A note on Race, Class, and Gender — Inequality
Race, Class and Gender have always been very well discussed and have always been the reason to inequalities and intolerance. Although, in a world as globalized and spread out as ours, I sometimes have a hard time understanding the reasons to such an oppression on different groups. As a foreign, agnostic, white female in America with strong thoughts of my own in controversial topics, I am able to experience first-hand some of the difficult situations people are sometimes put in for simply being a part of a non-WASP (white, American, straight, protestant) group. I have had many talks about it with my friends and I have been a target to some somewhat threatening comments.
As a woman, I ended up getting used to being cat-called on the streets. Just today as I was riding my bike home with my helmet, a hat, a rain jacket, shorts and sneakers I had to listen to a 50-something year old white trucker tell me to “use those sexy legs” and to “pump harder”. When I finally realized it was directed to me and identified the culprit across the street on his truck starring at me as he motioned his hand in a way that indicated how nasty he actually was I only had one answer to give him as I lowered my voice and made it sound like a man’s and responded “do you wanna s*ck my d***” as I rode away when the stop light turned green. What bothered me the most about it was not the fact that it happened, but that I had an answer for it ready since I’ve done it so many times before and that didn’t “ruin” my day, since I am used to it. Why should I be used to it? Why do I not feel the need to make a big deal out of it anymore? Why doesn’t society condemn his action more than they condemn my answer? That’s what bothered me as I finished my ride.
The other thing that I have come to realize is that when people don’t know me well yet and they think I am white American female they treat me differently than when they find out that I am from Brazil. The problem here is that, due to my slight accent, people don’t notice it at first and then I can clearly see the two different ways they treat me. At first they treat me as a possibly competent woman, then they treat me as a definitely incompetent woman when they find out I am foreign. They don’t treat me worse, but they decide to let things go because “she’s not from here, she’ll learn later” and that might seem like a generous action in their heads but it is actually very frustrating and offensive. This action is telling me that I am not capable of functioning as a “regular” white woman since now I became a foreign white woman. This also brings down the thousands of stereotypes that attack me when they say “oh, so you are from Brazil? Do you just walk naked there?” or “so do you have a monkey or a tiger as a pet?”, or even just by speaking Spanish to me (in case you still didn’t know, we speak Portuguese in Brazil). Those are all things that might seem harmless at first but they are actually really harmful.
Hundreds of years ago, acclaimed male artists were indeed women but, in order to have success, they had to create a character to represent them. It seems funny now to think about it when feminism has become such a strong part of our culture but, is it really? In my opinion feminism has been trying to be real but it has yet to come through and become something real and not only another stereotype used to criticize a certain group that believe in the silliness of “equal rights”. Alice Marwick has some really strong arguments on her “Donglegate: Why the tech community hates feminists” article to pin point what is feminism nowadays. The Adria Richards incident was pushed out of proportion when she started receiving death threats and other even more menacing and disturbing messages for showing two men who had been “in their right” to make phallic jokes and make women around them very uncomfortable. Before I get a lot of backlash for even siding with her on this, I need to clarify that I am not saying that she was right in publically shaming them, or that they should have indeed have been fired for it, but how can they make those comments and be seeing as victims as she makes her comments and suddenly she cannot even go back to her house due to the amount of very graphic death threats?
In the same way, why did Justine Sacco’s joke had so much backlash and ruined her life and Donald Trump’s campaign speech that perpetuated so many extremely offensive stereotypes of Chinese people, Latin-Americans, the lower class, and others as he relied on giving examples of how privileged he is had only John Stewarts funny sketch on it as repercussions? Why, in 2015, that is still seen as normal? I have a really hard time understanding the double standard that part of our society refuses to admit. Another good example on how women are still not equals, as explained by John Oliver this weekend, is based on the whole “women on the 10 dollar bill” issue. He pointed out something that I forgot, which is that the petition that has been going for months now was that we wanted a woman on the 20 dollar-bill, how did that become the 10 dollar-bill? The man portrayed in the $10 bill is said to have hated paper money and we were still able to place him there. When asked about it, the man in charge of it had no comments on why we are not trying to put a woman on the $20 bill, plus he made sure that we knew that a woman was not taking over the $10 bill, but she is now going to share it with its current owner. It seems like every time we make some kind of progress it is out shadowed by the amount of prejudice and double standard that is hidden behind that fake progress.
Of course that all of this that I go through daily does not compare to what many African Americans need to go through every day due to a lack of knowledge and understanding from a whole generation that has been passed on to their descendants after over 200 years. An example of it is the tragedy that happened in Charleston last week when a 21-year-old white boy decided that the thoughts of a dead almost-country, that never officially existed, were still correct, which meant that African Americans should have never been freed (which means that they should still be counted as 2/3 of a person (slaves) simply for the purpose of voting. And after that, as John Oliver pointed out in this week’s “Last Week Tonight”, the State has not yet recognized the consequences of the flag or has done anything to put down the Confederate flag that lead a young mind to do this terrible thing. The other point in that is that as they found the accused armed in his house, the South Carolina police officers easily escorted him to a police car without even putting handcuffs on him. That is only one week after an African American girl was violently put on the ground for having harmless fun and being at a pool party to which she was actually invited to. When are we going to stop making it a routine to have a crushed, defeated president officially send a note in disgust to those actions as millions still side with the killer?
Whether it is because a person has a different race, whether it is because they have a different gender, a different nationality, a different thought, or a different class, if you are not a part of the most privileged group you will suffer from intolerance and your life will be harder because of that. Opportunities become smaller and smaller with each group that you are a part of that deviates from the most privileged one and we are so used to knowing that and dealing with that, that it is hard to associate it all with injustice and prejudice. It seems to normal to have some things taken away from you simply because you are what you are and you identify as such.
