Privilege, Oppression, and Difference

Privilege, Oppression, and Difference
1. An article about privilege. By privilege I mean the dominate group in society gets this special treatment that they are not even aware of. For example the article talks about people who have a disability being considered not normal, because they do not think the same way people with out a disability think. In this instance the Dominate group (people without disabilities) has the power to define what is considered normal. The article also gives examples of one race being dominated over another race, or males being dominate over women.

2. This article says that one group of people are dominate over another group of people. However this did not happen over night. “It took generation and a vast amount of coercion, before this becomes a white country.” In other words the article says that what we see as real is just made up, and we take it to mean something. Take race for example, the way you look does not change you, but if you look differently from someone else, we autumnally pass judgments onto that person, wither those judgments are true or not.

3. If most of what we experience as real, is there a way not to teach our children about who we perceive to be the dominate group, or is it in our nature to view each other as being dominant or inferior? Children are always asking questions and wanting to know why something is the way it is. So we have to explain to them why someone is sitting in a wheel chair and why someone is not. We have this unstoppable reaction to ask why something is the way it is and we don’t stop asking until we know. Most things are learned but teaching children about privilege and being the domoite group is something that is ingrained in all of us.

4. As I was reading this article I did not feel I was affected by what they were saying about privilege. However when I got to the section where they talk about people with disabilities being labeled different. I suddenly realized that this article did speak to me. I am a person who has a learning disability. I do not tell a lot of people about this because I have found that they start to look at me differently, esp. when they are a friend of mine who realizes that I have a hard time comprening something that I read. They are not sure how to act around me and what is ok to say or ask me. But later on they find out that they d not need to ask a certain way, I just want them to be their self’s, and they can ask me what ever they want. As I was reading this part of the article I noticed that they person who wrote this might not of known what first person language is, they kept saying the disabled person, which made me a litter upset because the disability does not define a person. The person is in fact a person first and the disability comes second. Meaning the person with a disability. This makes me a little uncomfortable when people are referred as the disabled person, because your disability does not make you who you are, you are John with a learning disability, Person first, Disability second.