Today's blog will be quick, but only because I have uploaded a video where I talk all about what this blog post is about. As a sociologist who is very interested in learning about race, social movements, and inequality it bugs me when we talk about divisions in this country as if we have never had them.
Today, while browsing the comments section of a conservative video I came across comments that said Obama is dividing the country. Well, the sociological side of me had a lot to say about that, so I filmed a quick video (about 7 minutes long):
If you are all TL; DW, these are some of the main points I made in the video:
Democrats have more fun, I am obsessed with this t-shirt y'all...
Obama didn't divide the country.
Obama's presidency is in a strange time of advances in technology and social media.
Divisions in the country were there long before Obama.
Now the divisions are harder to escape because of technology.
Don't tell me or any group to be 100% perfect before I/a group can lodge a complaint and change the world.
One of my all-time favorite quotes says the following:
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." --Martin Luther King Jr.
I really adore this quote because I think it is so important to understand as we talk about injustice in our society. One of my favorite shows lately has been W. Kamau Bell's The United Shades of America and this past week the show covered community policing and police brutality. W. Kamau Bell mentioned the fact that while not all cops are doing bad things there are enough cops doing bad things for this to be a problem that we need to step in and solve.
So why is fighting injustice so important? A lot of people only consider what they and maybe their close friends are doing in the world. They might say something like "I'm not racist and none of my immediate family and friends are racist either, what else can I do?" In this age of social media it is so easy to get involved and change the world around you for the better. Sending a tweet, sharing social justice issues on your Facebook wall to educate your friends, and not being quiet when you see something wrong is so important.
You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train.
Another one of my favorite quotes is from the amazing Howard Zinn who said, "You can't be neutral on a moving train," I think about that quote so often when it comes to social justice issues and the injustices happening all across the United States today. If the train is moving toward inequality and you are not doing anything to stop it, that can't be great for society as a whole--even if you aren't the initial one making the train head toward inequality.
You may not feel like you are contributing to the trains pace by being silent and still, but in a way you are. Back to W. Kamau Bell's statement, yes there are a lot of amazing cops out there, but by taking up for the cops who are horrible, they are not doing anything to get rid of police brutality in this country. There are amazing cops and there are cops who aren't amazing just like there are amazing and not amazing people. It is important that we don't stay neutral. It is important the the amazing cops actually say what some of these cops do isn't good so that we can train more amazing officers to take their place. We should be making sure that all of our cops have the proper training and are following proper protocol because they have a very important job--to protect and serve the communities they police.
Our train is moving in the wrong direction in a variety of ways from police brutality to LGBTQ+ inequality and so much in between. Instead of siting idly by like the injustice only affects a small amount of people, we have to come together as a nation and fight these injustices. We may not be able to clean up every single part of the country, but trying is the most important part. We can't continue to ignore these problems, because these problems feed off of being ignored. The longer these problems are ignored the harder it will be to control these problems later down the road.
We have to act now, not later.
We have to stand up, show solidarity with the people who are affected by social injustice, and help them to the best of our abilities. We have the power to do amazing things, if only we act on that power.
In today's internet age, one word keeps haunting the nightmares of everyone on the planet, privilege. This word seems to haunt some people more than others, and I am here to offer some insight into understanding this word. Hopefully at the end of this post you will be able to better understand privilege as well as educate your friends on this important word.
Google defines privilege as "a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people." On the internet it is often determined that there are privileges that help you more than others, but in my opinion:
Everyone Has A Little Privilege
I know, that's insane to think right? Think about it though. There are certain privileges that various people have. There is the privileges like skin color, but there are also privileges in your gender, gender identity, sexual preference, age, able bodied-ness, wealth, etc. Each privilege carries a certain weight to it. So yes, not all white people have the privileges assigned to a rich, white, young, able bodied, straight cisgendered man but there is privilege in being white. There is also privilege in being straight, cisgendered, male, rich, young, able-bodied. Most people would have one or two of these privileges, but they don't always have all of them.
Today's Word Of The Day Is Intersectionality
I think an important word when we think of privilege and oppression is the word intersectionality. Each of these various oppressions or privileges compound upon each other. So being a black male and a black female carry different privileges and oppressions based on how gender and race interact and intersect with each other.
So you have a better idea of what intersectionality means, Google defines it as, "the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage."
This is so important to understand because just as privilege builds, so does oppression. I feel like privilege and oppression are two sides of the same coin and that they both must be studied.
Stop Comparing
So, some oppressions may or may not be harder to live with. I am going to quote Patricia Hill Collins. Hill Collins is an amazing sociologist and the author of Black Feminist Thought. She states
Adhering to a stance of
comparing and ranking oppressions-the proverbial,
"I'm more oppressed than you"-locks us all into a
dangerous dance of competing for attention, resources,
and theoretical supremacy.
I feel that Hill Collins definitely has a point. Privilege and in turn the oppression has an affect on everyone. If we want long term change we have to stop trying to be the most oppressed and work together to create viable solutions for dealing with oppression.
Doing this won't be an easy tasks. We have to start actually working together despite our oppressions to get things done.
Want some extra resources? I adore this video by Franchesca Ramsey with MTV's Decoded:
