Learning from the outsider within

Growing up, there were many times that I felt like, and was treated like an outsider. One example of this was in my 8th grade English class where 2 people in my working group of 4 decided to have a side conversation about black people by making fun of black hair, and even started to make fun of specific students from the school. I’ve always for the most part been very quiet and not really confrontational in school, so the way I used to respond to hearing things like this was to pretend I didn’t hear anything at all, but given the small group setting it was clear that I heard everything. They spoke as if I wasn’t right there, and it made me feel a strange combination of being invisible and like I’m standing out too much. Patricia Hill-Collins feels that by going through situations like this helps us learn more about sociality and oppression. What she is saying is that though being in a marginalized group comes with painful experiences it also can help bring you closer and feel like you are apart of a group, based on shared experiences. She says that the black women has a unique point of view on what they experience within this specific group. You can further analyse how specific black women see the world through the eyes of a black women who is also gay or a black women who is also a senior citizen and so on. All of these black women could find common ground through their physical similarities that lead them to have similar life experiences that vary to some degree. She also speaks on how oppression has many forms. In the comparison of black women being like mules and white women being like dogs we get a better understanding of this. Both groups of women had to deal with harmful stereotypes and treatments that pushed the idea that they were inferior, but there was still a hierarchy. The mule is to be worked and physically abused while the dog is to be obedient, can be loved but is always viewed as less than a human. The human is the white man. Both the black and white women can relate to being oppressed, but they can not completely relate on how they are being oppressed.

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