There are many topics I could choose from as my first post on this particular blog. However, there is one that I feel reflects my passion and drive to write in the first place. I am a champion of equal rights for all class, gender, and race of people. We are all raised with a certain frame of mind towards those classifications. I was raised in a very white, protestant, conservative town in the Midwest. And growing up I was definitely uncomfortable around poor, black, or “different” people than what was mainstream. I didn’t understand the world other than my small middle-class place in it. I had opportunities that many do not have. And I say that even as I grew up with friends who had more money than even I did. My uncomfortableness stemmed from fear. I had a lack of understanding and no real exposure to people who fall into those categories. But as I grew older and went to college, I knew inside myself that everybody deserves a chance to succeed and be given the same opportunities towards the life they want to create for themselves. The only way this will happen is if we change the fabric of our society. We must draw out the underlying, hidden bias that runs like a virus through our communities. No, it is not blatant in most cases. It is subtle, but even more damaging because it goes undetected by those it does not directly affect. We need to expose it and make people aware of it. We must not accept the status quo.

I took a graduate level class where we studied Jacques Derrida, a philosopher and pop culture theorist. He was a post-structuralist who invented the word différence, which means both to defer and to differ, drawing from the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure. Différence suggests that only through difference or comparison can we give something meaning. You are not a dog or cat; therefore, you are a human. We call ourselves humans because of what we are not. This is also known as the binary opposition. I am not male; therefore, I am female. Everything is constructed in twos. This is a Western-developed way of thinking about life. One is described as good or evil, extraverted or introverted, white or minority. The way we are taught to think leaves very little room for the intricacies, the grey area, the white spaces, that define each one of us individually. Yes, I am technically white. However, I am not defined by my whiteness other than what society projects onto me for being white. I am unique. I am me. No better or worse than anybody else. By simplifying the definition of who we are, we lose all the layers of complexity that truly define who we are as individuals, not a collective. This is not to say that we shouldn’t celebrate our heritage or our ethnicities. However, we should not be limited by them.

Speaking from my own experiences, my own personal issue related to inequality is being a woman in a male-dominated world. I am proud to say that I am a feminist because I define feminism as promoting equality among all classifications of humanity. It doesn’t really have to do only with women’s rights; it is more about human rights. We simply have a specific area of focus, the rights of women. Patriarchy is a man-made institution. Derrida speaks of the binary opposition as always being a relation of power. Traditionally, as we use that concept to define the world and give it meaning, one always has more power: self vs. other, man vs. woman, white vs. black, divine vs. human, author vs. reader. You get the idea. One always ends up with more power than the other when they are put right up against each other. Therefore, patriarchy has found its way into our collective consciousness through a history of demeaning one gender in order to raise up the other. I can’t stress enough that one is not inherently better than the other, but society has put more weight, more meaning, onto one over the other. That juxtaposition of power is crucial to understand in order to see how the world works and how it must be changed. Karl Marx talked about the base and the superstructure of our culture. He wrote primarily of economics, as they drive (or are driven by) popular culture, and how the economic base that is set determines everything we think about ourselves. The superstructure refers to the institutions that arise and the social consciousness that these institutions produce. The superstructure is, ultimately, determined by the base. The dialectical relationship of the base and the superstructure define our culture and how we think about different issues.

What does all this mean? Power is at the heart of inequality. Who has the power? What would happen if they were to lose that power? That constant struggle for power, that fear of losing it, drives the inequalities we witness every day in each of our communities. This is why I feel so strongly that it is our responsibility as conscious citizens of this country to help those who are less fortunate, to give them a boost into another realm of possibility. I don’t see it as an entitlement; I see it as our responsibility to give to those who are less fortunate and who cannot break out of the binary thinking of the societies that oppress them. Individualism simply does not work if we want to create a society truly based on collaboration, which is the only way to make progress.

I don’t claim to know nor can I say I have a complete handle on much that I’ve read about how popular thinking has developed, but I am learning. I do know that our ideas about right versus wrong are just human constructs that have developed to try to make sense of the world and give it more meaning. A perfect example of this is saying that homosexuality is a sin. We only say that it is a sin because we have grown up in a world that defined gender as either a man or a woman. That’s a binary that allows us to make sense of the differences between us, to classify us. But what if there are more than two types of gender? What if there are more than two types of people to love? I have a vagina, not a penis. According to how we were raised and how gender was defined, I am a woman based on that classification. However, there are times when I feel the drive of competition rather than being more “feminine.” Does that make me more male? Of course not. It just makes me who I am. I have feminine and masculine qualities. I happen to be attracted to men. That is just who I am. This world is certainly complex, and many things don’t make sense. To me, the purpose of our journey here on Earth is to try to understand and make sense of this world, and to learn how to be more loving and accepting of all human beings despite our fears. We should be striving to understand our fellow human beings and learning how to live together in peace and love. Power will always be an issue. That is the challenge that we face…overcoming that power structure and striving for equality and, ultimately, for love of all people no matter what their class, race, or gender.

Works Referenced:

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 5^th Ed. Harlow: Longman-Pearson, 2009. Print.