Branham Daniels

Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

When thinking about the intersectional/social justice pedagogies, I believe that it

is most important to point out that the themes that stand out to me the most are due to
my own personal location. As a man who was raised in middle-class, white America, I
have never really needed to analyze the topic of intersectionality until now. That, as I
have now come to realize, is due to my privilege of being a white male in a society
dominated by individuals like me in many ways. I understand that I, in many ways, have
been blinded by a system of oppression that was built to benefit myself more than
others. This analysis of intersectionality has opened my eyes and made me feel like I
have been living a real life version of The Truman Show.
The most important them of the intersectional/social justice pedagogy, in my
mind, is that we should all understand, as a foundation, that there are systems of
oppressions in place and the focus should be to challenge those systems. I assume it
is by no mistake that in our guidelines for this class it sits atop the list that we are to
Acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized
forms of oppression exist (Weber, 1990). In order to analyze something, the first key is
to acknowledge its existence and, in this case, you are forced to open your eyes up to
possibilities and issues that you have never thought of before. Of course, I am just
speaking from my own experience and position because the oppressed and
underprivileged have had their eyes opened to these issues all along while I was
enjoying the ability of ignorance.
The next theme that seems to run across the board in the intersectional/social
justice pedagogy is the ability to understand ones own position and location within

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Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

those systems of oppression. The thing that strikes me as the most alarming, however,
is that when thinking about individual positionality, you come to realize that society has
always forced the oppressed and underprivileged to see their position and location
through the systematic oppression and discrimination. The dominant culture has
always kept those people in place by pointing them out and placing labels on the
oppressed while those of us who are privileged have never had to really think about our
positionality. Being a white male in a white male dominated society, what reason would
I have to look at myself and where I am in the world as it pertains to oppression? I have
had no reason because I am rarely oppressed in any way shape or form. Therefore, I
have never really had a reason to analyze my own position. This is why intersectionality
has been so eye opening to me because I am having to analyze the world in a
completely new set of lenses that I have never tried before and what I see is very
disturbing.
In her piece on Performing Disidentifications, Olga Ivashkevich explains her
methodology in working with troubled youth, particularly girls, and how she had to
understand the relationship to the girls position and her own and the way in which her
own experiences differed from the girls through the work of empowering them through
art. Furthermore, as a White, college-educated woman who has never been in trouble
with the law, my subjective experiences have differed vastly from the subjectives of girls
whom I encounter in this program (Ivashkevich, 2013). The important thing to
understand here is that when Olga compares her own experiences to the experiences
with these young girls, there is a better understanding of why her ideas may be different
than the young girls who have been in trouble with the law. Rather than look down on

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Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

the girls for getting in trouble in the way that society wants to do, Olga sees that these
young women come from different backgrounds and deserve to be heard. Through the
pedagogy of empowerment, Olga gives these young girls a voice through art that
otherwise is culturally ignored.
These themes of accepting the existence of oppressive systems and
understanding ones own positionality and location are key because they are the critical
themes needed for change to occur. As Niemann pointed out in her article, the idea is
to plant the seeds of change for the future generations (Niemann, 2012). Sometimes
just putting issues on the table rather than ignoring them and choosing to believe that
some issues do not exist can and will at the very least plant the seed of change by
forcing people to discuss these issues. The problem that presents itself when these
questions are put on the table by women such as Niemann, Weber, and Ivashkevich
ask people to consider the class differences and its effects on society, those in dominant
roles tend to get offended and defensive and challenge the idea of intersectionality
research as a whole. The biggest challenge to intersectional practice in teaching is that
there arent enough people teaching intersectionality! This is getting into the question
about the ways in which the U.S. education system reproduces inequities, which I will
answer next, but it really bothers me that I had to get into the college of education and
graduate school in order to learn about these topics.
The U.S. education system reproduces inequities of race, class, gender, and
sexuality in many ways. The most evident in my opinion is the idea of a college
education. According to the American Dream, if we all work hard to achieve our goals
then there are no limits to what we as Americans can achieve. The idea of the

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Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

