How has the politics of identity (race, class, gender, and sexuality) shapped access
to the American Dream in terms of inclusion and exslusion? What personal
experiences of such can you relate?
Lynn Weber’s conceptual
...
How has the politics of identity (race, class, gender, and sexuality) shapped access
to the American Dream in terms of inclusion and exslusion? What personal
experiences of such can you relate?
Lynn Weber’s conceptual framework for understanding race, class, gender, and sexuality is
based on the simple fact that everyone is, or should be, equal. Race, class, gender, and sexuality
are historically and globally specific, socially constructed power relations that simultaneously
operate at both the macro and micro levels of society and the interdependence of knowledge
and activism. For example, during the Reconstruction Period, the ideal white male was strong
and stoic. The ideal white woman was nurturing and full of emotion. However, the “good” black
man was silly and happy-go-lucky, and the ideal black woman was the asexual “Mammy” figure
who had no family of her own and was emotionally very strong. Weber claims that, upon
examination, race, gender, and sexuality are not based in opposites or biology but in group
struggles. Social class (in the U.S.) is not viewed in the same way as race, gender, and sexuality. t
is viewed as a ladder that people can climb up or down based on talent and effort. However, it
still justifies dominance and hierarchy. Weber presents six common themes that characterize
the scholarship that addresses multiple dimensions of inequality under the rubric of race, class,
gender, and sexuality studies. Five of them describe the way that race, class, gender, and
sexuality are conceptualized as systems of oppression; the sixth is an epistemological
assumption. (1) contextual. These hierarchies are never static and fixed, but undergo change
constantly as part of new economic, political, and ideo
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