Exploring Geographies
of Power
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Being different from the (mythical) norm in society makes you an Other—a woman, a person of color, a queer, poor, elderly, differently abled. All these are labelled Others by the dominant voice, which is straight, male, white, Christian, able bodied, and upper-middle class.
Social processes and social constructs create, shape and force these differences into the larger world of individuals. The way we’re taught to see and feel difference is the problem, and not the differences themselves. What’s important to grasp is that this not just about being or feeling different, but about the creation of difference.
Relationship—Derrick Jensen
Think about the relationship between economics and hatred. We live in a society where more atrocities are committed in the name of economics than in the name of hatred. It is possible to kill a million people without personally shedding a drop of blood. It’s possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It’s possible to commit genocide and ecocide from the comfort of one’s own living room.
The best way to guarantee you won’t be in relationship with something is to not see it. the best way to make certain you won’t see it is to destroy it. and, completing the awful circle, it’s easiest to destroy something you refuse to see.
This is the key to our civilization’s ability to work its will on us, on other cultures, and on the world—our power derives from the steadfast refusal to enter into meaningful and mutual relationships— Columbus, the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers, Hitler, all wars, multi-national corporations.
It’s o.k. , we’re told constantly, to utilize resources— tress, land, vaginas, labor, animals, oil, but one must never enter into relationship with this other who owns or is this resource. This is just one of many things those we enslave would tell us, if only we asked them.
Real diversity is the capacity for a community of humans to confront trees, or animals, or other humans with no thought of how to best turn them into profit. Increasingly we minimize our perception of that which cannot be controlled or used, and then we use what we can and destroy what we cannot.
We’re taught to see sexism, racism, heterosexism, and poverty only in individual acts of meanness, never in the invisible systems that confer unsought dominance from birth individual acts, therefore, cannot end these problems. Disapproval won’t change these systems. We must use our unearned advantages to weaken hidden systems by illuminating them, and by talking about them. We need to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.
The first rule of the dysfunctional family is: Don’t talk about it. But, it is my duty as someone inside this system, with white skin and an education that enable me to be a college professor, to help shape young minds, to use my privilege to undermine or eradicate it. We can pass through the guilt and denial and paralysis if we acknowledge feeling the sorrow and the pain…just feel it and pass through.
Identity is fully relational. What it means to have a particular identity depends on what it means not to have some other identity, and by the kinds of relationships one has to other possible identities. To have a sense of self, regulated by a binary sex/gender system, means that one identity must be different from the other identity. Binary identities demand criteria for differentiation.
Social Construction means that gender, race, sexuality don’t exist independent of your perception of them, and it’s our perception that’s manipulated and controlled. We learn to link physical characteristics to internal worth and value. Our identity is constructed from the outside, not the inside.
Definitions and experiences vary, but we like our perceptions fixed so we don’t have to think about it. So, bi-racial people are asked What are you?” Parents of bald babies get asked: What is it? Non-binary folks are constantly questioned, challenged about their identities, and feared because they don’t fit within the traditional boxes of patriarchal society. Power and Injustice stem from these kinds of questions, and also ways in which we don’t question.
Being unnamed is a way to mask your power. Others are named —Nigger, Queer, Illegal Immigrant, Dyke, Faggot, cripple, homeless. Straight, white men are not named. The Master Status belongs to those who are not named. Therefore we say, Whites and Males are the undefined definers of other people.
We say my Black friend, my queer friend/Muslim friend/Asian friend, Deaf friend. We do not say My White friend. My straight friend. Try it— My Male President, My Straight dad, My Middle-Class Doctor. It sounds funny if we flip it.
Male is the norm— we can see it in pharmaceutical dosages, stair heights, sink heights, arm chair heights.
So, also it’s about Relationships. How dislike and fear separates all social interactions. Once we understand that gender, race, class are simultaneous and intersecting systems of relationships and meaning, we can see other categories of experience: ability, age, religion, nation.
Standpoint is the view of the world from where we are each located — physically, mentally, emotionally, socially—these views are constructed and perceived through lenses that make values and accomplishments visible, or invisible.
