researching women of color who have joined the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was drawn to this topic for one obvious reason: Raney herself is a Black member of the DAR.
To Raney, the backgrounds of people like her—which often involve disturbing relationships between enslavers and the enslaved—represent an important aspect of our past. So after a two-week crash course in podcasting, she launched Daughter Dialogues, which features her interviews with current DAR members. “I had no expectation to ever run into any of these other Black women” in the society, she says. “We were so scarce that I expected to be the only one in the room all the time.” In fact, that hasn’t been the case; she has so far found and interviewed 22 women of color. Still, that’s a tiny fraction of the DAR’s 180,000-plus membership. (The group doesn’t keep track of racial demographics.)…
Read the entire article here.