While I was reading these three articles I kept jotting down notes and copying certain words or phrases that really stood out to me as provoking thoughts that say what we've been thinking for years but almost too afraid to say out loud. Being in classes where it is free to speak your mind and racial topics come up, I am very comfortable to be the first to point out my privilege as a white person and my disadvantages of being a woman. Reading Kathleen Sterling's journal article I kept thinking how hard some situations have been for me because I am a woman but how much harder they probably would have been if I was a black woman. I think it is important to keep the conversation going about the discriminations and obstacles different groups of people see on a day to day basis and to keep gender and race in those discussions because it is affecting someone. Just like Sterling said, Discussion is not action and discussion is not enough to counter the effects of a broader racist and sexist system, we need to keep talking about it. Once we stop discussing and pushing the conversation forward, the moment these groups of people get left out of the conversation because society is so quick to silence people who don't "fit in to the status quo".
I think that in my college lectures, students and professors are very willing to have these controversial discussions and be very open about privileges of groups of people and point out flaws in the way evolutionary thinking has been altered. In my professional life it seems like the last thing anyone wants to talk about and are so close-minded or in the dark about problems because they refuse to address it or talk about it. If I went into work and started talking about bad evolutionary thinking, I bet money that at least one of my coworkers would say something along the lines of "well it's better than it was" or "we have come such a long way". That's what Dunsworth mentioned, that bad evolutionary thinking is used to justify civil rights restrictions, human rights violations, white supremacy and the patriarchy. Evolution should not justify these.
There was a sentence in Dunsworth post that I just really liked and felt was very prevalent in our world today, "Standard English is unequipped to deal with many of the ambiguous aspects of sex and gender." I think this statement is so true and I have run into this problem myself even this past semester in Biological Anthropology. Reading articles or posts about sex and gender can be very confusing and I do think that a big part of that is the language we are using, these two terms are so intertwined with each other that it's difficult to separate them anymore and make the difference. Maybe new definitions or new terms all together could help with clarification in the future and pave the way for new thinking and more modern ideas.
References
https://app.perusall.com/courses/human-evolution-3/03_athreya-and-ackermann-2018-colonialism-narratives-human-origins-asia-africa
https://evolution-institute.org/it-is-unethical-to-teach-evolution-without-confronting-racism-and-sexism/
https://app.perusall.com/courses/human-evolution-3/05_sterling_2015_black_feminist-theory-in-prehistory
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Welcome!
Welcome to my blog for my summer Anthropology course! Here I will share and post ideas, reflections, thoughts and opinions on articles and prompts.
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