I identify as a heterosexual, white, female and until I sat down to think about the notecard, I never really gave much thought to the privileges that lie behind each term. These terms are a part of my identity and they impact and influence my daily life without me even realizing it. Being white and growing up in a middle class area, I never had to face oppression because of the color of my skin. I was never questioned when walking into local stores, accused of stealing when I was just browsing, or shunned for acting “white”. What I mean by the last term is this:
My high school population was majority white. In my class
there were probably 10- 15 black, 10-15 Hispanic/Cuban
and 15-20 Muslim/Arabic kids who identified as these races.
I never once was questioned for dressing the way I do,
acting that way I do or even talking the way I do. To some kids in my class this would be called
acting “white”. There was one boy in my senior class, his name was Ryan. He was
one of our start football players and one of the top runners on the track team.
He clothing was very preppy which was common in my school considering a lot of
my peers were from the upper middle class. Ryan also spoke in a proper,
educated way. What separated Ryan from the rest of my peers? He was black. At
first some people took offense to Ryan’s display of identity. They felt that he
was “mocking white kids.” There were times when people even told him that he “needed
to act black”. Eventually though, my peers accepted him as who he was, but they
did so with a label that I do not agree with at all; “the white, black kid”. So when I say I was never shunned for “acting white”, I was privileged to be comfortable in my own skin, where Ryan was not.
When it comes to being a female in the United States I had a hard time with the privileges side and an easier time with the oppression side (which makes sense considering we are still fighting for equal rights etc.) I think one of the areas that women are most oppressed is within economics. As females, finding jobs that provide equal pay, benefits and treatment is difficult to find. From Killerman's reading, I was disturbed at some of the things he put on the privileges list for men:
4. You can be confident that your coworkers won’t assume you were hired because of your sex.
5. If you are never promoted, it isn’t because of your sex.
6. You can expect to be paid equitably for the work you do and not paid less because of your sex.
7. If you are unable to succeed in your career, that won’t be seen as evidence against your sex in the workplace.
8. A decision to hire you won’t be based on whether the employer assumes you will be having children in the near future.
18. If you rise to prominence in an organization/role, no one will assume it is because you slept your way to the top.
I think the most shocking and irritating was number 18 just
because it is relevant. There are coworkers, males and females that think when
a girl gets promoted in a position that they slept with the boss, not because
she is capable of doing the job. Although I had an easy time figuring out the oppression side
for females, I noticed a lot of them were oppression for the general population
of women rather than on a personal level, which I found to be interesting.
Overall though this exercise helped bring to my attention
not only intersectionality but more importantly, privileges and oppression. We
are blind to our daily privileges, whether they are something that we were born
into or worked hard to get. After a while we become so comfortable with them,
we forget that they are even a privilege.
I think as a society, oppression is
something that is focused on and in so many different areas. We become so
focused on ways in which we are oppressed personally or as a group that we
forget about the ways that we are privileged.
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