September 4, 2016 - 16:53
In this day and age, people have no other choice but to come together. People all around the world come together in order to accomplish a shared need or want. Despite race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, we as people have so much power. With this power we can accomplish anything we want to, as long as we come together. Recently gay marriage was finally legalized after years of protesting and fighting for the right to love. If people hadn’t set aside what they believed in and who they loved in order to come together and help a group of oppressed people, then gay marriage would of not have been legalized in America. Another movement that is still ongoing and has slowly been improving is the Black Lives Matter Movement. In my opinion this country was built on racism therefore, it continues to be a fight that needs to be fought. But in terms of growth, due to people setting aside differences and replacing them with similarities, Americans have accomplished so much beginning with the abolishment slavery, gaining African-Americans the right to vote, abolishing Jim Crow Laws, and so forth.
As a young woman in this country, I have experienced sexism a few times. Earlier this year in my English Seminar in high school, my classmates and I were reading the Greek play Lysistrata, which is about women rebelling against their husbands in the village by not having sexual relations with them until the men stopped fighting in the war. During a discussion about whether or not these women had the right to do this, we fell into a separate discussion about women’s rights, including the rights that women had to their bodies. While giving my input another male classmate and I got into a heated argument about this topic. The male student said that the women did not have the right to withhold sex from their husbands because they were married and because of that the men had the right to their wife’s bodies. The reason I felt so passionate about this topic was because as a young woman, and as young woman of color I’ve had to deal with sexism and being told by others what I can and cannot do. But at the same time I had to remember that he was a young man, and unfortunately this is a “man’s world.”
I had to remember that he will not ever have to deal with the issues that I have to deal with as a woman, therefore he probably does not fully understand how ignorant he sounded. I had to understand that we are different and that it is not my job to not get too upset over a person that does not understand. It was my job to explain to him and to help him understand where I was coming from and how we should not let our differences in sex come between the equality that we both deserve. In Report from the Bahamas, Jordan says “I am reaching for the words to describe the differences between a common identity that has been imposed and the individual identity any one of us will choose…” (47). What the author says here relates to my experience because as a man, my classmate had a certain identity including the way he should act, imposed on him. Men in general, are “supposed’ to be stern, independent, emotionless, and dominant over women. Due to the standards that society has imposed on men, my classmate had a harder time connecting with the issues of a woman because he was taught to be a certain way. But the labels that men and women both have need to be broken and we each need to create an “individual identity” for ourselves. Once we are able to overcome the labels that were assigned to us by society, we will be able to come together and eliminate the problems of inequality and violence that we face today. Our labels should not shape us nor shape our experiences. We need to shape ourselves into what we as people want to be.