5/22 Intro's and Johnson

While reading through Introduction: Creating Classrooms for Equality and Social Justice by "the editors", I was struck by the distinct feeling of hope. Not to be too cheesy or hyperbolic but I so enjoyed the perspective that this intro was written with. It really set the scene for this class and giving me so much purpose in why we do this work, in order to give our students a better world to grow up in. Creating classrooms that invoke feelings of safety and inclusiveness, while challenging the failing structures of Western education is a central focus of this bold "call to action" and an appropriate one.

"All of us are part of the problem" was a gripping start to the first few chapters of Johnson's book Privilege, Power and Difference. There was so much meat in this article that it took me a while to process. I so appreciate the author's honesty while discussing the difficulties of speaking with his friend, a black woman, about both of their experiences with these topics ("her misfortune is tied to my fortune", was a poignant statement that brings to light the feelings of shame and shaky-footing that comes along with a white person attempting to talk with their friend who is in an unprivileged category. It is a sentiment I have experienced before. The tragedy compounds when then, because of the hesitancy we feel (because of the shame, etc), we DO NOT delve into these discussions. The author argues that the ease in which the dominant group can choose NOT to participate in these conversations (start them) is the "single most powerful barrier to change" around this topic. I have heard so much recently about this topic that Johnson brought up in this article about how "no one is white before he/she came to American and that it took generations and a vast amount of coercion before this became a white country"-James Baldwin. America has such a distinct view of race/sex/sexuality/class. There is a theme that America places a negative (or positive) weight of someone's identifying factors as a value system, more distinctly/broadly than maybe any other place in the world. 

Considering the concept that people want to be valued in their workplace for what they can contribute, I was thinking about the show Love is Blind and how they tried to eliminate some of the ways we judge each other negatively (unfairly) and assign bias based on the physical attributes of another person. It would be an interesting experiment to have an entire company hire with this concept in mind; have the person interviewing use a device to disguise their voice and not be visible for the interview. They would have to be judged solely off of their resume and answers during the interview. I don't think this would be the ideal situation. It would be nice to be valued just as you are without having to hide in order to be judged off of merits alone, however we do not yet live in that world yet. I also was thinking about how remote work has changed some of those dynamics, do people even know what their employees and coworkers look like? How does that change their perception of each other. 

At the end of the article, I noted that in order to experience oppression you MUST exist in an oppressed category. I wrote in my notes, "so white, heterosexual, male, wealthy people cannot be oppressed?". The author did discuss that it is possible (even though they don't experience oppression) that they can still have hardships in life but they still will carry the benefits of their privilege.