Assignment 3B

Chris Maltbie

4.21.2008

Women Art and Culture

Project 3

Before taking WMST250: Women, Art, and Culture, I was very much oblivious to many things that were going on around me, every day. As was discussed in Project’s 1 and 2, I never really took the time to truly consider how much women have been oppressed, and at the same time, just how much of their work has been out there to be seen. Project 3, however, has asked me to do something very different. Instead of just taking notice of oppression and feminist movements, it requires that I analyze my own life, and confront how I have been oppressed and how the establishments that remove me from oppression, hold down others.

When I first read the topic of this assignment, I was quite terrified. After all, not only could I hardly think of how I was ever oppressed, but it was hard for me to quantify the systems of power that encircle all of us. More than anything, I believe this view is the product of where and how I was raised.

I grew up almost entirely in an upper-middle class suburb of Philadelphia and then in a middle-class shore town at the Jersey shore. Although neither of these areas was extremely diverse, they were certainly not racially ignorant. In the shore town I grew up in especially, there was a large and growing Latino population, many of whom I went to school with. Interacting with people of other races and social classes, however, never struck me as odd, which I primarily attribute to my parents.

My mother, my father, and my step-dad all had extremely diverse upbringings. When my mom was in high school, she moved to Salem County in NJ and attended a very dangerous school in which she was always in the minority. My father grew up in a fairly diverse area in Burlington County, New Jersey, and my step-dad was raised in the diverse neighborhoods of New Brunswick, NJ. Additionally, my mom attended Lehigh University, a university that is in a heavily Latino-American community in Pennsylvania. Due to where my various parents were raised, and their abundance of friends from other social, economic, and racial groups, I was never given a sense of parity between one person or another. My dad always reminded us to be thankful for our good fortune, and was true to his word, by giving back to the community by volunteering on the emergency squad for over 20 years, and because of this, I was always extremely thankful. Because of this, I never felt entitled to what I had; instead, I felt that I was very lucky, but that nothing else separated me from less privileged friends.

Furthermore, I grew up with, and was always extremely close to, my mother. I could easily write a small novel on all the things she has taught me, but for the purpose of this assignment, I will restrict myself to discussing her status as a woman, and what it taught me. My mom is without a doubt my greatest inspiration for a multitude of reasons. Not only did she beat breast cancer, despite being told she had 3 months to live, but she was truly a revolutionary woman in a time when women were still looked mostly down upon. After graduating high school, and without enough money to pay for college, my mother became one of an extremely small number of women to join the US Army. Even within the Army, she was quickly promoted, and rose as high as a platoon sergeant and general’s aid, gaining of respect of all of her male subordinates and superiors. She even went on to be one of the first women to complete airborne school, much to the chagrin of one of the sexist officers at the school. After leaving the military, she was able to go to a prestigious engineering school to earn her degree, before starting our family. Even after leaving the workforce for nearly 20 years, in her late-40’s my mom got a job at Boeing and was rapidly promoted to the highest position possible without finishing another Master’s degree, which she is now working on at Penn. Since my mom has been so successful and driven in overcoming adversity her entire life, I grew up viewing women exactly as I would men, and possibly even a little better than I would view men, because of all the things my mother had shown in her life.

It was in this way that I arrived at college. Up until I arrived at the University, discrimination had remained a mystery to me. I was used to everybody accepting everybody without question, seemingly without even observing difference in race and class. It was hard for me to imagine anyone disrespecting or holding women back. After growing up with such an inspiring mother, how could anyone possibly look down on women? Suddenly I was at school, where everybody seemed to notice every difference. Although it was not always in a discriminatory way, people seemed a lot more eager to label themselves and others, and there was a great degree of exclusivity amongst the groups. Coming from an area where discriminating was not only lacking, but the distinction was as well, the views at the university were rather shocking to me. It was not until this very assignment that I really started to assess the situation.

In many ways, I feel that my view is an idealized view. A world in which everyone can be unique, but a negative distinction is never necessary, seems to be nearly utopian. Cultures and expression would not be suppressed, but neither would interaction. At the same time, this assignment shed some light on why this is so hard to achieve. On the one hand, it is a fairly paradoxical society we live in: In order to be so tolerant and indiscriminant, you often need to experience diversity, or be taught by someone who has. This creates a system in which diversity must be very visible to make progress. Perhaps more practical at the present, the other key reason that this type of view is difficult is that not everyone is privileged enough to be able to step back and disregard diversity.

As I have stated, I have been very fortunate to grown up as I have. As a member of nearly every unmarked category, there were very few times that I was discriminated against as I grew up. The more I thought about this assignment, the more it occurred to me that my “position of power” was precisely what was enabling me to mold an ideal outlook on diversity. I hold only minor experience in being discriminated against and therefore cannot fully understand what it is like to be put down. When I consider one of the times when I have been stereotyped and discriminated against, it suddenly becomes much clearer why the majority of the world does not see things the way that I traditionally had.

