So some of my blog posts will be about what I am learning in school. I am taking my last two humanities...joy. To add to the excitement there aren't many choices except for foreign languages, histories, english, religions, and women and gender studies. Therefore my last two humanities were a religion class and women and gender studies. My women and gender studies class doesn't leave much to the imagination in the title, we are talking about women and gender on a daily basis. However, we are digging deeper than just talking about women and gender as a whole, we are learning about all of the different possibilities of gender and learning a lot about feminism, which also comes in many forms. Today though, we talked about privilege. How often do you think about privilege? What kind of privileges do you have and what advantages and disadvantages come from them? When I was reading the paper assigned to us I had no idea how many different kind of privileges there are, the paper listed class, gender, religious, and many more. Some of us don't realize as young Americans that on a day to day basis, regardless of the negatives things going on in the country, that we are simply privileged to live in America. Unlike other cultures we can wear what we want, say what we want, eat and pray when we want, and do many other daily tasks that are simply not allowed in other parts of this world.
Most privileges, in my opinion, we are born into. Being white, my family being financially stable, me having access to higher education, being a Christian, were all things listed on that paper that I had no control over when I came into this world. Therefore, I am looked at as having many privileges that were handed to me at birth. Is that my fault though? And really why is there someone to blame for this? Why are there "norms" as to which someone is considered privileged if they meet those "normal" standards? Who developed these "norms" and how have they stayed so true for so many years? Why is it 2015 and not everyone 100% privielged to live in this FREE country?
Class privilege is something that I was born into but just because my parents have money now doesn't meant that they always did. My parents worked extremely hard to get where they are today and had to make a lot of sacrifices in order to give us, my siblings and myself, the best life they imagined for us. I plan on doing the same for my children, living for them before living for myself. Why does everything revolve around money though? Why does there always have to be a dollar sign to everything? Shouldn't it be more important that someone worked really hard to get where they are rather than their net worth?
Race privilege is also something I was born into but is something that I think is completely unfair! Why does it matter what color my skin is as to what privileges I get as a human being? I mean it is 2015 and this stuff is still going on. It goes back again to the fact that it should be about how hard someone works to determine what they deserve in life.
Gender privilege is something that kind of pisses me off. That if you are a male you will get more privileges than a woman and you will also get PAID MORE for doing the SAME job! I could write a whole separate post about how much that infuriates me.
Able-bodied privilege simply means that people who are able to walk for example have more privileges than physically disabled people. I believe that all places should be accessible for EVERY person no matter if abled or disabled.
Those are just some of the privileges we talked about in class today and were listed on the reading assignment, of course there are many more. I simply think that everyone should be equally privileged based on how hard they work towards what they are trying to achieve in life.
Bottom line: If a man and woman are trying to get the same job, the employer should be able to hire one person not even knowing their name, what they look like, where they are from, who they know, and so on. Their qualifications should be all that matters.
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