Assignment #3

I completely forgot to post this, so sorry it's late.

To begin to think about the details of our everyday lives and what they mean to the world is quite a daunting task. Some of us barely recognize our existence. We submit to the numerical outlook on life that being one of six billion is not that big of a deal. Others believe their every action is the center of the world, and everyone should know about it. And yet there are others that live hoping to one day figure it all out, taking things day by day, never having a “typical” day, and always wanting more. I find myself as more of person three, and it very much so affects where I see and, more or less, acknowledge power in my everyday life.

I must first justify the use of acknowledge in my previous statement before I begin to elaborate on the power seen in my everyday life. I can see power everywhere. When I turn on the TV, read the newspaper, or even use a bathroom, I see some institution of power’s influence throughout. I see the power that affects other people as well. I can have a conversation with a friend through a cell phone and understand what they have experienced that day that has brought them to their current situation or mood. What I cannot always do is “acknowledge” the power. Acknowledging is a forming of accepting that I believe does not necessarily require further action afterwards, but because of our nature, usually does. When you acknowledge someone you know walking into a room, a simple hello is rarely the extent of conversation. Most times we extend out to them our idea of courtesy, whether it be asking how they have been or complimenting their vibrancy. This makes them become a part of my day, an event that was worthy of attending. This parallels the way I, and presumably others, deal with power in our lives in that once I have acknowledged it, I will more than likely do something about it or be affected by it. There are times, the rare times, that we ignore it, or leave it be with our “simple hello,” but whether we know it or not we are acknowledging and letting the power of the social labels that exist in our everyday life, affect our everyday life.

Power can be good and bad, but it relies on the use of it. What power we have and how we are able to use it comes from the matrix of domination, those interlocking social labels of our lives. These labels that we carry affect our experience with power in many institutions, for example the education system or the workforce. For each person it is different, but the matrix of domination always involves links between good power, privilege, and bad power, oppression. The power I experience depends on my markedness in each societal community, a concept I will further discuss as I feel it is a big part of my own personal experiences with power.

I see the power in my life as pretty normal - at least for a white, able-bodied, middle-class, working, college-enrolled, heterosexual male in his early 20s. It’s quite an interesting label for a person, perhaps overdone and or perhaps lacking, but to me, that is me to society. Each part of my label embodies a part of my life that gives me the advantages others are not as fortunate to experience and the disadvantages that make my life a little bit harder. I do not ask for either, but I believe it is inevitable to experience what I do in my life because of each of these labels. The parts of my life that I see this power the most prominently are in my education, my current and future job, and my associations with the media.

For the past four and a half years I have been attending a large and highly respected university throughout the United States. How I got there, why I got there, and why I even chose to get there are all come from powers I hold and that control me. I got into college through dedicated work and involvement during my high school career that made me a prime candidate to attend college and further my education in the first place. I got to go to high school in the first place because I was a white, middle-class kid living in an economically developed area. The public school system of my state was able to fund my school and give me the opportunity to attend college, but unfortunately at the expense of public education in many other areas. We are looking at a higher power empowering the youth of chosen socio-economic classes. I look at this and do not know how it is possible to deny the same education I received to others, but they are marked to be the uneducated people of the world. So when I walk around campus, I know that my fellow college attendees received some sort of prior education and are the same as me, and we are unmarked. I also know that my admittance to the major program of my choice comes from not only my previous education, but my race and gender. A white male that excels in computational and physical sciences has become the face of the engineer. If I represent the typical engineer, it was no surprise to me that I end up becoming one, or at least was empowered to educate myself in the profession. This power I have leaves the atypical engineer to face difficulty with acceptance into the profession. The number of women in engineering is growing, but it is not simply because more women are choosing the profession, but because it is becoming more acceptable by the workforce they will enter for a woman to practice the profession and represent an engineer. The power to choose the major though does make it difficult to believe however that gender representation in a particular field is strictly based on lack of interest by that gender, a view I held for most of my academic career. It was not until my exposure to student-teaching last year and the mentoring I received from a woman that worked for developing engineering programs that I was able to think differently. Her message was so clear that I understood better. What I also realized at that time, however, is that no man could have made that as evidently clear to me as she did, and so as a male advocate of female enrollment in engineering programs, I know I will never hold the influence that woman had over as many people as she can touch. And so now within the next month I will be graduating with a bachelors of science from one of the top universities in the country. But what made it a top university? When I was a senior I always checked two ranking systems from institutions comprised of peers and authority figures in the higher education system throughout America – the Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report. What they did was to compare as many universities as they felt necessary, but usually I never concerned myself with more than 100 out of the over 4000 that exist. I looked at a ranking, done by people I did not know, and based on that ranking deemed a university acceptable. Coupled with personal choices of student life and available programs, rankings have become so important to prospective students that you frequently have to pay in order to have access. These rankings are important to me because of the frequent questions I receive from family members, strangers, and employers about my pursuits in college and where. I place the power to be highly touted in the workforce purely in the hands of the ranking systems that let employers know how good my university is as I do to the “wow factor” experienced by family members and strangers when news of my graduation from the University of Maryland as a mechanical engineer reaches them. That same privilege is what oppresses the graduates of community colleges and colleges ranked lower in their same experiences with employers and interested strangers. My education is important to me. It has given me the knowledge I feel I need to secure a strong financial future with a career that I enjoy and the life experiences that will mold the history that is mine to be made.

