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Essay on diversity studies
Diversity awareness paper introduction
Case study on intersectionality
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Our book defines intersectionality as the “analysis claiming that systems of race, economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization, which shape African American experiences and, in turn, are shaped by African Americans.” (Collins, 2004, p. 351) African Americans are always facing experiences that involve several of these attributes. Normally, our experiences revolve around race and economic class, but that’s not always the case. My gendered situation will discuss these particular intersections: race, age, and economic class.
As an employee at Staples, you come across many different customers. Some are nice, some are nasty, and some are racist. During the holidays when
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I was working, I was faced with my first racial encounter since being an employee there. Working in the copy center, we have a UPS drop off department where people can drop off pre-paid packages or create a label to ship a package. This part of the copy center is always busy during the holidays because people are trying to ship off Christmas presents to arrive before Christmas. There was one customer waiting in line to make labels for his package, so once I finished with the previous customer, I went to assist him.
The customer was an older Caucasian male. After greeting him the first thing he said was, “Do you know what you’re doing young lady?” I acted as if I didn’t hear him and continued weighing and measuring his packages, while still trying exemplify customer service. Once I finished I asked him for the information needed to process his labels and he started giving me the information in a very fast manner as if he was trying to challenge me. Because we had been processing so many packages that day, the computer had been moving slow throughout the day. After typing in some of the information the customer gave me, I informed the customer that the computer was moving slow at that moment and asked if he would give it a few minutes before continuing. He then has the audacity to say, “Well is it the computer that’s slow, or is it you?” At that moment I was starting to become very frustrated with the customer, but I had to continue doing my job. While I was continuing to make his labels, he whispered to another Caucasian customer, “For someone who needs this job, she sure isn’t acting like it.” After hearing that last comment, I called my supervisor over there, who is an older Caucasian woman and asked her if she could continue assisting this customer and I’ll go assist another customer, she agreed. I noticed once she went to assist him, his entire …show more content…
attitude changed. The computer was still moving slow while she was helping him, she explained that to him again and he said, “My computer is just as slow at home, it happens.” The entire time my supervisor was helping the customer, he didn’t complain. He was cooperative, friendly, and patient the entire time. But, as they were finishing up his packages, he loudly asserted, “Thank you for your assistance, but I think that the young Black girl needs more training.” My supervisor then realized that the customer was clearly racist and asked him to leave, but he had a problem with that. He made a scene and started expressing reasons why he didn’t like “Black” people. After his outburst, he was escorted out the store. I was so hurt and bothered by the man because I wasn’t expecting a customer to act like that. I know racism is still a serious matter in our society, but I just wasn’t expecting that at my place of work. It made me feel belittled and embarrassed to see how my race and age caused a customer to act out in that manner. My supervisor was very disappointed as well and explained to me that she was sorry for the experience that I had encountered. She then told me that, “It’s many people in my race who are still wanting Black and Whites to be separated and that stuff like this is unfortunately going to continue to happen.” I was still in shock that I had the experience, but it really opened my eyes and showed me that this is only the beginning and because of the color of my skin, I will probably face many other issues related to this one. Race is one of the mutually constructing features of social organization that has a significant role in my situation. The color of my skin caused this customer to be disrespectful towards me. This explains why he continued to belittle me and criticized the way I was doing my job as if I wasn’t capable of doing my job correctly. At first, I thought he was just being ignorant, but after I heard his last comment, I realized that my race was the main reason he gave me so much trouble. As for my supervisor, she wasn’t faced with the same trouble as I. While she was assisting him, he held a pleasant conversation with her. She was able to do her job without being questioned or judged. This showed me how the respect differed between my supervisor and I. While she was respected for doing exactly what I was doing, I was disrespected. So this made it clear to me that there was a particular reason the customer disrespected me. Still to this day, in certain situations, Caucasian’s are better respected and put on a higher ranking than African Americans. Age is another feature that was at play in my gendered situation. As soon as I began walking towards the customer, he immediately questioned if I knew what I was doing. He assumed that because I was a younger employee, that I wasn’t going to be efficient at my job. As for my supervisor, she wasn’t questioned at all. Because of her older appearance, the customer believed that he could rely on her more than me to fulfill his job. This showed me that being a younger employee also hindered my interaction with the customer, because he wasn’t willing to allow a younger associate to help him with his needs. The last feature that played a role in my situation was economic class. The customer was trying to imply that I couldn’t go without my job because of my race. African Americans are often observed as having less money than Caucasians because we don’t have the same privileges as they do. Rarely will you see African Americans holding higher positions in the work field and that has a lot to do racism. So I believe that’s why that customer made that comment. He was trying to accentuate that I need this job because it’s probably as far as I’m going to get or how far he wants me to get because of my race. Personally, I believe if the customer wasn’t racist then my age or economic class wouldn’t have mattered. This is how the three mutually constructing features of social organization intersect because with one comes another. Since he was racist, he needed to find other features to intersect with his existing feature. He started off by making it seems as if it was just about my age, and then later intersected economic class along with race. Applying an intersectional lens to the situation allowed me to better understand and analyze my situation. An intersectional lens gives opportunity to understand how mutually constructing features of social organization intersect. My situation allowed to see the intersection between race, age, and economic class. The intersectional lens showed me the reason why this customer acted the way he did towards me. The color of my skin was the main intersection that caused him to be disrespectful towards me. Since I was a certain age, he believed I wasn’t equipped enough to handle him as a customer. Then he makes a comment about my economic class, because he wanted to imply that my job that I have is probably going to be the best job I get because of my race. Intersectionality is significant because it gives insight in the different areas used to discriminate against others causing them to have certain experiences.