Social structures are built on difference — Conquest. Enslavement. Rape. Police brutality. Poverty. All these are justified by the difference in identity that’s constructed from the outside.
Classifications of race, gender, sexuality, class bind people together and ignore what we have in common across the divides of identity boxes. These categories all promote the punishing and artificial idea of The Other. This is the source of so much of our suffering in a culture.
There are very few real differences between us, but these separations into hierarchies and categories allow people to be manipulated by these systems, to defend, to attack, to hide, to feel shame, to hate themselves, to become violent. Divide and Conquer is a mechanism of social control that keeps us paralyzed by fear, blind to our own oppression and destroys solidarity by separating potential allies.
By playing off national and racial groups, the system has created—not one, but a series of racisms that buttressed each other, and a series of working classes that allowed People Of Color to be played off against one another in the realm of economic inequality. And so, the curse of conquest continues into this very day. The very few still own the very many.
The categories differ in their access to power, because people are de-valued according to the categories we assign them through mostly physical appearance— poor, queer, Latino, female, Muslim, homeless. That objectification depersonalizes and creates inequalities, and these are the outcome of historical and large scale social forces.
Partial and Situated Perspectives
But all this is relational. Who we are has a lot to do with where we are, in relation to social systems and the positions the Others occupy. Everyone’s voice is both limited and situated, but necessary and equally important. Each perspective adds to the comprehensive knowledge of our circle of community.
“Becoming a self-conscious participant in the process of knowledge construction requires that we become aware of the limitations of our own experience and perspectives, and therefore value the experience and perspectives of others.” (Stephen Schact)
“I strive to live an existence that is based on no one’s denial.” (Toni Morrison)
Shifting the center from straight white men, and reconstructing knowledge asks, who’s been excluded? Who’s been silenced? We get to so many false conclusions , and we lose so much wisdom and wholeness by not having valued the thoughts and experiences of marginalized Others.
If what you know is wrong based on exclusionary thought, you will act in exclusionary ways, reproducing the sexism, racism, class oppression, and homophobia of our society.
We must learn to perceive the Contradictions, social, political, economic. For instance, if democracy, freedom, and liberty were truly central to the creation of the United States, how do we explain the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans? There’s a huge contradiction at the place where our nation began, and who do we mean by OUR? Possibly, the U.S. began on the wrong path at the start, which both birthed and enforced the lying and manipulating that has become our essence. That could be the center where we began this imbalanced and dangerous wobble.
A considered belief—or the ability to think critically—is about your being willing to sit with something you think you believe, and examine it. One way to do this is to spend time considering how other people, with other ideas, experiences, and perspectives might approach this issue. You can amend, qualify, or radically change these considered beliefs over time.
An unconsidered belief doesn’t do this. An unconsidered belief is something that enters your mind through cultural osmosis and matches real nice with the blaring voices on the t.v., with what your family, your peers, your government, church or the media tells you, so that it seems like fundamental knowledge and indisputable fact. Just the way things are. We learn how to be a human being within this society from media, and the Bible, from school and ads, the internet, corporations, and Facebook.
Indoctrination leads to value judgements. Value judgements are rife in a racist, sexist, homophobic, judgmental culture. They are normal and invisible. When we hear a “fact” we need to consider who’s doing the defining. Ex: look up civilization in the dictionary. “The most advanced stage of human social development” , “A high level of culture, science, industry and government.” So, we can fly a rocket to the moon. We can implant hearts into other bodies. We can kill people from a great distance using our economy, and we never have to leave our living rooms.
But, maybe you consider it most advanced and a great achievement for folks to have homes, food, education, loving communities, clean water, clean air, and health care. Most every Indian tribe in all the Americas once provided these things. Our current value judgements prevent us from appreciating the brilliance of indigenous people, non-white people. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, devastation of the earth, extinctions happen because we don’t believe in challenging our indoctrination about freedom and liberty. Civilization means changing the climate.
