It is no secret that trying to move forward in a system that was created to hold you back is analogous to the myth of Sisyphus, trying to move a boulder up a hill and having it roll all the way back down for you to have to start all over again. This is what it feels like to be a woman of color in white America. The snapshot that Maram Nahshal posted depicts this perfectly; it feels as though you are being locked in a cage by another person and being stripped of every right and freedom even though you are the same as the oppressor.

Peggy McIntosh points out some of the ways in which individuals who aren’t of the white race are oppressed and discriminated against in her article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” highlighting that those who are fortunate enough to be white “can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me,” or “I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.” At first, this may not be something that those who don’t suffer in these circumstances think exist, but they are things that the oppressed see in their day to day lives. Imagine not being able to see any representation of yourself or your race anywhere you went and feeling isolated in the society you live in, the society you grew up in. Certain individuals can’t even receive proper medical assistance such as black women who have a higher post-partum death rate because they don’t receive the help they need like their white counterparts. The only way to battle against this oppression is by seeing it for what it is and making it known to the world as some individuals may not even recognize their own privileges or the damage they cause.

The excerpt from Marilyn Frye’s “Oppression” also demonstrates the message I believe Maram Nahshal was trying to convey through her snapshot of how individuals are stripped of their freedoms and aren’t given the voice they deserve. She demonstrates how there will always be a barrier or impasse to a woman’s decision and autonomy towards her own life in a system that was created to only benefit men. Men are even so praised in society that any small gesture is seen as chivalry or gallantness when they really have no practical meaning to them. Gestures like opening doors for women is infantilizing because in some way it emphasizes the idea of how women can’t do anything for themselves and need a man there to help them make it through the day. Frye even goes so far as to make the analogy that this gesture imitates the behavior of servants toward masters which mocks women since the role of the “servant” is mainly assigned to women who are expected to tend to their husband’s every need. As s society, we need to take these myopic viewpoints out of society and see things in their bigger picture, as a whole and as it is, a façade for oppression.

I absolutely enjoyed this week’s readings, it’s unbelievable to know that there’s a huge population of people who are blind to their privilege and think otherwise. Reading White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh and Oppression by Marilyn Frye has given me hope in humanity and society.

In Peggy’s article, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, she gives her personal points as to how many white people are oblivious to the fact that they are indeed privileged. “My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to make.” says Peggy, then states about 26 advantages she has had, being a white person. Reading this as a predominant person of color, it’s unbelievable that there are people that go about their day without having to worry about their neighbors being pleasant due to your skin color, shopping alone without being harassed, race working against job applications, or other common public situations. White folks’ skin color is a useful tool in their every day life whereas being a person of color is seen as a threat or intimidation. The issue of white privilege stems from unacknowledged power. They often feel as if their skin color is a “pass” or “coupon.” White people have this unearned privilege. What makes their skin color so much better than everyone else’s? They did absolutely nothing to gain this power. Peggy says that her whiteness has protected her from hostile situations, violence and distress. Although she is not blind to her privilege, she promotes the positive and negative advantages that come within. I agree with Peggy’s belief that white people as a whole should distinguish the positive advantages which we can work to spread, and the negative types of advantages which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. If they cannot even attempt to open their eyes to the harm white privilege creates, how can we expect any change? As this group of people continue to feed into the hierarchy, their over-privileged advantages are gained from people of color’s disadvantages. Peggy also mentions how men’s denial from the privilege they have, protects them and prevents male-privilege from ending. Similar to white privilege, they are being taught to stay blind and quiet in order to stay persistent.

I admire Marilyn Frye’s words on Oppression. I like Frye’s comparison of oppressive suppression to presses that are used to mold things, reduce them in bulk, sometimes restrain, restrict or prevent their mobility. I also love the door-opening scenario Frye uses to show the macroscopic phenomenon of oppression because it is so obvious. “The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false.” “What women experience is a world in which gallant princes charming commonly make a fuss about being helpful and providing small services when help and services are little or no use.” The door-opening scenario is very symbolic because realistically, one would open a door for somebody who is incapacitated, unwell, or has their hands full. This is symbolizing that women are incapable of opening their own door, and incapable of anything else. Opening a door for someone is literally the bare minimum and men want to make it seem like they’re doing this grand favor, IT’S ACTUALLY RIDICULOUS! I can name a bunch of other examples where men do the bare minimum and expect women to fall and their knees and praise them. It’s real sad how men usually always want something in return from women by doing the bare minimum or things that a woman can do for herself. In my eyes, little chivalrous things like this are annoying and unnecessary. It is simply un-needed help. It’s funny because men are so quick to open doors for women but can’t seem to help a women in danger, getting harassed or threatened. Who feeds into this oppression? Men. Barriers are enforced by men and maintained by them too, for their own benefit. We live in an economy controlled by them. “That barrier is protecting his classification and status as a male, as superior, as having right to sexual access to females.” Men often hide their vulnerability, making them accepted into the male community, and this validation (from other men) contributes to their self esteem.

