I know I experience a lot of privilege and I agree with some of the people in this video that you don’t really know what to do with that information once you’ve been made aware of it. I have definitely learned to start by appreciating it working to change my frame of thinking about myself and others in relation to this unearned privileges. There are some reasons I would’ve taken steps back in the exercise, from disabilities and circumstances from time and place. However, I am a heterosexual white female from a middle class family and I can also see that my unearned privileges took care of those things in life that were hindrances to my success. I.e. Health care, supportive family, a safe home to go to, people to fall back on that could support me, etc.

I relate to the general oppressive examples give in the Frye reading. However, I found them very extreme examples, black/ white thinking. it might be that my circumstances of time and place, the way my parents raised me, the political climate I grew up in, and the people I got to be surrounded by made it so the consequences that she spoke of were very rare and for the most part there has always been a way out. Or at least, the cage is a lot more broad and roomie than she makes it out to be, or that other people experience it as. By no means do I mean to say that people don’t experience it that way, in my life I would not say that has been my biggest challenge, the oppression of being a woman. I honestly think the biggest way I experience oppression is probably in such a macro scale I am not even aware of it on a day to day.

I found the part about oppressor being oppressed very interesting. If the oppressor is the one ultimately benefiting than they are not being oppressed. I think this answers a lot to my own response about how I experience oppression in my life. I know I could come up with answers to that questions, but I ultimately know that my privileges outweigh my disadvantages. I am not caught between a rock and a hard place, there has always been a solution for me, and I don’t know that those solutions would’ve been there for anyone/ everyone.

There were a few things that I will hold onto from the readings that have helped me understand oppression. I found the birdcage analogy in Oppression by Marilyn Frye very helpful for thinking about both white privilege and oppression of women. As well as the definition given that, “the experience of oppressed people is living within barriers that are not accidental and are not avoidable. Every direction is blocked or booby trapped.”