When I was 17, I went to a local beach town with my girlfriend, my friend, and his girlfriend. After walking around for a while and playing some mini-golf, we got in the car to head back home. I was in a slight rush because my girlfriend had a rapidly approaching curfew, and although her dad was quite fond of me, I didn’t feel like pushing it. Still, despite my rush, I was only traveling about 5 miles over the speed limit, which is hardly abnormal; in fact, 5 miles an hour is usually the minimum speed people travel above the speed limit. Nevertheless, under 5 minutes later I was pulled over. Now, I had never personally been pulled over before, but it is my understanding, based on the accounts of others, that it is standard for a single police officer to pull over a car, especially in a crime-free, upper-class beach town; however, apparently this was not the case for me. Whether it was the fact that I had 4 people in the car or that I was clearly a young-adult, I will never know, but for whatever reason, I was pulled over by 2 police officers, who apparently called for backup. When the first officer approached my vehicle, he asked for my license and registration and then returned to his car. I still don’t completely understand how this could have made him more suspicious, because I had never been pulled over or even remotely been in trouble with the law before. Regardless, the officer returned almost immediately and started questioning me about why I was in the town and about things in my car, which he had taken the liberty of searching through the windows. Shortly thereafter, I was asked to get out of my vehicle and I was berated by questions from the 3 officers. Finally, I was chastised for having my hands in my pockets, which prompted at least one officer to move his hand to his gun, and then told to get back in my car. Despite my clean record and minor offense, I was given a $200 ticket and a rather unpleasant experience.

This incident, which I know would probably be of the smallest significance to many people, was a rather short and isolated, yet still shocking, experience of discrimination. Regardless of the reasons the police had had of suspecting me of some major offense, the memory of the incident reminds me of how it feels to be put down. When I consider this event, I realized how hard it would be to see everyone as equal if there were constant reminders of how some people hold all of the power. Who am I to speak out and resist the established power of the police? Why would I ever both consider us all as equal if they didn’t?

This event showed me how power will always cause rifts and separation of classes. Perhaps now it is best to transition to the conundrum that is power. Although I have already made clear that I have never felt any more powerful than other people, this is most likely due to my position of power. Since I don’t feel the strain of being at the bottom of structures of power (I personally feel that I am probably right in the middle of the overall power structures) it is easy for me to simply not acknowledge that they exist. At the same time, it seems that people at the top of a position of power feel equally uncomfortable as those at the bottom. Although this presumption comes from many places, the most easily supportable is the testimony of family friends who are police officers.

Much in the way that dictators are always said to fear those that they suppress, or in the way that a dominant sports team is always scared of being beaten by the underdog, it seems that people with power (such as police officers) are often fearful themselves. While I’m sure some police officers are bad people, the vast majority, and all that I know personally, are very normal, personable, and nice people. Why then do all of my friends who have encountered them fear and resent them? It is my opinion that positions of power are very much like a see-saw: The people at the ends constantly find themselves flipped and at the bottom, while someone sitting at the fulcrum would never be at the top of bottom, but would remain in the same location. I once asked a police officer who was friends with the family why police were always such jerks when the pulled people over. He was not at all surprised or annoyed by the question, but told me honestly that police never consider themselves in control of a situation; when a police officer approaches a car, he doesn’t know if the driver will be a friendly citizen or a gun-wielding maniac, and unfortunately, this means that the officer must prepare for the latter scenario, always at the expense of the driver. This explanation really struck home, because it got me thinking about all positions of power. In many situations, neither side feels that they hold the power, but perspective always makes them feel as if they are at the disadvantage.

The realizations that I just discussed have helped me to understand where I am placed in “positions of power”. The relative lack of outside pressure, I feel is a result of being directly in the middle of most power structures. While I am white and male, I do not have common white/male views of many things, both because of where I grew up and because of my parents as I have discussed. Although I am upper-middle class, my family has not always been, and we are far from being extremely rich. Although I am heterosexual, I have homosexual friends and see nothing wrong with it. Furthermore, I am able-bodied, but know, and as a premed student hope to help, many disable and ill people. I am a US citizen, but have many immigrant friends, both with and without citizenship. I am Christian, but not protestant or any other major Christian religion; I am instead Quaker, a religion with a very small following around the world. In these ways, I have very diverse views, while not appearing to be very diverse. In many ways, now that I am at a diverse university, I feel that structures of power are constantly at play all around me between social groups, while I sit in the middle, mostly accepted by all groups. This type of experience has allowed me to constantly evaluate and learn from my surroundings, which I am extremely thankful for. Yet I am aware that it is the very structures that allow me to be so observant that suppress others. If being white was not considered unmarked, for example, then I would possibly not be in any position to observe things as I do. As the old idiom goes, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and this seems to be the case with “positions of power”. While few people are able to feel truly free of these positions, someone is always put at an advantage while someone else is put at a disadvantage because of it.

In conclusion, I have come to realize that positions of power are ever-present, no matter how much or how little we feel them on an individual level. It seems to me as if everyone, at some point, will feel the strain of being power-deficient. I personally feel that in many, although not all, situations, this feeling is mutual; that is, bother sides feel at a disadvantage. In the remaining cases, stereotypes and poor education on diversity are likely to blame. Although there are no easy ways to bypass a system that constantly puts the majority of parties at odds with each other, perhaps those lucky enough to observe and ponder may be able to grow in number, until finally everyone is in such a position. In this way, one day we will hopefully live without positions of power and suppression and will rather be able to see each other for what we all are: people.