Activists in our histories have achieved great milestones for the rights of many different marginalized groups of people, as well as for the general public. While those so-called milestones may or may not have been very large they still helped to improve the quality of life for a lot of people and have passed on the torch to the next generations to achieve even more in their respective fields. In the film “American Revolutionary The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”, they talk about the life of Grace Lee Boggs in which she did an amazing amount of work as an activist for civil rights, even doing things as incredible as working with the black panthers, and trying to convince Malcolm X to run for president. It’s incredible that she worked for so much to the point that she spent her whole life doing it, and writing to spread activist ideals late into her life up until her death. She’s truly a very inspiring person, and it’s great to think about the people who she has inspired to activism and the people they might have inspired as well. Something that is touched on in the reading, “How to think like an activist” is how social media has impacted activism across the country. People have access to a lot of information nowadays and they can learn about current events pretty soon after they happen so long as they can get past efforts to keep them hidden which is so often tried by police and government. I’ve seen a lot more posts within the past few years related to activist movements and spreading activist ideals and messages for the betterment of different communities and social problems as well as actions of systemic oppression. Even though this has also brought with it a lot of bad, such as people clogging up important social media channels that people more active in these movements and protests use regularly to find things out quickly and effectively. It’s also a shame that a large portion of those people also made those quick posts and did little or nothing more past that. But I think that with some tweaking to how we use social media as well as the giant problem we have with misinformation and propaganda in this country, social media can become a really great tool we can all use to help and take part in many great movements to combat many problems we and other people have to deal with in this country.

I really appreciate the explanation of the difference between oppression and the daily and regular troubles of the human condition. Even though this article on oppression was written 21 years ago, the same incorrect feelings about what oppression is and how it looks and feels are still pretty much commonplace. I’ve heard too many white people over the course of my life that believe that they are oppressed and a recipient of racism. Even more ironic is that most of those people were men, men who were well on their way to inheriting fortunes and being handed a career and life by the men who raised them whether they claimed to dislike it or not, and even men who already owned and operated a business of their own however small, that enjoyed the benefit of selling out of stock for long stretches of time. A majority of the people who enjoy the freedom of living their lives without the fear of the accompaniments of doing that living under an oppressive system still either deny the existence of it, minimize its effects and consequences, enjoy it because it clearly benefits them, or simply don’t believe in it altogether. And even in the people that I believe don’t fall into this category there is an incredibly slim portion of them that actively want to and try to do something to change it, or even provide help to those people it oppresses day in and day out. 

One thing that I saw both articles touch on is the way that white people and men in regards to a patriarchal society live and operate behind a kind of veil that keeps them from seeing clearly what is being done on the other side of that veil. And I pick the word “veil” intentionally, because to me there is no possibility that those things are ever completely blocked from view or consciousness. It is there, and on the other side of it are people constantly lifting that veil, shouting from the other side, telling them that the veil exists and what is happening behind it, all to very, very little real progress in anything but appearances of how much work has been done and what times we now live in and a cry of how hard it is to live their lives having to think about other people that are not on the inside of the veil.

The theme that stands out the most to me about the examples of different people’s arguments about non-gender conforming people or behavior or style etc. is that in several cases, these people are very upset about something that doesn’t involve them in the slightest. Some of them are upset about it being “shoved in their face” when often it’s them that are strangely obsessed with someone else’s appearance to the point that they won’t look away and then get in a stranger’s business. I’ve noticed that some people also tend to see anything that goes outside of an assigned norm for binary genders as a threat to them or their children. When Lil Nas X posted several pictures of himself with prosthetics to make him look as he was pregnant, I noticed a lot of people were upset that this was going to influence their kids somehow. Strange thinking that it would first of all, since I knew plenty of boys who put balloons and soccer balls under their shirts and imagine themselves pregnant. And second of all, it made no sense to me that if it DID influence their kids, how that was in any way a bad thing. I understand the sentiment that if your child wanted to dress or act outside of their assigned gender norm they would probably experience some form of bullying or mistreatment. But if this is what they’re afraid of, why be so concerned with changing your child and not the people that treat them that way? The blame always goes to them that are outside the gender binary and not to the people that actively hate them.

Another thing that often gets to me is how often people will cite “science” as a way to completely discredit different genders. These people are usually unable to provide so much as an article, or a piece of information that goes beyond what they were taught in high school biology if it even goes that far. If people were interested enough in science and they really cared about the subject matter, they would be able to find out that those ideas are completely unfounded and don’t make much sense in the first place. Gender and sex has no norms in the biological norms, there are even several animals that swap sexes within their lifetimes, and I think most people are familiar with the factoid that “male” seahorses give birth to their young. Life on earth has an amazing amount of diversity that completely dances around these ideas of male and female, which is part of what makes life beautiful. Why work so hard to restrict these things and shove them into simple categories when there is so much more to explore, know, and appreciate? 

I hope that the trend of exploring gender and those norms continues to allow more people freedom to express themselves as the more people are honest with themselves and can express themselves publicly without harming anyone, the easier it will be to live together and work on other pressing matters that require people to work together.