Monday, June 28, 2004

Creative Ways to reinforce White Supremacy

Just define what subjects have whites in them (or men) as important, and subjects with blacks (or women) in them as unimportant. Like History is important, but Women's History is useless. Or to make it even more final, all of liberal arts is unimportant because now it teaches about unimportant subjects. English now has sections that talk about women's lit,Sociology now talks about the plight of the black man. Psychology even barges in, talking about the differing sizes of structures in gay and straight people, men and women. Yes, I realize that that is more like biology, but it was taught in a psych class.

I don't mean that people just like wake up and say "Hey, to protect my male privilege, I'll complain about how women's studies doesn't cause people to get huge paychecks, so therefore it's worthless". It's sort of a mental process that you don't think about much. Like if I think my supply of little green pieces of paper is threatened, I will become very stressed out. Very rarely does it come into my head that green pieces of paper, or numbers in your bank account, do not have inherent value. It's like that. It's not exactly subconscious as you can think about it, and ask "why do I think something is worth more than something else", but it's more like hidden.

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