Changes in the System
Farmer defines agency as the “capabilities of each person.” Throughout my life, I have always considered myself to be intelligent, allowing me to get good grades in school, and a risk taker, which helped me make the best of opportunities given to me. As a high school student, this has helped me in various ways. For one, because I like to take risks, I never sell myself short. I enjoy things that put me out of my comfort zone and I believe that this gives me an advantage over others in life who do not. Whether it is taking on a difficult class or writing about something personal in an English class, I enjoy challenges. This has helped me adapt to certain struggles I had in school and endure creating the opportunity to get accepted into the university that I go to now.
Stevenson writes: “The children of Sharecroppers in Southern Alabama were introduced to ‘plowin’, plantin’, and pickin’’ as soon as they were old enough to be useful in the field.” As African Americans did fieldwork while attending school, they are already at a disadvantage in comparison to others because of the hard, physical labor forced onto them at an early age. This may make them physically and mentally tired as they try to attend school and learn the already difficult curriculum.
What is insidious is that instead of looking at logical reasons or factors as to why problems are occurring within a certain race, we are blaming the race or culture as a whole when it very well could be other factors that could explain it. For example, in the event of Chouchou, others might say that torture was just a result of their culture but no matter how you look at it, inside of the culture and outside of the culture, torture was inhumane and evil. A focus on cultural specificity perpetuates a discourse of the “other” because it creates differences between races based on culture and blames it on that culture or race. Preventable problems arise and instead of thinking of them logically, we just use race or culture to blame the problems on not thinking it is our place to help it. For example, with Acephie, AIDS could have been prevented however, because the system around her pressured her into having sexual relations with the man, she died a horrible death and passed it along to her children.
The social structures that perpetuate systems of inequality and impact people at my sight are the fact that they are being compared to students who have English as a first language on all academic levels and their low income environments can create stress for the students in and out of the classroom.