Who and what do you represent? Whether you represent The Longmont VFW, Exxon Mobil, the Denver Broncos, Somali Pirates, Texas Republicans, The Tea Party, The Republic of Tea, The Banana Republic, or just your family, somewhere along the line you learnt a set of very specific cultural value judgements you may feel incredibly compelled to defend. This often results in violence. You need to stop universalizing your experience. Learn to perceive contradictions. Why cling to your unconsidered beliefs and value judgements when it can be such fun tearing them down?
Standpoint Theories— Sandra Harding. Wrote about The Social Organization of Knowledge Production. She asks, what voices are we hearing in the places we are physically located? Being situated in a university, or a union, or the military, working with a non-profit, or talking informally in a circle of friends, all facilitate the creation of some kinds of knowledge, and obstruct other kinds.
A standpoint is a point of view. By definition, standpoints are grounded and limited. Standpoint is not about individual experiences, but about group-based, historically-shared experiences. I’ve learned that what’s presented to me as an accurate view of the world is often a lie. My eye is actually constricted by what I have been taught to see. Our vision is also structured.
Consider the people and events that have affected the development of your thinking. How did this happen? How do you know what you know? How is this connected to your standpoint? Learn to pay attention to the language of ads and of the news. If something is offered for free, then often YOU are the product for sale. The picture is always framed.
The facts do not speak for themselves. History is written by the winners. But we can build bridges among the standpoints to provide a solid place to stand on contentious issues. Where we overlap is a common context of struggle, where we can combine our different perspectives to create understandings to work together. Even “enemies” can do this— Israelis and Palestinians, radical feminists and fundamentalist Christians, loggers and tree huggers.
Humans live by stories—our story has been controlled for a thousand years by the forces of Empire, and that story—not militarism, economics, or politics—is the oppressors’ greatest power. We’ve been told that we need an infinitely expanding economy, that enemies are everywhere, that god rewards the righteous with wealth and power while the poor suffer and wait for heaven, that we must support the wealthy by cutting their taxes, and that regulations to protect workers and the environment are just barriers to the rich accumulation of wealth, which, it bears repeating, is the most important thing.
We’ve been told that America has always been good, that human nature is violent, that the sharing of socialism/communism/indigenous systems of collective property is cheating at best, intrinsically evil at worst.
Poverty — This term means the degree to which people have less resources than they need. Look at our economic system as a pyramid; the groups at the bottom support the whole structure. These are women and people of color. Free trade is about all goods, but not any people, passing over borders. This is why there is such a fervent effort to keep the oppressive system of racism, sexism, classism, and all the ways they are manifested, to maintain the unpaid and low paid labor force of the world. The methods keep in place a system of control and profit by a few and a constant source of cheap labor to maintain it.
Women do 80% of the work in the world. They get 10% of the pay, and own 1% of the property. This statistic includes the Queen of England and Oprah.
One example of the deep inequalities between individuals and the richest corporations of the nation are Corporate Welfare and Corporate Subsidies — PepsiCo, General Electric, DuPont, Verizon, Boing, Wells Fargo, Honeywell, Exxon, Haliburton, Dell, Target, Private prisons — all PAY NO TAXES, while huge subsidies go to Walmart, nuclear power plants, oil companies, Agriculture (Monsanto), Big Pharma, transportation industries. Mothers and the majority of people of color get no such break.
Gender revolves around the three themes— three I’s—of Identity, Interaction, and Institutions —all which are the 4th I—invisible to most people.
Institutions are like factories, and what they produce is gender difference. Some gendered institutions are the family, the economy, religion, education, medicine, government, the legal system, and the military. Through jobs, wages, hierarchies, power, and subordination, resources available and distribution of these resources, institutions control every aspect of our lives.
Through institutions, differences are generated and inequalities are BOTH legitimated and reproduced. Institutions tend to give power and resources in subtle and complex ways, invisible ways, that systematically support male dominance. Institutionalized gender bias is so deeply embedded that it appears to be the natural order.
