January Blog Post

“The power lines produced within these organizations often follow along the preexisting lines formed by structural and systemic oppression and privilege in terms of race, class, education, language, and so on , even when the stated goal is to dismantle and transform these structures of oppression (Russo).”

This sentence speaks loudly to me. With everything that is going on in the world around us right now, this particular sentence stuck out. As everyone who doesn’t live under a rock knows, Donald J. Trump has just become the 45^th President of the United States of America. Millions of American’s are furious, confused, and most of all: scared. The sentence I have selected to reflect on, has the words: oppression, race, privilege, and education in it; all words that could have hundreds of pages written about each one of them individually.

When I read this sentence, the first ideas that come to my mind is: women, race, religion, and oppression. While America at one point in time was seen as a place where “everyone is welcome” at this very moment, it’s not longer that way. There was a huge Women’s March that broke records for one of the biggest marches in history, yet not much has changed (yet). Women are now being told by our government what we can/should be doing with our reproductive organs, trying to take away funding from establishments that most of the time are purely there to provide HIV and STI testing for women AND men, and simply there for the better health of human beings. Religion in my opinion is TRUMPing carelessly over human lives. 

While there are many, many, many, groups of people that are being oppressed, not everyone has the right education, and if we’re just being blunt, not everyone has the privilege to truly be heard. Sad part about these phenomena, a lot of people who are privileged are completely unaware of it, because most of the time you wouldn’t know much about privilege unless you DIDN’T have it. Some people might legitimately not be educated enough to stand up for themselves, not to mention some people may just not be living in the right class. Money is everything in this world, and if you don’t have any, you probably won’t be heard as well as someone with white male white-collar buddies. My point is here, although you might be in a group of people that is being oppressed, you might not have the right education, skin color, sex, or living class, to say/make any type of affect on the situation at all. I realize some content in this blog are subjective and opinionated; these are just the things that came to mind while reading the selected sentence. I respect anyone and everyone, even those who have different opinions and ideas different than mine.