American Dream itself ignores the fact that there are inequities and systems of
oppression within this country and therefore reinforces those same inequities. We as
Americans are told from Kindergarten through our senior years of high school that if we
go to college, work hard, and make good grades then we can be whatever we want to
be. However, college institutions themselves are not open equally to everybody. From
the point of the college application and throughout college, people are discriminated
against or privileged.
Colleges are critical institutions in the reproduction of social class and related
racial advantage, and yet they hide that function under a thin veneer of merit (Weber,
2010). Weber points out here the way that colleges discriminate against race and class
by saying that those who are admitted earned that privilege through their grades and
test scores. However, and intersectional analysis points out that different people of
different classes have different resources available to them that can heavily benefit their
chances at success in the grades and test scores category. For example, my mother
remarried in 2005. My stepfather is an engineer and, together, my mother and
stepfather bring in six figures every year. When I was in high school my mother was a
single mother raising four boys on a job that paid about $30k. When it came time for
me to take the ACT, we couldnt afford any prep classes or tutoring for the test. In 2013,
when my brother graduated from high school, he was offered half off of his tuition at
Birmingham Southern because he made a 29 on the ACT whereas I only made a 22
and received no financial help to school with that score. My parents were able to pay
$1200 to put my brother through two ACT prep courses at a local tutoring center which
greatly helped his score and he benefited from that and got into the most expensive

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school in the state of Alabama because it was now affordable. I had to go to a local
community college in my first two years with a basketball scholarship because my
mother would not have been able to afford for me to go to school any other way.
This is only one example of class differences and how they are effected by
colleges. Higher classes have more resources available to them than do the less
privileged and therefore they are rewarded with the current system that college
admissions offices operate on. Overall, my high school GPA was higher than my
brothers grades. That did not matter when it came down to admittance though. Rob
tested higher than me on the ACT and that was the reason he was given a better
opportunity to move on than I was. The cost of a college education was too high for me
and I had to rely on my athletic skills to get me into school. College tuition itself is
another way in which institutions reproduce the inequities.
The best way I can see to combat this problem is the way in which Jennifer
Pierce shows us that the state of Texas changed its college admissions process in
1997. In a way to oppose the backlash of affirmative action, a coalition in Texas
proposed a new plan. This coalition sought to increase minority enrollment through
what became known as the Texas 10 Percent Plan. This plan, which went into effect in
1997, offered admission in flagship universities to all high school students who
graduated in the top ten percent of their class, regardless of standardized test scores.
(Pierce, 2012). Although this does not completely resolve the discriminatory practices
by admissions departments in universities, it helps a little bit because the ACT and SAT
tests are historically scored better by middle and upper class whites. As long as college
admissions departments are going to use these standardized tests as the key

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determinant in college admissions, then they are systematically accepting the fact that
they will be keeping minority numbers down to numbers such as The University of
South Carolinas 8% African American population. I believe that plans such as the 10%
plan should be implemented in all 50 states as a way to systematically equal the playing
field a bit more. I do not mean to say that this would resolve the entire problem, but it is
a start.
Collins tells us, in Emerging Intersections, about the purpose of intersectional
research by pointing out that it is an effort to improve society by understanding and
explaining the lives and experiences of marginalized people and by examining the
constraints and demands of the many social structures that influence their options and
opportunities (Collins). Most of the time, in our society, the voices of the oppressed
and the underprivileged are ignored. Intersectional analysis and social justice education
gives those people an opportunity to be heard. This requires us to first, as stated
earlier, to understand that there are systems of oppression and therefor, less privileged
groups. We then need to understand that our own experiences may differ from others
because we come from different societal locations.
The article by Olga Ivashkevich, Performing Misidentifications: Girls in Trouble
is a perfect example of examining the lives and experiences of marginalized people.
Olga works with young girls who have been labeled by society as bad because of runins with law enforcement for substance abuse or violence, etc. Because these girls
arent upper-class, white, anglo-saxon, college educated good girls who have never
been in trouble with law enforcement, they are placed in a category of bad and thus,
their voices and experiences become less important than they rule they broke. Olga

