Legal feminism excludes bodies like cheryl green, people in poverty who cannot access dignity within life and became a victim of gang violence at age 14 – feminism needs to move towards methods of emancipation for people.

Perhaps the fact that American legal feminism is unable to treat the diversity in the physics faculty body at Harvard as equally important as the plights of female bankers at Morgan Stanley, who do not earn the million-dollar salaries their male counterparts do, or female Wal-Mart employees, who make thirty percent less than male employees, 174 is going to prevent us from being heard by our intended audience. Only the academe can  [*143]  understand how those three issues may become equally important research topics, while neither the upper class nor the poor can see them fitting together.

What our legal feminism misses acutely is a systemic critique of inequality whose majority victims are women. For example, the fourteen-year-old Los Angeles teenager, Cheryl Green, a recent victim of gang violence, defined herself in a poem entitled I Am, as a complex human being, but a being with needs that defied race or gender:

I am black and beautiful

I wonder how I will be living in the future

I hear my dog barking when someone is at the door

I see my mom go through something every day

I want to live in a house and have a car and a good job. 175

Cheryl, like everybody else, wanted to live with dignity. Certainly living with dignity means different things to different people. For Angelina Jolie living with dignity means adopting children from impoverished countries and becoming a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 176 For J-Lo that means to be an Oscar presenter at the glamorous awards ceremony. 177 For a poor person, a person who has very little, living with dignity means living above poverty, having the minimum necessary. Cheryl dreamed of having a sufficiently "good job" that would enable her to have a house and a car. She did not see her life as inadequate because people did not treat her with proper etiquette, though it might have been. She viewed her life wanting because she lived a life of permanent struggle. Unfortunately for her, and those like her, feminism, or any other postmodern (legal) theory, offers only hopes about etiquette - that people would not kill you out of hate for your identity (gender, sexual orientation, race, etc.). Feminism or any postmodern theory seems less concerned with those who die quietly in their own shacks, as long as no one disrespects their gender, sexual orientation, or racial identity. The millions of Cheryls need both an identity-based emancipation, which gives them the freedom to enjoy their gender, sexual orientation, or race, as well as the freedom to have a good education, which, for the majority, still remains the only road to good jobs and a dignified future.