Feminism has uncovered the layers of discriminatory patterns. The deeper we look, the more patterns emerge. Women have very different life chances than men, even in the same family, given the realties of divorce and single parenthood. Single moms have to provide child care, housework, AND earn enough money to keep everyone alive. We must ask—why does society value nuclear warriors more than social workers, or accountants more than nurses or engineers more than teachers? Fathers more than Mothers? Sons more than daughters?
The feminist task is neither to glorify nor discount the differences between a man and a woman, but to challenge the adverse consequences of whatever differences there may be.
Reproductive Rights and Abortion
Woman’s subordinate position in society, prevailing attitudes towards women’s bodies, and the political context of public policy shape women’s health and their reproductive lives.
Margaret Sanger said, Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.” Our reproductive rights, our right to choose to have another baby or not, have been under fierce attack since Roe, really since patriarchy. A woman doesn’t get to choose this most basic of all biological function. While our society talks about the right to privacy, it’s a rare social conversation to ask who’s business is what happens in HER body? Why would it lie outside of her choice? What do we police and legislate in male bodies? What if something like this happened with a man? What could we imagine?
Republicans now want to forbid access to in-vitro fertilization, and also to force all women to have babies, even in the cases of rape and incest. So, women who want to be pregnant aren’t permitted to be, while women who don’t want to have a child are forced to and must.
“Right To Life” vs. “Pro-Life” —Pro-Life people should be called Anti-Choice. There is nothing pro-life about them. These people believe that women’s sexuality should be confined to the family and that our most important role is Motherhood, for which they have no respect beyond the abstract. Who will care for these kids? Surely not them. The debate about abortion is totally tangled up in the broader debate about women’s position in society.
Clinics have been bombed, doctors murdered, people live with death threats from these Pro-Life hypocrites. When so little has been done to improve the socio- economic realities of poverty that endanger millions of babies, and half live below the poverty line in this country, this concern for fetal life is pure bullshit hypocrisy. It’s all about controlling women’s lives and women’s bodies.
The Personhood Amendment, which is on the ballot every election in a majority of U.S. states, would give fetuses rights that trans people don’t have. Clinics are closing all over the U.S. In 2010, 90% of rural counties have no abortion options. The status of fetuses is ridiculously elevated as LIFE, while the status of the mother is degraded to potting soil.
Racism and White Privilege
An important definition of racism is that it must combine Prejudice + Power. It’s not just prejudice alone, and that’s why Black folks cannot be said to have racism. They may not like white people, might be prejudiced against or even hate white people, but the power of the institutions are not behind their prejudice. Reverse racism is like reverse sexism—not possible, a myth people tell themselves to feel better. But because the whole hierarchy is based on Power, there is no such thing. Individual women can be biased, of course, as any oppressed people can against their oppressors, but that is not the same as institutional biases that create racism and sexism. Only whites systematically benefit from racism. Only men systematically benefit from sexism.
Every social indicator, from salary to life expectancy, reveals the advantages of being white. It’s more comfortable for white people to think of racism as a form of individual prejudice, because then we don’t have to address power or privilege, and it’s not about US.
Anti-racism teacher, Peggy McIntosh says, Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end these problems. To redesign social systems, we must first acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions.
On White Supremacy—White people need to fully explore how white supremacy and white privilege determine how we see the world. It’s important to keep in mind the theory and strategy of DIVIDE AND CONQUER. This means that we’re easier to control when we’re split off from each other, and the dominator class has always used this tactic when colonizing or trying to control the hierarchies that they create.
On American White History—Start to notice and be curious about the Imperialism, Colonization, and Genocide of Native populations everywhere. The legal and governmental structure of our own Constitution supported slavery.
We know that Black and White people can socialize in a friendly manner, be racially integrated (or pretend to be), while deeply ingrained notions of white supremacy remain intact. Assimilation is a force in our culture that tells others — not white, not male, not Christian—to blend into “the melting pot” of America. But it just reinforces and maintains white supremacy. It means Black, Brown, Native, Asian folks become white. This is an Economically-based survival strategy.