So far I am a pretty unmarked guy. I am 22, white, and in college, pretty standard in today’s picture. I am a male engineer, so I won’t stick out too much at any company I work for, and graduating from a good university is only but a clock tick away for me. It is not until I look at the parts of my life influenced by my current job that I begin to feel a bit more in the opposite boat. Since the ripe young age of 17, way back when in 2002, I have worked part-time and recently full-time in the retail industry for American Eagle Outfitters. I had to work because as the child of middle-class, working, and minimally higher-educated parents, my funding for the wants of my life were limited. Those wants included but are not limited to – a car, gas for the car, clothing, music, books, food, and my college education. The economy had oppressed me into being a person that had to, at a young age, devote time to working in order to have the things they wanted. I was also a person that had to lose a lot of social and study time during my college years that even many professors to this day do not realize our existence. It is somewhat unbelievable for any to assume that the average college student must not work, but that is the much too common statement muttered by anyone not in the norm. In the same sense, my race, which identifies the most with the image of the company, gave me the privilege that the successful corporation had to continue my employment for such an extended period of time. Not that my dedication and hard work did not pay off, but there are many groups that do not have as easy a time holding a job with struggling companies constantly looking to down-size or who are being dominated by that corporation I was a part of. I always enjoyed my job but it was because of the economic power my company yielded I was able to keep it.

The hands down, biggest influence on not only the ideas we hold and formulate but the success and failure of people in political and economic power is the media. The media perpetuates so many of my privileges it is absurd. It is because of the media that my gender is the dominant focus of the sports world, and that people of the same sexuality as me can entertain a larger TV audience than those who are not. Let me walk through my day of privilege because of media and watch as I struggle to find any oppression. The white, able-bodied male athletes that succeed in professional sports that draw much TV and radio broadcast coverage give me identifiable and relatable icons. As I grew up, I could admire and aspire to be the 7-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens. If it wasn’t him, there are so many other white male athletes out there that the choices were endless. The stand-up comedians that provide us college-aged and older adults with so many jokes have given me outlet to poke fun at anything different from me, just as long as it was a joke. I have been able to make fun of the stereotypes of the GLBT community, blacks, and women without consequence as long as my demeanor is one of non-seriousness. Due to the large exposure of these comedians on TV and in venues frequented by people of my specific race and sexuality, those other subordinate groups can gain more stereotypes while I remain in the dominant group developing these oppressing outlets. The media, relating back to my job at American Eagle, also gives the company the power to reach the right people to fund their business. Without exposure to the media, American Eagle is just another producer of clothing that does nothing more than any other brand. Instead it creates people who believe there is something more about wearing that brand than meets the eye. When I wore their clothing, I believed most thought I looked stylish and well put together. What I mean by well put together is a sense of being mature enough to understand that there are appropriate times to wear jeans and a t-shirt and other times where you needed khakis and a polo. When people looked at me, I wanted them to approve of my choices and make an initial judgment that I was a good person because of the clothes I wore. I also wanted my peers to judge chances of compatibility based on style. I have become a person concerned with outward image because of the media. Looking back on only a simple activity in class, I realized that I owned nearly 100 shirts, all of different design, each with its own intended purpose to portray myself as something. The media has made me part of the dominant group that thinks this is perfectly fine and not someone who challenges the idea of an image being necessary to be accepted.

