As a white, upper class, educated, able-bodied female I recognize and understand that I’m blessed with more privilege than most. My parents have provided my siblings and I with a lavish lifestyle that came from years of their hard work. I don’t have to worry about affording my next meal or if I’m going to have a place to sleep at night.
Although I’ve been blessed with this lifestyle, I’m fully aware of the gender divide and the different components that come along with it. While women are automatically seen as lower than males (i.e. wage gap, pre-historic gender roles), there are certain groups of women that are more invisible than others. These women include people of color, women who are LGBTQUIA+, lower socioeconomic status women, etc. In the future, I hope to use my privilege to help speak out for those who are repressed in society.
I was reinforced and punished a certain way in order to live up to unobtainable gender roles. I’ve been inundated with television, magazines, or social media about how I should look, dress, and what I should eat. There’s a non-stop policing of women’s bodies that doesn’t necessarily come from laws. Not only do I have the media telling me what to do, but also I have people convincing me to get an IUD because my own government trying to control my body.
While these classes have definitely opened my eyes and exposed me to underlying, subconscious forms of oppression that I failed to recognize in the past, they also taught me that each person I encounter has various components that come into play to empower or create struggles in that person’s life. A person’s gender, birthplace, ethnicity, religion, ability, class, etc. ultimately create a path in which they are thrown obstacles. Depending on how these different components come together changes
While I understand that as a female I will face specific obstacles that my male counterparts don’t have to, I also know that as a white, educated, abled, upper-class woman I’m already way more ahead of the game than most. If anything, the take-away from this article should be that having privilege isn’t necessarily an evil, but you need to understand your privilege and how it affects others.
If you would like to use your privilege to help others out please consider donating to the organizations found on this website:
http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/charities-to-donate-to-in-trumps-america.php