We all internalize white supremacy. It is invisible to us, until it isn’t. We want to be committed to changing society, but we fear living in poverty. Critiques of capitalism and imperialism bang up against class privilege. You need a good job and money to better help the exploited. And so on it goes, even with the most well-intentioned of the oppressor class. Racial genocide has always been economic. Slavery, native genocide, white people who were so scared under Obama and affirmative action—the disrespect for “political correctness”.
It’s easier to confront racism in the forms of overt exploitation and individual hatred and meanness than to confront the encompassing reality of white supremacy. But it’s not an individual issue. As with recycling, it’s something that we MUST do. Being personally kind to People Of Color is important. Like recycling, it’s important that we work to clean up and process our personal shit, and work to change what we can as individuals, BUT it’s not enough.
Why? Our willingness to be kind cannot by itself overpower A SYSTEM of institutions that pumps out a million times more racism than we can personally neutralize, or balance, as individuals. We need to Change the System if we’re serious about confronting our own privilege. The struggle to end white supremacy is a struggle to change STRUCTURES, many interlocking structures.
The problem of racism isn’t simple individual prejudice, but Domination. Being an ally to POC means taking on these structures of domination. They’re called Institutions. They’re invisible. They’re normalized. They’re everywhere. The family, economics, education, the justice system, government, the medical establishment are a few.
Meet the ISM Family- racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism. These reinforce privilege, invisibly. All are interlinked, and all must be revealed and challenged by allies. For every oppressed group, there’s a group that’s privileged IN RELATION. We must see that our identities are all relational.
For a group to be oppressed, they must be subject to one or more of these conditions:
1. Exploitation— of energies and profits. For example— the freedom, power, and self-actualization of men is only possible because women serve them, take on most of the subsistence work and responsibility of food and dirt and reproduction. Also, most POC are or have been servants of white privileged folks. They take on additional menial labors
2. Marginalization— a whole category of people is expelled from participating in social life. Example, elderly people have no dignity, feel useless, bored, and a lack of respect. Much the same is true for disabled people.
3. Powerlessness— Folks cannot participate in making decisions that affect the conditions of their lives. Example— The divisions between menial laborers and those who do mental work. This split is often referred to as white collar vs. blue collar, or professionals vs. non-professionals, but some of these folks have no collars at all, and everyone’s a professional in what they do. Powerless people have little or no work autonomy, must take what they can get, and they get little or no opportunity to develop and exercise skills.
4. Cultural Imperialism— How the dominant society renders your particular perspective useless, invisible, or criminal. An example the belief among some white people that all Mexicans are criminals, or all Muslims are terrorists. This is about norming and othering, which is how the dominant group is universalized. Only white males can be individuals. They’re the only group without a stereotype. All others’ identities in the culture are defined from the outside, by people they don’t identify with and who don’t identify with them.
5. Violence— it used to be that we saw acts of One steoreotype that’s not true is that violent acts are committed by deviant extremists or “sick people” Example, rape., lynching. But violence is actually a social practice. It’s a coercive tool that’s motivated by fear and hatred. It’s institutionalized and systemic. Examples are killing the homeless, or killing trans people, which are rarely seen with the same seriousness by police as the murder of a white man.
Racism means indoctrination for all races that white is superior. The core of white identity is that we are better. But it’s time to look at the impact white supremacy has on white people. White privilege is the flip side of racial oppression and must be challenged in the struggle against white supremacy. The psychological wages of whiteness have misshaped our identity and deformed our consciousness.
Struggles around racism have been powerful catalysts for real social change because they challenge the very foundations of this society: white supremacy. To challenge white supremacy is to confront global capitalism. The challenge is to bring down the social structures based on domination, and free up the energy of the oppressed to discover their freedom, equality, and our collective liberation. We are all vulnerable to being oppressive and we need to continuously struggle with these issues.
White identity has been developed through the process of slavery, genocide, and cultural annihilation. White identity was fused together as a way of dealing with the massive injustice of stealing other people’s lands and/or enslaving other people. All the southwest of the U.S. was once Mexico. The debate over language is about control. English-only laws are about keeping a 3rd world workforce in place, and providing a pool of janitors and dish washers and ditch-diggers, and about reinforcing inferiority.
