Study up October 28, 2007
Here is a powerpoint presentation that I did for a class. It is in regards to studying whiteness at World Market.
another part of me October 24, 2007
The readings and assignment for this week made me think about my life, my struggles, where I come from, who I claim to be, who I try to be, and who I actually am. My life started out in a town of about 20,000 people in the northeast corner of South Dakota. My family was well known in my town (my grandpa was the mayor for twelve years). Everyone seemed to know our family and the issues within our family. Watertown from the outside didn’t look as if it had much diversity but the town hid its diversity, as if we were ashamed of it. The African American population was limited, somewhere around five people all together. Watertown had/has a large population of Mexican immigrants that work at the turkey processing plant, which my extended family owns. I don’t know when I realized the injustice that surrounded me but I wasn’t blind to it. For example, I knew that at the turkey plant white men worked in the air conditioned offices while minority women and men worked the “kill line”. Also, I can remember when the plant brought in “workers” from South Africa. When people heard the news, phone calls started to flood the radio. I was sitting in my grandma’s sewing room listening with her to question/comments that blew me away, “We don’t want them here. Why are they bringing them to Watertown?” and one person was so bold to asked what most people were thinking, “Are they black?” and to that the response was, “No they are white South Africans.”. Shortly afterwards it wasn’t a big deal any longer.
I personally claim to be a woman, a white woman, a white woman who struggles with being white and all that embodies. I am aware of my whiteness, my “privilege” I have because of my color; the ease in which I go about my life, all because of the color of my skin. I despise it. I don’t like it. I don’t despise myself as much as I despise the social constructions that surround whiteness. So I try to be a white woman aware of what that means, and I try to be white woman who speaks out about injustices that I see in my own life and of lives around me. I try with my best ability to not be silent. So, I listen closely to the words that Audre Lorde spoke about, how silence can have a dying effect on oneself and on the world.
parts of me October 23, 2007
Religion has played a major role in my life. I chose to go to church, to a fundamental church, during my high school years. We learned how to be a “good Christian”. I learned the notion of “them and us” very quickly. I seemed to constantly judge and put myself in power over people. It was learned, I was taught; I was the subject.
I took two years after high school and joined a ministry organization. I played in a band and traveled the United States and East Africa; building relationships in the name of Christ. It was during this time that I began to question and re-questioned all that which I had been subject to. I met people from different cultures, ethnicities, and religions. We talked, I listened and I learned. It was during that time that I learned what it truly meant to have and to know what faith, hope, love, grace and peace is.
To this day I police myself, what I say and how I act when it comes to religion, to Christianity. When I first meet people I don’t tell them that I traveled in a “ministry band”, I just say a band. Or when people ask if I am religious I am careful with my answer. I am not ashamed of my past or even who I am but I don’t want people to assume who I am and what I stand for. More and more I find myself doing this all the time at the U of M, especially within my major, Gender Women Sexuality Studies. I have two voices constantly policing all that I hear or read. It is an odd but beautiful struggle between two worlds. This struggle has lead to a life of balance, to not live in a world of extremes, but to live in a world of understanding. It is the ability to not think that “your way is the highway” or “I am right and you are wrong”. I want to hear everyone’s story and try to understand and to learn. I have my beliefs and things that I stand for but I want to always have the option to be open to other beliefs and ideas.
–katie
Journey of Questions October 18, 2007
Robin D.G. Kelley said, “…racism is not ignorance. Racism is knowledge. Racism in some ways is a very complicated system of knowledge, where science, religion, philosophy, are used to justify inequality and hierarchy. And that is why you can’t think of racism as simply ‘not knowing.’”
This last statement allows great insight to racism. People learn racism. I can see it in my own life. In my high school history class we never talked about Native Americans being removed systematically from their land. We mentioned Native Americans and the pilgrims and how they learned from one another but not about what really happened. My teacher never mentioned the Jim Crow laws, the lynching in the early 1900’s- 1960’s, eugenics, blackface and so on. If we had talked about any of these things, minds would have opened in our classes. We would have been studying ‘whiteness’ and all it embodies. We would have been starting to counteract racism. It wasn’t until my first year in college did I ever study about the Jim Crow, lynching, eugenics and blackface. Reading and talking about these issues caused me to confront my own ‘whiteness’.
In my first LR I talked about my struggle with being “white”. I am not colorblind on the contraire I see in full color. I am not a saint, I don’t have everything figured out, I am on a journey; the journey isn’t full of answers it just leads to more questions.
Katie
**Take a look at the links, they are further
