Burn The Rug (2.4)

"The most mainstream...controlling regimes in society will privilege themselves and diminish or subdue all others in the organization of what constitutes legitimate knowledge. When we inherit privilege, it is based on a massive knowledge regime that foregrounds the structural inequalities of the past, buttressed by vast stores of texts, images, and sounds saved in archives, museums, and libraries." --Safiya Umoja Noble (2018: 140).

In the noble pursuit of equity, we often find ourselves in constant battle with the symptoms, while rarely delving fully to the source. Symptoms are demanding, to be sure--racism and hatred rear their ugly heads every day. But when we scrape away infection, more will surely grow in its place. The sources of these persistent attitudes of bigotry and racism are histories and systems that have followed us through time; they have been inscribed into our technologies, our archiving systems, our governments and institutions, and they have been furthered for generations of both oral histories and every system that runs our day-to-day societal lives. It seems that we would require a veritable army to tackle both pressing day-to-day symptoms, and these pervasive sources perpetuated by every level of our government. In this way, we become soldiers.

From our earliest classification systems, we have codified bigotry into our institutions and their functions. We deemed certain races and classes as lesser; we initialized systems that would keep them in place; and despite our adamancy of progress, we maintain the same systems that got us into this mess.

"In God We Trust"--but whose God?

A nation that is unofficially founded upon 'religious freedom', yet still prints--and mints--devotion to a deity belonging to a particular sect, is a nation that is in the midst of a whispered holy war. By excluding nearly half of the population, our government has overtly negated their validity, othered them, and set them at odds with their neighbors. 'We the People' play into the fallacy of meritocracy through Silicone Valley, its entrepreneurial ideals seeping into every aspect of the new-age American Dream, and establishing glass ceilings the privileged peer down through and critique our impermeability.

When faced with inequity and cruelty, it is often our first instinct to believe our response must be loud, our actions big--else it hardly seems worth it to make the effort. But small, actionable changes can make a world of difference. Doing the work to dismantle the meritocracy, the glass ceilings, the supposed hegemony in our nation and in our global professional sphere, will require the masses--the People--to work together in small parts as a whole.

This is the work of soldiers in this war. If you are privileged and receive a raise at work, you raise the question of whether your coworkers are receiving similar compensation. If you are of a privileged class and you come into a new work environment in which certain other classes are unrepresented, you make it your first goal to find ways to represent them. If management attempts to sweep these problematic business practices under the rug, burn the rug; for when it comes to abuse, discrimination, bullying, and unfairness, silence is tantamount to participation.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, New York University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=4834260.

Created from WSU on 2023-03-08