“Neil Armstrong the First “White” Man on the Moon”
The effects labeling and tracking have on minority groups.
Labeling and tracking happen in schools as well as any social institution. labeling someone according to the stigma tied to their race and tracking a student according to “learning ability” are forms of oppression. Through different forms of negative “Labeling” and “Tracking”, come positive ones as well. Those “positive” forms of labeling are also forms of oppression. This oppression happens from within a minority social group as well as the help of the leading white groups of people. Chandra Mohanty speaks about “feminist solidarity without borders” and seeks that this can somehow be obtained. Different theorists such as Bell Hooks have noted that such a movement can be possible through acts of love. Bell Hooks writes in her journal Love as the practice of freedom that love in necessary in order to be liberated from oppression which is caused though labeling and tracking that we as a society use and applaud.
This labeling and tracking happens whenever an event about a person of color accomplishes something. For example, we say things such as Barack Obama our first black president. We don’t only do this to race but also gender we use phrases like “The first woman to…”. These are all actions that we allow to happen and we are blinded by the power that this labeling has. When we use phrases like this we are taking power from the minority group and ultimately giving it back to the top of the food chain.
Accomplishments should be acknowledges and praised, however using language that suggests labeling someone into a particular group or tracking someone only brings oppression. People should not be singled out for their accomplishments by stating they are the first in their race to accomplish something. It brings a negative connotation to the overall accomplishment of the individual.
Anyone who has accomplished anything should not be praised in a way that makes their accomplishment harder to be credible due to the race or gender of the person. Saying statements like “Maria, a Mexican woman has graduated college at UCLA today…” only bring oppression to the individual. We are subliminally assuming that it is unlikely for a Mexican person to go through college and succeed. We can talk about people who are accomplishing great things without adding these migroagressions.
The way we speak about people and praise them for their accomplishments is all tied down to the way we learn history. We are told in history that America is the best and with that, certain types of “whiteness” are the best. As we grow we learn that the white man is able to accomplish anything through privilege and therefore we are implanted that although we can achieve success it will be “rare” and “unlikely”. If textbooks would refer to the 19 century and speak about the negative impacts that happened in th U.S. and move on by stating there injustice we would not be using these microagression sentences. When we are taught about particular writers, the first thing that is an astonishment is the race of the person. This is an idea that we are implemented since we are very young.
If we can teach through textbooks where there is a criticism and reality of historical events that the United States took part in we would be shaping a new society. A society where we would not have gender binary which make it hard to define feminism and nearly impossible to have “feminism solidarity without borders”. The word feminism itself is part of this tracking and labeling that we allow to happen, and this differentiates from stereotypes because the oppressed group does not take a part of spreading the stereotype. When in labeling and tracking the oppressed group help make that possible by being proud to be “The first _______” in their family or in society as a whole. What we should be saying instead is giving our name that pride of accomplishment.
Its important to note that we do not do this form of labeling to the white body. We and mentally engraved that the white man is prone to success. In history we never refer to Neil Armstrong as the first white man on the moon, or George Washington as our first white President. There success is just bound to happen.
Its not impossible for people of color to succeed, and when we label ourselves as “making it” we are letting ourselves be oppressed by admitting in our statements that our accomplishments were at one point far fetched. We must be proud of things we do and change our vocabulary from “I actually made it” to “I did it”. If we can stop making successful acts rare when they are made by people of color we are liberating a form of oppression. We will be one step closer to having a society where as Martin Luther King Jr. said “will not be judged by the color of [our] skin, but by the content of [our] character”.
