General Discussion

Last edited Sun Mar 2, 2014, 12:18 PM - Edit history (1)

There is nothing wrong with the world reminding you that you are female since you are. It is when the world does not treat you as a human being who is female or discriminates against you for that or any other reason that is the problem.

Further, you phrase your comment correctly. You phrase it as "about themselves as human beings". I have no problems with people talking about themselves. When racism and sexism is brought up by a person who is recounting his own personal problems with it, I have no real problem. When I hear it sometimes I agree with the person that his or her subjective experience is actually happening and sometimes I don't and I think mostly the problems we have with racism and sexism are lessening and will disappear with the younger generation. Where I believe racism is most problematic is in the criminal justice system. However, if a person talks about their own experience and I internally believe they are wrongly reading a situation there is no harm and no foul because they are talking about themselves.

As I said in my earlier post, people should have no "privilege" to objectify any other individual which is inherent in terming the other person only as a member of a group all things being equal and not seeing them as individuals. This is "objectification". The only real group is humanity and within that group, no two individuals are ever equal. They/we are all faced with different challenges some lesser and some greater and some are even born with silver spoons and for the most part we face similar issues in this American culture unless we are one of the 1%.

In another post, I gave an example of another grouping that is possible if you are talking privilege. Studies show that tall people do much better in American society than short people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination. If you told a tall PoC, that he was privileged because "all things being equal" his group does better in society, I think you might find that he would not agree that privilege defines his situation or that he should admit that it has helped him in life because he probably internally would not identify with that group. If he was in a bad way in society I think he might even be offended if anyone tried to obtain an admission that he was privileged because of his height and ignored his actual situation. However, height is equally as valid as race if you want to just use a statistical analysis of life's problems and seek only an admission that you have a characteristic that statistically does better than other people without that characteristic.

Personally, I am shorter than average height. It is a characteristic that I had no choice in. However, the statistics about how height affects your way in society would not lead me to discuss it as a privilege that other people might posess. In fact, I do not think it has really affected my life so the statistics about this have no bearing whatsoever in my life. I really used height as an example of using statistics to group people and find fault with people who do not accept such grouping.