In which firecat discusses her isms

[firecat]

I've studied feminism for decades and have long believed that feminists—starting long before I was born and continuing today—have discovered some really important things about what my world is like and have done things to make my world better for me as a woman and better for a lot of other people too (although not all people).

Steeping myself in feminist viewpoints for a long time has made me pretty sensitive to gender-biased behavior among people I know, and gender bias in the media. (And has spoiled my enjoyment of a few authors I used to really like.)

Nevertheless, I have lived my whole life in a culture that privileges men over women and people of other genders in a number of ways, and I have internalized the assumption that the public sphere belongs to men. So despite decades of study, if someone mentions a person involved in making public policy, and I don't know who they are, and the name I hear doesn't strike me as "obviously feminine," I tend to assume they are male.

So I just saw a news headline, "Clinton stresses two-state solution," and my first thought is that Bill Clinton said it in a talk somewhere, and it takes me reading the first few words of the article, "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton stressed a two-state Israel-Palestine solution..." to realize who the story is talking about. *DOH*.

Despite decades of being involved with feminist thought, sexism is still so deeply rooted in me that I automatically envisioned Bill Clinton when I saw the name Clinton, even though Hillary Clinton is in a more prominent position in government now.

I have made some effort to learn about race issues but I haven't worked on that nearly as much as feminism. So I'm sure I have many more automatic assumptions about race than I do about gender.

When people who I think came from more or less the same upbringing as mine say they aren't racist or sexist at all, I really wonder where they got the module installed that erases all of the conditioning they received.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

While I'm willing to believe most of what people say about themselves, experience suggests that people who say they aren't racist or sexist at all often fail to see the many, many ways in which lifelong acculturation can lead even the best-intentioned of us to do, say and believe things that are just plain wrong.

I'd *like* to not be racist or sexist (or agist, or classist, or any number of other isms). It's what I aspire to. But I still catch myself making assumptions that demonstrate just how far I have to go to get there.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Nod. Part of that is the majority-serving idea that it's not racism/sexism/etc., unless it's either malicious or terribly blatant, or some combination of the two. I'm obviously not consciously, or maliciously, or blatantly sexist/racist/etc., but I do have a lot of things that catch me unawares... often because I haven't thought about them, because, duh, I don't have to.