Intersectionality And Social Identifiers In Modern Society
In the months leading to the writing of this essay, and after reading a handful of passages from The Contexts Reader I have found that the overlapping of race, gender, class and the disadvantages that stem from these social divisions are much more common that I would have believed. They exist within and among one another in a variety of ways, we see it everyday, we are consumed within these classifications and sometimes identifying these disadvantages can be quite hard as sometimes they are subtle and nuanced. I will be identifying those disadvantages and display how race, class, gender exist amidst each other and how they interact to create intersectionality with the help from the various passages I've read throughout the semester. The sanction of marriage is on the verge of collapse while we redefine our interpretation of intimacy.
More and more people are raising children without the bounds of wedlock, many reasons factor into this common phenomena. Some people believe that marriage is outdated and some want the possibility to leave a relationship keeping in mind that even the strongest of marriages have their cracks. It’s also the idea of individualism that keeps the marriage rates at a steady downfall as people find themselves wanting to be seperate from their intimate partner, unconstrained by yet another traditional institution. Additionally where the relation between race and gender factor in is how we are progressively becoming more unconventional with the rising amount of same sex and interracial partnerships due to what the authors of The Changing Landscape of Love and Marriage says “young people today are less constrained by the watchful eyes and wishes of their parents”. Women raising and supporting her child by herself was taboo at one time, equally as much as being married or intimate with a black man.
Things have changed, our newly progressive way of looking at traditional values like marriage and same sex/race partnerships has transformed our social existence into a more sustainable way to preserve our love for one another. Pure relationships among same race couples and same sex couples are about as outdated as the sanction of marriage, while it is still valued by some, even most, the likelihood for sustainability is very low in this day and age. The man that is taught from a young age to be tough, to never cry or show emotion, to be strong and aggressive is the man who was handed sports at a young age to be taught how to act like a man. There are so many expectations on men from an early age to succeed as men, a symbol of that manhood is sports, a “healthy” way to guide a young man into the position a man olds in society and the qualities that are valued in men like being tough, strong and lacking of emotion.
Sports is equally as much a gender status as a class status, as said in The Sanctity of Sunday Football: Why Men Love Sports, “The former tended to transfer what they learned in sports about being men to pursuing success in other spheres, such as education and career. Men from lower status backgrounds saw sports as their only hope for success as a man – an accomplishment that the higher status men looked down upon as a narrow, atavistic type of masculinity”. For some men, sports is their way out, an outlet for emotion as well as a symbol of success. In a song called “Palmdale” by Afroman, he sings about his hometown Palmdale, a heavily black concentrated region where football was that outlet for all the boys he grew up with, he implies that if he can't make it in a white man's world he can make it to the NFL, which to him was making it. Race and class are heavily concentrated in the issue of what it means to be a man. Everyone wants to know who can say the N-word, rappers, those rappers’ fans, white kids who live in the hood, should anyone get to say it? Doesn’t the answer lie within grade school rules, if everyone can't say it, no one should say it? This long debated issue has been the topic of discussion for decades, rightfully so as it’s a fairly complex conversation to have. The word itself has been through the ringer in terms of its usage and historical background, once being a derogatory term for slaves it is used all the way till this day with a negative connotation, however in the 70’s it was re-coined as a term of endearment to a sister or a brother with that nice little soft a on the end of it. Now this is the way it is majorly used today, in rap songs and amongst black communities.
I believe that it is as simple as white people should just not let that come out of their mouth, it is incredible in the first place that the word, with such historical weight to it was reclaimed and transformed into a positive term amongst themselves. White people had no part in that and therefore should not be able to say it, there is simply no reason to. Now, people argue that it’s more of a class thing than a race thing, white kids who grow up in the hood who are surrounded by a black crowd with the word being thrown as effortlessly as each other's names. Later in life, these kids will be exposed to a world where it's just not socially acceptable for a white person to utter those words yet they grew up throwing it around with their friends. There is also the weird middle ground for people of color that are not black, from Hip Hop Culture and America’s Taboo word “The rules are less concrete for non-black ethnic minorities, who fall somewhere between blacks and whites in hip hop’s racial stratification”.
Race and class are most certainly interconnected in this issue, it seems as though to America, they both determining factors to who gets to say the heavy word. Race and class is also introduced in Amidst Garbage and Poison: an essay on polluted peoples and places that gives a perfect example to the vicious cycle of defining class based off race, to leave these people to die in such filth because they've known it their entire lives, for many class is a cage or a hole that is hard to climb out of, especially if you belong to a race that it subject to the labels and stereotypes provided by white people. Why don't we help? Why do we turn away and go back to our homes, our families and the simple pleasures that we take for granted. Flammable shantytown is home to 679 households, reported in 2000 “still used as an open-air waste disposal site by subcontractors who illegally dump garbage in the area”. Racial minorities have been subject to our cultural, social waste that has bound them to stereotypes we hold to generalize populations of people, we now treat them as physical waste lands, with no consideration for the families that live there, the hardships and physical altercations they must deal with on a daily basis. It is a never ending cycle that must be exterminated, these are people that must be treated with the respect we give to our neighbor. According to Race as Class, race and class are practically interchangeable, “When arranged hierarchy, they resemble the country’s class-and-status hierarchy”.
Class and Race have been found to have a remarkable correlation, which leads to the conclusion that the darker the skin tone the lower you stand with class. Asians seem to be the standing acception as their median household income is much more than any other minority as well as white people making them the “model minority”. What will squash this epidemic is the continuation of interracial marriages which is actually quite dependent on education, “People with a higher educational attainment are more likely to intermarry. This affects geographic patterns to – areas with higher educational attainment are more likely to have more interracial couples living there”. Which is very interesting considering interracial relationships must develop from an academic atmosphere like college that strive for racial diversity, a college education entails a certain amount for success once graduated, which displays how diversity in colleges is very important in the changing of the race class paradigm. It is no secret that there is a lack of equality among women and men in the workplace, from what I gathered while reading From Summer Camps to Glass Ceilings: The Power of Experiments it's believed that in a group setting people that are thought of to have the best ideas, contribute the most gain the most status within the group, however, these people wind up always being the men of the group characterized by their loud voices and powerful stern demeanor. According to a Pew Research survey, “A plurality of women (48%) say they work in places where there are more women than men, while 18% say there are more men than women”. This is taken from a woman's perspective so perhaps there's room to infer that women are seeking out jobs that are primarily female dominated. Generally the men say the opposite with working in a male dominated business or that the gender gap is fairly closed, just what you'd expect to hear. Gender and class have been closely related for centuries with women following in mens shadows working twice as hard for the same pay off, and not even the same pay off with a twenty cent difference in pay, can you guess who’s getting paid more?
The Business Insider says that “Today, on average, a woman earns 80. 5 cents for every dollar a man earns, and women's median annual earnings are $10, 086 less than men's, according to data from U. S. Census Bureau”. Hows that for gender + class relations? Of course it’s gotten better over time, in the past 50 years alone we've made incredible progress in women's rights and appreciation but we have a lot more work to do before a woman is getting paid the same amount as a man for doing the same if not a better job.
In conclusion, these social identifiers, labels if you will do not just exist periodically, these are all markers that interfere within and around each other, we know the disadvantages of each of them and we see how they conflict with each other. We must accept that they do all exist here and now and will not and cannot exist without each other, feminists while they fight for women's equality must fight against race inequality, we must break down our barriers that keep us within these social boxes, we must fight for each other and with each other to better our society.