The media has also limited the way in which I can act from day to day. Media coverage of the horror stories of college aged women’s experiences with sexual assault and rape makes me a part of a marked group of men that are chauvinistic, forceful, sexual animals. I then become the college male whose sexual promiscuity is the result of a sense of conquest within my circle of peers. This is, however, a positive constraint that college-aged males face that raises awareness within our educational systems that the adolescent male population is not getting the proper education about sexual relations. Add those who do not learn in school to those without the available schooling in the first place and the outlook for men is not good. The type of male that deserves the negative stereotype of being forceful and eventually rapes someone gets it from the media coverage, it just unfortunately connects itself to the rest of the male population. This is one explicit situation where being male marks you.

In the continuous effort of Katie King to motivate us to engage ourselves in events that are about social reform, I must mention a media event I recently saw that opened a large window about the oppression of race in this country and just how privileged I am to be white. The event was a panel discussion at Howard University, covered by MSNBC, entitled “A conversation about race.” During the event, a video clip of what has been called the doll test was shown in which a two dolls, one black and one white, were placed in front of children and they were asked to identify which doll was the pretty doll, which was the ugly doll, which was the nice doll, and which was the mean doll, after which they were to point to the one that looked most like them. Though only 60 seconds of the test was shown, with the children all being black, the results were shocking. All three children identified the white doll as the pretty and nice doll while the black doll was ugly and mean. When asked why the dolls were pretty or ugly, the response was unanimously that it was pretty because it was white and it was ugly because it was black. The one black boy showed little confusion as he answered, but one of the girls seemed puzzled at the end when she was asked which one she looked the most like as to why she was pointing at the one she had just called ugly and mean for being black. In terms of the matrix of domination, this really struck me as an injustice that race will probably always carry. In terms of the doll test, I was the pretty and nice person. And as I identified with the test, I had to ask myself, “What would lead these children to ever believe this?” And the answer unfortunately relates to the actions my race controls media that instills this image to even the youngest of children. Our educational system has reached a point where this would never be something a teacher would tell children, and outside of possible exposure through a religious environment, which is more than likely racial segregated, the only excuse is the media. My race is the one that creates confused images within people. I can even go as far to say that my gender contributes to it as well, as most in power in the media business are men. This means white men hold the power to instill within millions the wrong ideas about themselves which can cause additional emotional, psychological, and physical problems of its own. And in my life, I am left to be simply unaffected and not to worry about confusion because I am a part of that group. The power that is my influence to give myself privilege within society, acceptance as the good and the pretty, makes me just the opposite. It is a good thing I am not a marketing or television executive who sees this same documentary, for I am sure the sense of guilt and exclusivity from so many problems of society would de-value my life.

The last example I experienced gives a good summary of what I feel power is in my life and also how my partner and I decided on our creative representation. Power to me seems excessive and dangerous, but it is because I have access to so much of the good. Rarely do I find myself in a position where I worry what will happen because of my labels. My matrix of domination would be exactly that, an interconnection of domination over the social influences and economical and political policies that shape this country. My life though, everyday, finds me at odds with myself over the use of this power, and whether I want to acknowledge it and make it a part of my life. I saw no problem with using my race and socio-economic class status to get and retain a stable and good paying job, so why would I not enjoy the privilege of a higher salary than an equal woman in the same workforce. It is a struggle within that I cannot compare to the oppression that is an actual struggle for those outside of my groups. Though there are things in my everyday life I do not concern myself with, those that I do have been highlighted to show the importance of needing some sort of change. Maybe I should be a proprietor of change since I have so much privilege, using the good power to rid the world of the bad power that limits so many in this country. If so, I think I would become marked, in the sense that activists are not considered the norm, and I might find myself at more of a disadvantage, in other words, sacrificing my power. It is a vicious circle of either choosing to be apathetic in order to remain comfortable but then find yourself back where you are too privileged, or the desire for change that inconveniences your immediate power in hopes of the elimination of oppression for others and regaining of benefits for all. Power would be much better off not existing, and make it much easier for us to all get along.