People who are Black, Brown, and poor are presented to us as Having problems and Being problems—the implication is that they are responsible for All Our Problems. Certainly, they are blamed by the powers-that-be. Whites dismiss inequality in all the conditions of their and our existence, and they— the Others are found to be Morally Irresponsible. Our society demonizes and punishes whole segments of the population because they are poor, regardless of how the economy creates and needs poverty.
The Jew, the Frenchman, the Italian, the Irish, the Spaniard were all ‘niggers’ to some extent, and still are in some parts of the right-wing of this country. The only truly ‘white’ people are the Anglo Saxons and Scandinavians. These other people were not white when they came here, and they became white by massacring, raping, and stealing from Native Americans and from Blacks.
The framers of the Constitution incorporated slavery into a document committed to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all. The self-evident truths of Jefferson were restricted to propertied white men, for PROPERTY is the great object of government, the great cause of war, and the great means of carrying it out. The profits from slavery funded the American Revolution. And this is how the economic benefits of slavery played a major role in the nation’s development.
The creation of a Black sub-class enabled poor whites to identify with and support the policies of the ruling class. Poor whites got a larger role in the political process, and slavery provided property-less whites with a property in their Whiteness, which they felt compelled to defend. This rendered them more willing to accept a lesser share and gave them priority and precedence over the Blacks. The masses of Whites are too occupied in keeping Blacks down to note the gap between their own quasi-slavery status and that of the elite whites on top. This national conspiracy functions without a master plan and keeps Whites, who are not super-rich or powerful in our political and economic system, from seeing that we’re all victims of economic injustice.
“The rhetoric of liberty so freely offered is no substitute for the economic justice that’s been so long denied” (Jesse Jackson)
“Our oppressive and bloody history known all over the world …for which we bear an inescapable responsibility. We’d rather not be reminded of it since we lack the energy to change it…we bear a guilt more deeply rooted than the oldest of old fears.. the record is there for all to read. It resounds around the world. It may as well be written on the sky.” W.E.B. Dubois.—social historian, civil rights activist, founder of the NAACP
“White people carry within themselves a carefully-muffled fear that Black people long to do to others what has been done to them. White people are not truly happy for they are not truly safe…if they were to examine this fear they would have to create a personal confession, a cry for help and healing in the great unadmitted crime of what they have done to themselves”. (James Baldwin)
Poverty. Homelessness. Economic exploitation. Unequal access to quality education and quality healthcare. Look at mothers of color and their children living in poverty, and how structures of oppression and privilege have shaped their lives. Meanwhile, all of their suffering shapes and serves a system built on maintaining white power and control. It’s profoundly important for white people to look at our experiences and deconstruct them, confront our internalized racism. Whiteness is about being better, being above.
Anti-racism work isn’t about guilt. It’s about placing oneself in the matrix of domination that shapes our society. You’ve got to see how your position influences you so you can be part of dismantling the structures of domination.
Make America Hate Again- post-Trump
White supremacists are thrilled by his racism, sexism, proud wealth and privilege. He’s the alpha male, and he’s allowing us to talk about things we haven’t’ been able to talk about. “He says what I’m thinking.” Is an oft-heard quote from The MAGA-verse. Nazis, rapists, and hate mongers are now fully socially liberated and it seems that, since 2015, they have crawled out from beneath their rocks and bunkers to take charge of the Republican party in America.
This is what the hatred of “political correctness” is about. The Trump-centric version of white nationalism is a direct response of backlash to this cultures’ slow shift towards inclusivity, consciousness about oppression, kindness, dialogue. Now they will further block access to voting for Blacks, end Roe, erase gains for gays and trans folk, openly hate Mexicans and Muslims, end social services for the poor, advance rape culture, destroy nature. All this will be transferred, proudly and openly, unapologetically, to rich white men.
When whites say, as they have been since Obama’s election and increasingly under Trump, “I want my country back!”, what does that mean? How ridiculous is this statement when we’re collectively unwilling to recognize and acknowledge the history of our country? How have POC in this country ever had “their” share of this democracy?