“Humans can be miserable without being oppressed, and it’s perfectly consistent to deny that a person or group is oppressed without denying that they have feelings or that they suffer.” NOT EVERYONE IS OPPRESSED! Being a woman is significantly attached to whatever disadvantages and depravations she suffers, be they great or small.” We as women will unfortunately continue to be oppressed as long as men feed into the patriarchy they created themselves.

The reality that there is privilege everywhere became very apparent to me from an early age. One of my most memorable moments that lead up to this realization had to be when I was a freshman in high school. As a teenager I was never doing what I was supposed to be doing, this included being in class – let alone the school building- when I was meant to be. I remember the first and only time I was caught skipping with a few friends during school hours. While my POC friends were scared of what the truancy officer was going to do with them my non-POC friends were cool calm and collected. I was somewhere between worried about my POC friends and wondering why my nonPOC friends were so calm. I had personally never had a bad experience with the police force but of course, I knew about biases people had and how some officers would racially profile POC. One of my POC friends ended up running before the officer even left his patrol car. Luckily the officer was nice and let us off with a warning.

When we all met up again later that day the non-POC friend asked jokingly “Why was everyone so scared? Why did you run?” and the rest of us replied with something along the lines of “When you look like us who knows how that could’ve gone”. Our non-POC friend couldn’t comprehend why the rest of us reacted the way we did. We told him he had to check his “white privilege card” because if he didn’t need to worry about what might happen when coming face to face with an officer that was a privilege.

As a white woman, I will never face the injustices as a black person or person of color. I will never know what it is like to be pulled over and searched for no reason, or picked to be on a team because of “perceived” athletic capabilities. I was not put into a systemic cycle that preys on the deterioration of a race. Cowardly so. I will never understand. The oppressions of POC, LGBTQIA+, and women, seem to be dated. We have made strides to get humane rights, then get pushed twenty years back. Constant wave. For women, our bodies, partners, clothing should be our choice. White CIS men really loved to manipulate, control, and power as Marilyn Frey published.

As a Black woman, I exist at this intersection of race and gender. I am oppressed by my racial and gender identity simultaneously, yet my struggles are constantly dismissed and invalidated. I am invisible to white feminists, and I am invisible to Black men, yet both groups feel entitled to my labor. White feminists want Black feminists to be “woman first” and Black men want Black women to be race first, but we’re not privileged in either identity so we cannot toss one aside in our fight for equality. These groups only recognize me when they need someone to exert power over, they only recognize me when they need me to mule for their benefit and I am fed up. 

It is very apparent in conversations with white women who claim to be feminists that they only want to talk about the gender oppression that affects them, there’s this “omg why’d you have to bring race into it” sentiment when I bring up gender oppression that is specific to Black women. It’s almost like they’re annoyed that my experience reminds them that they have white privilege. They don’t want to see themselves as oppressors and they especially don’t like to be reminded that they, as women, can oppress men of color. This brings me to the Tik Tok my classmate Nicole Guidetti shared which talks about white women’s specific brand of white privilege. White supremacist patriarchy paints white woman as damsels in need of saving and white women have historically weaponized this against Black and other people of color. This costed Emmett Till and many others their lives, and it’s still being used to harm people of color today. We’ve seen so many “karens” in the last couple of years, its disturbing. Please note that they are not just weaponizing whiteness, they are weaponizing white womanhood. Black women are not afforded femininity, we are seen as aggressive and manlike, which makes it easy for white women to weaponize their tears and false victimhood against us. Too often the black woman in the karen situation is the one being victimized, and the white woman uses their privilege to escape accountability. There’s no woman solidarity between white women and women of color. Too often white women side with their whiteness, we saw this with the white female vote for trump. White women constantly fall back on their privilege, which begs the question, do they want equality, or do they just want white male privilege?