My situation involved racism, ageism, and classism. These three intersections came together and shaped my experience and the intersectional lens helped me break down why I was the employee that the customer decided to give a hard time. As a young woman of color, I realize that I’m going to be discriminated against because of the color of my skin, my age, and class. Now after looking at my situation through the intersectional lens, I’ll be better prepared if another situation was to happen like
that.
In many contemporary spaces, intersectionality is taught and consumed as a static concept of merely listing identities carried by one person simultaneously. It’s used more often as a checklist than a place of analysis or resistance. However, the use of intersectionality as just an apolitical tool, rather than a theory born from the knowledge of Black women experiencing a “triple jeopardy” of oppression and seeking liberation by deconstructing the institutions that bind them, is reductionist at best. In “Intersectionality is Not Neutral”May communicates that intersectionality pushes us to question and challenge the relatively mundane or acceptable norms in society that lend themselves to a continuous legacy of systemic inequality.
Wilson, William J. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored an essay by Marita Bonner addresses what it means to be black women in a world of white privilege. Bonner reflects about a time when she was younger, how simple her life was, but as she grows older she is forced to work hard to live a life better than those around her. Ultimately, she is a woman living with the roles that women of all colors have been constrained to. Critics, within the last 20 years, believe that Marita Bonners’ essay primarily focuses on the double consciousness ; while others believe that she is focusing on gender , class , “economic hardships, and discrimination” . I argue that Bonner is writing her essay about the historical context of oppression forcing women into intersectional oppression by explaining the naturality of racial discrimination between black and white, how time and money equate to the American Dream, and lastly how gender discrimination silences women, specifically black women.
In the world of sociology and the studies of human interaction, the term intersectionality has been defined as, “the idea that various biological, social, and cultural categories – including gender, race, class, and ethnicity – interact and contribute towards systematic social inequality” (“Definition of Intersectionality – Sociology”). However, as Dr. White defined the term on the Spring 2014 Final Writing Assignment sheet, these categories that make up one’s identity can “intersect or interact in ways that can either advantage or disadvantage the person’s well-being and development” (White). In regards to the text, David M. Newman’s Identities & Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality, Newman progressively explores the concept of intersectionality throughout the entirety of the text, but he does not ever actually define the term itself. Although an exact, clear-cut definition of the term “intersectionality” has not been officially established, the concept of the term is fairly simple to understand. Every person has different social identities that they carry to their name. Intersectionality is simply an analysis of how those different identities play off of each other and how they affect the person they are describing.
The Author of this book (On our own terms: race, class, and gender in the lives of African American Women) Leith Mullings seeks to explore the modern and historical lives of African American women on the issues of race, class and gender. Mullings does this in a very analytical way using a collection of essays written and collected over a twenty five year period. The author’s systematic format best explains her point of view. The book explores issues such as family, work and health comparing and contrasting between white and black women as well as between men and women of both races.
Often identity is only thought of as a collection of individual characteristics that are independent such as sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, etc. Intersectionality is when these characteristics are transformed by one another and “tend to collapse into one another in the context of everyday life”. Dorothy Allison wrote Two of Three Things I Know for Sure where she explains aspects of her life through chronological stories revealing details and providing the reader with lessons she learned throughout her experiences. This book can be read with an intersectionality lens focusing on the moments or stories where gendered poverty shapes people’s experience of sex and sexuality as well as how gender, sexuality, and class transforms whiteness into a stigmatizing attribute rather than it’s usual power given attribute. Allison’s scene with her Aunt Maudy and the scene with her girlfriend both show intersectionality in different aspects and times of Allison’s life.
