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Oppression is historical. The under-representation of women in government is not simply the result of the last federal election in a given country. Women’s exclusion from government in the United States and Canada well into the 21st century illustrates their long-term overall exclusion as citizens, guaranteeing that they would have no role in deciding how […]

Dolores Huerta (b. 1930) Huerta is a pioneering labor and civil rights leader, and the cofounder (with Cesar Chávez) of the United Farmworkers of America. In 1955 she became involved with a grassroots organization (the Community Service Organization) that was fighting police brutality in the community and pushing for improved public services. It was there

Social Stratification In Chapter 3 we discussed how individuals belong to various social groups. For the purposes of understanding socialization, we described how important it is for individuals to recognize the significance of these social groupings. For the purposes of understanding oppression, we must also understand that these groups are given different value in our

Common shorthand within the discipline is: Prejudice > Discrimination Prejudice + Power = Oppression Oppression involves institutional control, ideological domination, and the imposition of the dominant group’s culture on the minoritized group. No individual member of the dominant group has to do anything specific to oppress a member of the minoritized group; the prejudice and

How do people often respond when their prejudices are pointed out 97 Now interview two people (other than those engaged in the activity with you), asking them to do what you did. What patterns do you notice in the responses? How did an awareness of your prejudices (or preconceived ideas) influence the decisions you made

All Humans Have Prejudice and Discriminate Just as all people have prejudices, learned from socialization, all people discriminate. So, the blind woman in our previous example may also have prejudices against us because we are sighted. Based on her previous experiences with sighted people, she may assume that we are ignorant about people with disabilities

Patterns to Practice Seeing 1. Practice identifying patterns at the group (rather than individual) level. For example, in workplace meetings or other public spaces, practice seeing which groups are included and which are not. 86 2. Practice naming people by their key social groups. For example, “Tina, a white able-bodied cis-woman, went to the store.”

why do so many people feel immune to the forces of socialization? 1. Key careers tend to be organized in ways that are gendered (police and firefighters tend to be men, while teachers and nurses tend to be women). How would the authors explain this pattern? 84 2. According to the authors, why do so

Group Identities As this example shows, race and ethnicity interact in complex ways with language and citizenship. For those new to the study of critical social justice, mastering these complexities is of secondary importance. Of primary importance is the ability to understand these categories as socially constructed and reflective of a particular political and cultural

. Frame of Reference Glasses Diagram In order to develop critical social justice literacy, we must be able to see how our ideas, views, and opinions are not objective and independent, but rather the result of myriad social messages and conditioning forces. The first layer of socialization we might easily identify is our family. While