When privilege is organized according to race, even class is mostly organized according to race (and gender), there is no significance or meaning of being WHITE outside of systems of privilege and oppression.
According to the great Audre Lorde—"Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/ subordinate, good/bad, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel bad, to feel surplus, to occupy the place of dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working class people, and women.”
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing, and to handle that difference in one of 3 ways — ignore it, copy it (if we think it’s dominant) , or destroy it (if we think it’s subordinate). But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.
Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, there is a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me”. Here, the norm is white, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, strong, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that power resides in our society.
Diversity
Allan Johnson — pdf
The diversity wheel is like a pizza pie that divides us and asks us to locate ourselves in terms of age, gender, sexual orientation, race, income, religion. These are intersectionality loci. The wheel doesn’t say much about the unique individual you now you are, the content of your character, what you dream or feel. It does, however, say a lot about the social reality that shapes everyone’s life in powerful ways.
Assignment for students—Imagine waking up to find your gender had changed, or your race had changed? How would that affect how people perceive and treat you? How would it affect how you see yourself? How would it change the material circumstances of your life, such as where you live, and how much money you have?
For most people, shifting only a few parts of the diversity wheel would be enough to change their lives dramatically. Even though the characteristics in the wheel might not tell us who we are as individuals in the privacy of our hearts and souls and dreams, they matter a great deal in our society because they locate us in relation to other people and the world in ways that have huge consequences.
Social Conditioning
Derrick Jensen— Education in the U.S. is about reproducing the social order. We cannot comprehend, our unconscious will prevent it to protect us, the true nature of the roles we are playing and the consequences of our culture. If it threatens our worldview, we will simply not perceive it.
All my schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see my life as normal, average, ideal, and morally neutral….power from unearned privilege looks like strength, but it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. License to be, at best, ignorant, at worst, murderous.
It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal. Each new child has his eyes, ears, tongue, mind torn out so he cannot see, hear, speak, think, feel these things. These things are normalized. Then he is released into a world broken in 2— those others like himself, and those to be used. Here is the world we live inside of, composed of subjects and objects.
The most powerful system is that which leads people to take hold of their own leashes. No external controls, and no perception that they’re being controlled. Invisible mechanisms of control are best. The spectacle controls us into thinking it’s real and we’re free.
Homosexuality
Suzanne Pharr — Heterosexuality is the assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual. When an abusive man calls a woman a lesbian, he is not so much labeling her as a woman who loves women, but he is warning her that by resisting him, she is choosing to be outside society’s protection from male institutions, and therefore, from ever-present, wide-ranging, unspecified violence.
Judith Butler— Gender is accomplished through day-to-day interactions. Gender is accomplished through a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeals over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. Identities that are recognizable are much less threatening, therefore, non-binary people are in danger in this society.
C.J. Pascoe— “Fag” was the worst thing one guy could call another guy…this insult literally reduced the boy to nothing. Lesbians may be “cool” because because of their place in heterosexual male fantasy, not necessarily because of some enlightened approach to same-sex relationships. However, penetrated men symbolize a masculinity devoid of power, which threatens both psychic and social chaos. This specter of penetrated masculinity functions as a regulatory mechanism of gender. Becoming a fag has as much to do with failing at the masculine tasks of competence, heterosexual prowess, and strength, or in any way revealing femininity as it does with sexual identity. This fluidity of the fag identity is what makes the specter of the fag such a powerful disciplinary mechanism. Boys police most of their behaviors out of fear of having the fag identity, which most males on this culture strive to avoid.
Boys call each other “fag” to help manage anxiety and discomfort. Acknowledging the fag’s existence affirms constantly that the fag is out there, and at any moment a boy can become a fag. At the same time, these performances demonstrate that the boy who is invoking the fag is not a fag, thereby reaffirming their masculinity.
One assignment I give to my Intro to Feminism class is to explain racism, then sexism, and finally, hetero-sexism to
1. a kindergarten class,
2. a visitor from another planet,
3. the marines,
4. a conservative Senator in charge of making public policy,
5. a visitor from the future.
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