I am revisioning my SOP as we speak. I am still thinking of your
proposition as to what ethnicities role will be --and it has made me think --
especially looking further at it, that perhaps it is not simply ethnicity that
will be the major factor--but I perhaps it will be the place where intersecting
oppressions meet. As such, it will be a very complex picture-- one where it
isnt simply a question of race(even though I think that is a fallacy, so even
ethnicity if you may), or gender, or even simply class-- but the places where
these things intersect--I think Patricia Hill Collins calls it the interlocking
systems of oppression or something like that. It will be where all of it comes
together--race, class, gender, and sexuality. I am thinking of Hurricane
Katrina--that was not simply racial that was race and class. Alas, I believe
this entire assault upon abortion (although it may spread) is not even simply
gender-- it is class,gender, and race all together. So that in terms of race
and gender perhaps you have people like Condoleeza Rice sititng in the power
structure while poor people are sitting on rooftops in New Orleans, or people
like Ann Coulter speaking for the Conservative agenda while poor women get
denied access to safe, legal abortion. What do you think? I think perhaps this
is perhaps the picture we are seeing.
2 comments:
It's certainly interlocking issues, including access to power by visible tokens (e.g., Ann Coulter) who gain power precisely because their rhetoric *and* their presence both argue that discrimination doesn't exist. And of course, the fact that these different groupings overlap also helps people deny that discrimination exists--"those people on the rooftops weren't there because they were black, they were there b/c they were poor," and so on. Point out the class-based discrimination, and you get "it wasn't their poverty that caused all the problems, it was the criminal behavior in the superdome." The intersections of race / class / gender get deployed beautifully to cancel each other out, even if doing so requires coded language and lies ("criminal behavior in the superdome").
Interesting post. And thanks for the good comment over at my place.
I think that is right on the ball.
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