Intersectionality: Social Inequalities In Our Society

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Prior to starting Social Inequalities in January, intersectionality was a term that I did not even know existed. I had never taken a sociology course before, and I honestly did not have much interest in learning about it. Throughout the course though, my eyes were opened to so many of the inequalities in our society, and also, the oppression that comes along with being different in any way from the majority. As I started to discover so many things about oppression, privilege and discrimination, I also began to understand how many different things can make up one single person. Often, when we look at a stranger, we see one particular characteristic, such as race, and define them based on that. I now am able to understand how harmful this can be to a person, and also how harmful our own ignorance can be to ourselves. Choosing only a single characteristic and defining anyone with it is so inaccurate; we know this because we would never do it to ourselves. As I started to understand that these intersecting identities are actually called intersectionalities, I was fascinated with just how many identities one can have. Personally, I never really felt like I had very many original qualities. Aside from being a woman and a Christian, everything else about me was pretty much just like everyone else in society. Being introduced to what intersectionalities are though allowed to me to see that there are more parts to me than just those two. I am a woman, a student, a Christian, Caucasian, straight, and so many more things. All of these identities work together to make me who I am, and the same is true for all people. It is not enough to pick a single identity because that does not encompass the whole of who I am, or who anyone else is. Understanding this is essential for treating everyone as the beautiful mosaic of identities that they are, and not treating them as one single characteristic. The group project that our class completed helped me to understand intersectionality even further. As we gave other students and professors at Grenfell the opportunity to discover their own intersectionalities, and well as explained what that actually meant, my own eyes were opened even more. I was amazed to see how many different identities were represented on a small, Newfoundland university campus. Although there was plenty of overlap when it came to things like race and gender, there were also so many different things that people decided were important parts of them. Looking at the beautiful flowers created by a variety of students and professors, I realized that the flowers would not be very beautiful with only a single petal; in the same way, the beauty of a person cannot be seen through only one single identity. Together, all the petals come together to make one beautiful flower, as the many identities come together to make a whole person. It is one thing to read articles where intersectionality is described and to hear examples of people far away, but to actually get to see people discover and describe their own intersectionalities was something so much more eye-opening. It was incredible to be a part of helping people have their eyes opened to exactly what identities made up who they were. Being a part of this study not only helped me to better understand intersectionality, but it also helped to be able to speak the truth in multiple registers better, as Patricia Hill Collins described in one of her articles. …show more content…
In order to be able to correctly explain intersectionality in a way that people could understand, I had to take what I had learned in Sociology and put it in everyday terms. This was not an easy task and I found myself struggling to try and explain exactly what intersectionality was. With some thought, as well as listening to other students describe what intersectionality was in their eyes, I was able to think of my own definition for it that other people could understand. By doing this, I was able to better understand it personally. Explaining it to others, and putting it into simpler words made it more clear to me, and ensured that I would never forget what it meant. Overall, this group project, as well as the Social Inequalities class as a whole was an extremely eye opening experience.

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