I found this week’s readings, “There Is No Hierarchy In Oppression” by Audre Lorde and “Patriarchy, the System, An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us” By Allan G. Johnson and continuation on Oppression and Privilege very interesting. Like I mentioned last week, oppression always narrows down to the root of racism and hierarchy created with the white cis-gendered men. Throughout both texts, we can see this “theory” evolve through history and personal experiences. 

“There is no hierarchy of oppression” (There Is No Hierarchy In Oppression, Audre Lorde, pg 1) To me this quote means that there is no oppressed group being more oppressed than others. Every oppressed group faces the same oppression one way or another. And there is no way someone can fight oppression being a part of a certain group and feel freedom in another. When one identity idd targeted and oppressed, all of you are being oppressed. Johnson also has a great example that feeds into Lorde’s point. It states “There is poverty and class oppression because the upper classes are greedy, heartless and cruel” This comes to show that in the hierarchy, there will always be a common denominator, which is lower classes and in these classes, we will see them sharing a lot of similarities. The reason being is, taking the train back throughout history, the higher/wealthier classes were the ones with all the power due to this status. They would humiliate all other classes below them who weren’t so fortunate, and unfortunately, these lower classes consisted of people of color, uneducated, and poor people. This is exactly the point that Lorde was making on how once one of these categories is oppressed, they are all under the same attack of oppression. On the topic of oppression, another example we can look at is, in Johnson’s writing, they speak about when we think of “Patriarchy” we ALL automatically think of men’s privilege and their oppression of women. Unfortunately with time, the power of men never died down, it actually grew as they would reclaim the power of their ancestors and fight with the current laws established for equality to keep that patriarchy and oppressive side going. 

With this week’s topic, I really enjoyed the snapshots posted by my fellow classmates. Before I elaborate on someone else’s piece, I wanted to elaborate a little more on mine. I chose an image of a white man and a woman of color about to compete in the same race with the same distance to the finish line. However, the only difference was that for the woman of color, the path had way more obstacles than for the white man. Just like in real life, where minorities have to face so many challenges to reach the same exact goal/finish line as the privileged people of society, white males. In the image, the man is telling the woman that the distance is the same in a sarcastic way, without fully understanding why the woman is upset at her path. This also happens in our society where the more privileged people don’t understand the other people’s struggles and are quick to judge and call others lazy when they don’t see how many more obstacles they have in their path to reach the same goals, no matter how big or small they can be. Another classmate’s post that I really enjoyed was by Ceranlly Rodriguez. Their post was an image of a woman being “shushed” by different hands with all sorts of comments and questions. Unfortunately, this happens to women all over the world where women are oppressed and shut out of their truth. No matter what a woman goes through, there will always be that privileged comment about the victim or just women in general, doubting their truth and questioning a set of unfortunate events. This image ties back to both of this week’s readings and I enjoyed making the connection with all 3 documents.