            Male privilege is a hard topic to bring up but it’s especially hard to bring up within the Black community. Black men similarly to white women don’t want to see themselves as oppressors. It’s hard for them to recognize themselves as privileged because they are oppressed by their race and greatly at that. Every time I bring up misogyny with Black men, they deflect by bringing up racism. At the height of the BLM protests in 2020, I pointed out the centering of Black males despite the movement being created by Black women. I was told that Black women don’t go through as much as Black men do. But Breonna Taylor was murdered by police in her sleep, yet they weren’t marching for her, they were marching for George Floyd. Black men have the privilege of being the face of Blackness, their issues are well known and fought for, but Black women don’t receive that same privilege. In “Oppression” Marilyn Frye states, “If a man has little to no material or political power, or achieves little of what he wants to achieve, his being male has no part of the explanation. Being male is something he has going for him.” Black men fail to realize this. In white corporate America Black men are more likely to be promoted over Black women, in the Black community and predominantly Black countries their male privilege benefits more extensively. Black men are more likely to be promoted in their careers over a Black woman; Black music genres are Black male dominated; Black activism centers Black men. Black men barely recognize the racial violence that Black women experience, of course they also refuse to acknowledge the misogyny they inflict on us. Black male rapists are protected in the Black community, is that not male privilege allowing them to escape accountability? This begs the question; do they want equality, or do they just want white privilege?  

            It’s a painful existence when communities you are supposed to be a part of invalidate your experiences. I get no comfort or solidarity from white or even other women of color. I get no comfort or solidarity from Black men. White female privilege is seeing your featured be represented as beautiful, I want that. Black male privilege is having your plight be recognized, it’s not having to worry about catcalled or being sexually assaulted if you’re out too late, I wish I had that. Like Peggy Macintosh says in “White Privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack” “not all of the privileges [are] inevitably damaging. Some like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race doesn’t count against you in court, should be the norm in society”. The parts of male privilege and white privilege that I want are the parts that every human should have by default, the right to be human, the right to be seen, the right to be an individual, etc. I don’t care for the rest because the rest are damaging, no one should have the power to harm others and get away with it.

White privilege can sometimes be a difficult topic for some. They might think your saying they’re are racist but not necessarily they are many kinds of privilege in the world. Having white privilege doesn’t make you a bad person you can live your day to day life having privilege without noticing it. But you can’t deny that it exists. yamilet snapshot Is a great example of white privilege is be denied or ignored using the famous term “I don’t see race”. Which is definitely not true Mc Inotosh mentions in her article she try’s to detect some of the effects of white privilege in her daily life. Like “ I can if i wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time”. Which is a big privilege to have that black people don’t have we tend have to aware of our surroundings most of the time to conform into to what we usually are not. So the people around us don’t think of us as the stigma of how a typical black person acts.

Frye mainly concentrates on the oppression against women. Marilyn Frye compares women as a bird in a cage. Frye states that the oppression of women is meant to mold women and restrict their motions. This restriction or confinement is an experience of being caged in. Frye mentions how taking a further look at the cage of a bird one can see “It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers”.  She states how for women there will be constant barriers that we have to face because the system is in the benefit of the men. I found it interesting how Frye can set an example of a man holding the door for a woman as oppression. Once I re read it though I understood that that scenario is only a representation of how men would be the ones to remove that barrier for the women, a useless act like that suddenly makes them seem mightier.  This gives off the idea that a woman is not capable of doing simple tasks like opening a door, making women seem like they must depend on a man, when that itself shouldn’t be the case. The oppression of women however is not the only form of oppression Frye mentions

The definition of oppression is an unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power. Just like how Marilyn Frye mentions in the beginning of her writing, the word oppression is a strong word. In fact, the word oppression has been floating around in recent times. This is mainly because people of color are constantly being oppressed by authorities. And although this is a serious topic, I can’t help but draw a parallel to what Frye mentions next to a real-world situation. The situation is that the word is very misused, I have come upon a few Tik-Toks of where, mainly, white individuals would take this word out of context and apply it to themselves. Although Frye mentions various forms of oppression including race, Frye doesn’t seem to mention forms that white individuals are oppressed. Frye does give an example of how if a white person were to be deprived of the knowledge of the ghetto, their “feelings of unwarranted feelings of superiority” are hurt. However, this does not make them oppressed, it just limits their access to those barriers in a different degree.

            The reading of Peggy McIntosh concentrates on white privilege. McIntosh comes to describe white privilege as a “invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious”. In other words, these individuals have this subconscious knowledge of their advantage in life due to their skin color.  This way of seeing things has become such a greater issue. Individuals with white privilege, who deny having that privilege are trying to seem as if they don’t have an advantage in life, as if the system doesn’t side with them when in many cases white privilege has helped them out of sticky situations. Allena McKenzie’s Snapshot #3 could be applied to this case. Their image illustrates how much white privilege has helped white, more specifically white males, out. The media, the government, and the system in general will more likely stand behind white individuals than people of color.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution found that the unemployment rate is even worse in many majority-African American metro areas.⁴ For example, in Washington, D.C., the African American unemployment rate is six times higher than the white rate.