As a POC, I must say these readings were a little tough for me. In White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, the author discussed her journey into understanding what White privilege is and how it is prevalent in her everyday life. She writes “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. “ An unconsciousness acknowledgment of the privilege that isn’t spoken out loud about or written down on paper Well at least not currently. Every day I wake up, I’m reminded in various ways that I’m running a race in which I’m partially equipped to compete. Whether that be my neighbor’s shock or discontent when they say my face in our middle-class neighborhood or when I walk into an office space and realize I’m the only black male on-site. However, I had never considered what that quiet pressure of oppression might be like for another group of people who are currently being oppressed.
In Oppression, Marilyn Frye compares the oppression of women to a bird being kept in a cage. Sure the cage might be pretty and basic needs are provided for, but the motion and mobility of the birds inside are restricted. The lives of women have already been shaped and reduced by a system designed to benefit men. Frye writes “On the other hand, anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as a mean, bitter, angry or dangerous.” But women are supposed to be proud of their gilded cages and are deemed problematic when they question the system and the merit of the bars of society that lock them in.
I’d like to say I am aware of the odds that are stacked against women and that I haven’t consciously been involved in anything that perpetuated their ongoing oppression. However, I hadn’t thought about the oppression being in the form of a system designed to keep men at an advantage over women. Their irony of a black man, living through the oppression of a system designed to benefit another race, missing out on the same system being designed to benefit men was not lost to me. Mcintosh wrote, “I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”
I can only imagine what it must be like for women of color to navigate this ‘system’. I thought back on Feminist Politics and how the author mentioned that women of color fighting for women’s rights were not necessarily in the same boat as white women fighting for the same rights. How this created a double standard of living for the reformist feminists. I now wonder if this same thing happened as black people fought for civil rights; that black women were only partially supported since men’s rights would come first.
