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OK WAIT SO IF POC GET STRICTER SENTENCES IN COURT… AND IF WOC ARE MORE AT RISK OF MISCARRIAGE AND GENERAL MALPRACTICE… AND IF SEX EDUCATION IS WORSE IN INNER CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS… AND IF RACIAL HOUSING DISCRIMINATION IS PRACTICED BY 85% OF REAL ESTATE AGENTS… AND IF SCHOOL DISTRICTS ARE FUNDED VIA PROPERTY TAXES WITHIN EACH DISTRICT… HOLD ON………. WAIT A MINUTE
My sociology professor had a really good metaphor for privilege today. She didn’t talk about race or gender or orientation or class, she talked about being left-handed.
A left-handed person walks into most classrooms and immediately is made aware of their left-handedness - they have to sit in a left-handed seat, which restricts their choices of where to sit. If there are not enough left-handed seats, they will have to sit in a right-handed seat and be continuously aware of their left-handedness. (There are other examples like left-handed scissors or baseball mitts as well.)
Meanwhile, right-handed people have much more choice about where to sit, and almost never have to think about their right-handedness.
Does this mean right-handed people are bad? No.
Does it mean that we should replace all right-handed desks with left-handed desks? No.
But could we maybe use different desk styles that can accommodate everyone and makes it so nobody has limited options or constant awareness that they are different? Yes.
Now think of this as a metaphor. For social class. For race. For ethnicity. For gender. For orientation. For anything else that sets us apart.
WHY DOESN’T THIS HAVE MORE NOTES?
Because I posted it about 90 seconds ago, calm down.
if you lived your life never realizing until now some desks are in fact designed to be right handed then bonus revelation to how privilege works
We’re also more likely to die in industrial accidents because all the machines have been built for right handers. Use that in your metephor as you will.
so my brother was telling me about this human resources certification he attended a while ago. in a panel, the panelist asked a bunch of people in attendance, “who here knows if an applicant for a job is right for it in under 60 seconds?”
hands shot up around the room, people smug about their ability to “weed out the riff-raff” when it came to hiring for their fortune 500.
“you should all be fired and probably in jail,” they said, waiting for the whole room to get uncomfortable, then continued, “because the only things you can really learn about a human being in under 60 seconds are all things that are fueled by prejudices and biases covered by american law. so now, i will teach you how to stop being racist, sexist, judgmental assholes and hire people that will better your company of employ.”
I need this to be force taught at all companies
This is a good example of why study after study after study has shown that discrimination against racialized people looking for work is very real. Oh, and don’t get too smug if you’re not in the USA - similar studies have shown that the same shit happens in Canada, Germany, the UK, Sweden - basically in every country you can think of.
Roane hitting it out of the park, as usual. Also, I hadn’t heard that comment. Boo Meg Rosoff. Booooo.
A reminder that racism, the struggle for civil rights, and urban planning have been intertwined for a long time
For more than a century, African Americans have struggled to end apartheid on buses, trains, and highways. This form of racial discrimination, which clearly violates constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, was codified in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson, 160 U.S. 537 (1896), a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Louisiana’s segregated “white” and “colored” seating on railroad cars, ushering in the infamous doctrine of “separate but equal.” Plessy further served as the legal basis for racial segregation in education until the Court finally overturned it in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
The modern civil rights movement has its roots in transportation. In 1953, roughly half a century after Plessy relegated blacks to the back of the bus, African Americans in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, staged the nation’s first successful bus boycott. Two years later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a Montgomery city bus to a white man. In so doing, she ignited the modern civil rights movement.
Parks would have had a difficult time sitting on the front or back of a Montgomery bus as the new millennium arrived because the city basically dismantled its public bus system, which had mostly served blacks and poor people. The cuts were made at the same time that federal tax dollars boosted the construction of the region’s extensive suburban highways. The changes in Montgomery and its metropolitan region took place amid growing racial geographic segregation and this was reflected in tensions between white and black members of the city council. City officials stated that their actions were fiscally necessary even as Montgomery received large federal transportation subsidies to fund renovation of nontransit improvements.
read more: aba, 2007 (vol.34 no.3).
Blacks riding bicycles during the Montgomery, AL bus boycott, 1955.
It's a very quiet kind of discrimination, class-based more than racial although the two often overlap: those most in need of effective mass transit (not to mention proper urbanism) are those who cannot afford any other means of getting around.
