Oppressive systems aren\u2019t just made up of individual actions but years and years of social constructs and institutions contributing to empowering and upholding these structures. For example racism, sexism, etc. are all systems that can\u2019t be boiled down to a few shared experiences. Instead it is the amalgamation of actions and systems that work against a specific group of people in order to maintain the power for the other group. This is where privilege arises, and one may benefit from one aspect of their identity but suffer at the expense of another aspect. Allan G. Johnson in “Patriarchy the System” elaborates that if we reduced things like the patriarchy to just individual behaviors we would essentially be ignoring how structures are influencing these experiences to begin with, \u201cIf we see patriarchy as nothing more than men\u2019s and women\u2019s individual personalities, motivations, and behavior, then it won\u2019t occur to us to ask about larger contexts\u2014such as institutions like the family, religion, and the economy\u2014and how people\u2019s lives are shaped in relation to them.\u201d (Johnson 15.) As a black cishet woman, I have cishet privilege but will still lack power due to misogyny and racism. Things that are rooted in misogyny will still result in my harm and the same goes for parts of society rooted in racism. \u201cWithin the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black.\u201d (Lorde 1983) In my own experience I\u2019ve found that whenever one marginalized group is attacked it always creates a trickle down effect. Eventually the oppression spreads like mold and it begins to affect every group similarly but in different ways. Even in modern day America, although I\u2019ve only been alive for 20 years I witnessed how dehumanized black children and victims of police brutality were in the media as a teenager and only for me to witness it happening to asian people a few years later in current time. Myweleman mentioned that \u201cI think that patriarchy is universal, everywhere. Patriarchy is in every country, in America, Japan, Saudi Arabia, France, Congo, Ivory Coast . We can find patriarchy in all of this nation. Patriarchy is like oxygen, everywhere, men can not live without this way of dominating. It is innate. Sometimes people tend to point to another country, but patriarchy is right there next to them.\u201d And I completely agree. I\u2019ve seen some people use the argument that because in some ways American women live under better circumstances than those in other countries that feminism is no longer needed, but obviously it doesn\u2019t matter the intensity or magnitude of the misogyny. Feminism is to combat all forms the patriarchy presents itself in. Due to the patriarchy being everywhere I often wonder if it’s possible to dismantle it or if it’s something we should attempt to reform instead of destroy entirely because of the difficulty that comes with tearing it down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oppressive systems aren\u2019t just made up of individual actions but years and years of social constructs and institutions contributing to empowering and upholding these structures. For example racism, sexism, etc. are all systems that can\u2019t be boiled down to a few shared experiences. Instead it is the amalgamation of actions and systems that work against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-response-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1439,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/fall-2021-gws-100-170w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}