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Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

emphasizes the theme of empowerment by having the girls create movies to tell their
stories. Because there are laws against revealing the identity of adolescents, the girls
benefit from being able to play roles of different characters to tell their stories through
disidentification. Working with marginalized youth calls for empathetic understanding
of their lived realities, their public discourse and image constructions, as well as our own
self-reflexive re-examination as community pedagogues (Ivashkevich, 2013).
Although we do get a glimpse of what these girls have been through and the
experiences in which they have lived, because their identities cannot be revealed, it
may be hard for some people to get a real idea of what these girls have been through
because it may come across as staged and hide behind a character. Coming from a
privileged background, I also assume that some people will look at this project and say
that these are just kids and briefly feel sorry for them but there will still be a disconnect
and an ignorance that these same issues exist with women even beyond adolescence.
The question that I have in relation to this class and intersectional research is
what can be done once we understand the five main themes of intersectionality and
realize that although we have a better understanding of the systems of oppression, what
role can we, as privileged and underprivileged, do to push change going forward? I will
be a high school teacher in addition to coaching basketball in less than a year. In my
work, I will be lucky enough to be able to influence the live of young men and women on
a daily basis. With this knew knowledge of intersectionality and the oppressive systems
that dominate American culture, I have the opportunity to put discussions about such
topics on the table in the classroom.

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Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

Olga Ivashkevich and her emphasis on empowerment is the key to change in the
way that I want to effect society. We should constantly look for new and improved ways
to allow people of all races, classes, sexes, and sexual orientation to be heard and
empowered. The main problem with those of us who are privileged in our society is that
we claim there is such a thing as colorblindness and individual choice while at the
same time ignoring the fact that there are groups of people as a whole who are
systematically and socially constructed as inferior. When we chose to buy into the
falsities, we are choosing to ignore the systems as a whole and believe that everybody
has the same equal opportunities. However, when we challenge these ideas and
realize the oppressive systems, we are forced to realize that there are far more people
who are subordinate in our society and their opportunities are far less than others.
Projects such as Ivashkevichs Girl In Trouble project allow people to speak out and be
heard.
Another opportunity that we, as privileged people, have is not to wait until current
events occur to raise questions just because we are forced to talk about them. We
should ask the people who feel the effects of police brutality about their life experiences
and allow them to talk about them openly before shootings happen like in Fergesun,
MO. When we wait until we are forced to talk about things to raise questions it seems
just as it sounds, forced. When people are forced to apologize for wrongdoings, it
sounds less genuine. Similarly, when politicians come out on TV after an 18 year old
boy is shot and killed in the streets of Ferguson, it feels less genuine to those people
most negatively effected by the police brutality on an every day basis. When the NFL
puts in place programs against domestic violence only after Ray Rice and Adrian

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Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

Peterson commit acts of domestic violence, the efforts seem shallow and less genuine.
Those of us who are privileged in our society should make a better effort to raise
questions of social justice on a more frequent basis to effect societal change more
effectively.
Teaching social studies seems like one of the best avenues to accomplish this
task in that many of these topics will come up in every day lessons. I may even be able
to use Webers classroom guidelines as an opening point to my classroom at the
beginning of each school year so that kids can feel more comfortable and free to speak
up in my class without fear of being not heard or made fun of. The best way that I know
how to make any change at all is to create an environment within my classroom where
there is an open dialogue for people to voice their concerns with whatever is going on in
their lives and the lives of people around them. Similarly, I want to create an
environment where, when those questions are put on the table, people of different
locations are slow to judgement and quick to understand that everybody has different
experiences and very real concerns. This seems like just a small step in the fight for
social justice, but it is the opportunity that I have been given and as I have come to
understand in our class, sometimes just raising questions is the best way to plant the
seeds of change.

Branham Daniels

Midterm Paper

March 22, 2015

References
Weber, Lynn. 2010. Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Pierce, J.L. 2012. Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against
Affirmative Action. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Collins, P.H. Emerging Intersections and Dill, B. and Zambrana, R. Critical thinking about
inequality: An emerging lens, In Dill, B. and Zambrana, R., eds., Emerging Intersections:
Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Niemann, Yolanda Flores. 2012. Lessons from the Experiences of Women of Color Working in
Academia. In Muhs, G., Y.F.Niemann, C.G. Gonzalez, and A.P. Harris, Presumed
Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia.
Ivashkevich, O. 2013. Performing Disidentifications: Girls in Trouble Experiment with Digital
Narratives to Remake Self-Representations. Studies in Art Education 54(4): 321-334.