Monday: Matrix of Oppression

 

Warm up: How are you feeling about your project so far? Where are you and where do you need to be?

Today we talked about the meaning of privilege and examined our own identities for places of privilege and targeting. We used the Matrix of Oppression to create an identity wheel that showed the breakdown of our social group memberships. Below you will find the MoO and an example of the social identity wheel.

The way to use the Matrix of Oppression is to write down how you identify according to each of the social identity categories (race, sex, gender etc…), then find your answer on the matrix. If you identify racially as white, you are privileged. If you identify racially as black, you are targeted. Figure out where you fall on the matrix for each category and you will begin to see a picture of how much or how little privilege you experience.

For the pie chart activity below think about those social identities of which you are MOST aware and LEAST aware. In the example below the person is MOST aware of being black and she is next most aware of being a woman and being part of the working class. It is no coincidence that the things she is most aware of are targeted categories. We tend to be less aware where we have more privilege. In fact- PART of privilege is the ability to NOT think about those traits of ourselves so often. Create a pie chart of your own to show which of your social identity categories are most aware and least aware of. 

 

Friday: Social Identity

Congratulations on making it through your first week back to school!

Today we looked at the differences between a personal identity and a social identity!

1. Warm up: Friday Freewrite
2. Vocab continued:
   1. race: A socially constructed category. A race is a group that is treated as distinct in society based on their biological or cultural characteristics. It is not the biological characteristics that define racial groups, but how groups have been treated historically and socially.
   2. institutional racism: A pattern of social institutions — such as governmental organizations, schools, banks, and courts of law — giving negative treatment to a group of people based on their race.
   3. internalized racism: The personal conscious or subconscious acceptance of the dominant society’s racist views, stereotypes and biases of one’s ethnic group. It gives rise to patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that result in discriminating, minimizing, criticizing, finding fault, invalidating, and hating oneself while simultaneously valuing the dominant culture.
   4. interpersonal racism: is a component of individual level racism. It includes directly perceived discriminatory interactions between individuals whether in their institutional roles or as public and private individuals.
   5. oppression: Socially supported mistreatment and exploitation of a group, category, or team of people or individual.
   6. privilege: Refers to the idea that in human society, some groups benefit from unearned, largely-unacknowledged advantages that increase their power relative to that of others.
3. Read  “Social Identity” by Kay Deaux.
   1. Three annotations on the first page, one (so far) on the second page.
   2. Stop at section two: Types of Social Identity
4. Identity Project: POEMS DUE MONDAY!