An intersectional view of Mock’s (2014) multiple identities and social locations, for instance, reveals the presence of both oppressed and privileged identities: she is a biracial (Hawaiian and Black), trans, able-bodied, woman who grew up in a lower-working class family, although has since achieved a higher socioeconomic status. Many of her identities are marginalized, as they are oppressed by the white-dominant, heteronormative, cisnormative, middle-class patriarchal privileged society that surrounded her throughout her life. Although Mock’s (2014) life provides a plethora of examples of the ways in which her oppressed identities intersect with one another to exacerbate the barriers and marginalization she faced, applying a lens of privilege still holds value, despite the limited examples, because it sheds light on the larger existence of privilege in society and brings awareness to the topic as a
In relation to the Critical Race Theory, the idea of the “gap between law, politics, economics, and sociological reality of racialized lives” (Critical Race Theory slides). The critical race theory gives us a guide to analyze privileges and hardships that comes across different races and gender. For example, analyzing how and why a “black” or “indigenous” woman may experience more hardships versus not only a “white” man, but a “white”
During the semester we have explored multiple case studies that have had some rather cut and dry solutions. Our final case study features the very grey area of workplace cultural discrimination providing a scenario in which there is possible evidence of several counselors who, during lunch break, are singling out clients of a certain minority and speaking in a highly derogatory fashion about them. In this scenario we are part of the supervisory staff and the counselor who brings us this information has been in the field for half a decade and is the same race as one of the main counselors he has concerns about. That counselor has only a brief amount of experience and this is his first position since obtaining his CSC-AD certification. We
The theory of intersectionality posits that black women stand at the intersection of race, gender, and class, which form a matrix of oppression. In other words, black women, along with black men, are systematically oppressed due to their race. Because race and class are inextricably linked, black women experience class discrimination along with black men. However, they are also oppressed because of their gender, and this oppression can come at the hands of both white men and black men in their
Intersectionality is a term used to describe a situation whereby an individual has multiple identities and as result, the person feels that he or she doesn’t belong to one community or another. Because of the many conflicts in an individual’s identities, he or she could be a victim of multiple threats of discrimination (Williams, 2017). The discrimination could be a result of race, gender, age, health and ethnicity among others. To give an example, a black transgender woman could be discriminated in the workplace because of being black and also because she is transgender. From an intersectionality perspective, the woman faces multiple threats of discrimination because of the overlapping identities of gender and race and therefore the transwoman faces a bigger struggle (Barber, 2017). Transwomen of color will most likely encounter prejudices in the form of homophobia, racism or sexism in many dimensions of their life. The perspective of intersectionality is not only applicable to women but it can also be applied to males. For example, a gay Latino man could be discriminated based on race because he is an immigrant into
The intersection of dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender are important in shaping my social location and experiences. By exercising my sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), I will argue how my social location as an Asian American woman with a working class background has worked separately and together to influence how I behave, how others treat and view me, and how I understand the world. The sociological imagination has allowed me to understand my own “biography”, or life experiences by understanding the “history”, or larger social structures in which I grew up in (Mills, 1959). First, I will describe my family’s demographic characteristics in relation to California and the United States to put my analysis into context. I will then talk about how my perceptions of life opportunities have been shaped by the Asian-American model minority myth. Then, I will argue how my working class location has impacted my interactions in institutional settings and my middle/upper class peers. Third, I will discuss how gender inequalities in the workplace and the ideological intersection of my race and gender as an Asian-American woman have shaped my experiences with men. I will use Takaki’s (1999) concepts of model minority myth and American identity, Race; The Power of an Illusion (2003), Espiritu’s (2001) ideological racism, People Like Us: Social Class in America (1999) and Langston’s (2001) definition of class to support my argument.
Many foremen in a workplace will try to belittle workers of lower standard in order to get what they want from them, and over work their employees in order to save money on hiring more staff. Many times it is not only the managers that mistreat the workers but the customers do as well. At the beginning of the short story by John Updike, the young cashier was targeted by a customer when he accidently scanned an item twice, this cause a ruckus from the customer, "I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell…By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort in passing…". (A&P, John Updike) Many cashiers are disrespect on a daily bases and are looked down upon for the job they do. Disrespect directed at this cashier is also seen by his manager, in the sentence paired with the context of the story, "'Did you say something, Sammy?'". (A&P, John Updike) Maltreatment of staff can also be seen in the article by Karen Olsson, Walmart goes out of its way to make the wages of their associates as long as possible by cutting their hours and coercing managers to force employees to work overtime without extra pay. This was told by a former manager at Walmart who was interviewed, "In the Oregon wage-and-hour case, a former personnel manager
While Hartsock acknowledges that her theory focuses less on race and sexuality, the Combahee River Collective’s argument revolves around the importance of acknowledging the intersections that create an individual’s identity; this acts as a mediating category. Since this theory emphasizes the importance of considering racial divisions of labor, the purpose of the standpoint becomes more complex as well as inclusive. When society considers the intersections that interlock with the structures of oppression, we can see that Black feminism is a mediating category that urges society to dismantle the idea that gender politics is solely determinative by gender. The oppression an individual faces for her race and sexuality can determine her “working [and] economic” status (Combahee River Collective, 213). They argue that there are certain consequences and disadvantages that affect an individual’s quality of living based on their race and sexuality, along with gender. Similar to how Hartsock shows the injustices of being a woman in a patriarchal, capitalist society, the Combahee River Collective argues that white feminism is “threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about [their] existence” (Combahee River Collective, 215). The
At this point I had already tried everything in my power and couldn’t get him to listen to a female manager. I had realized that people still discriminate for being a female. I then told him that I was going to get my store manager to speak with him. Many of the other customers looked at me as I walked passed them and knew that the man was wrong. A female customer went to me as I was walking and told me “do not let him get to you, he is wrong for acting the way he is towards you,” I looked at her and give her a small grin to say thank you. As I went to my store manager and explained to him the situation I had going on out in the sales floor, he became angry. He then said to me “how does a customer come and disrespect my manager, sorry that is not allowed in my store.” We look out to speak to the rude customer and once he approaches him; he tells him “my assistant has given you all the information you need