Developing an Inclusive Perspective

We want readers to understand that race, class, and gender are linked experiences, no one of which is more important than the others; the three are interrelated and together configure the structure of U.S. society. You can begin to develop a more inclusive perspective by asking: How does the world look different if we put the experiences of those who have been excluded at the center of our thinking?
Inclusive perspectives see the interconnections between these experiences and do not reduce a given person’s or group’s life to a single factor. In addition, developing an inclusive perspective entails more than just summing up the experiences of individual groups, as in the additive model discussed previously. Race, class, and gender are social structural categories. This means that they are embedded in the institutional structure of society. Understanding them requires a social structural analysis—by which we mean revealing the race, class, and gender patterns and processes that form the very framework of society.
Once you understand that race, class, and gender are simultaneous and intersecting social structural systems of relationship and meaning, you also can see the distinctive ways that other categories of experience intersect in society. Age, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, physical ability, region, and ethnicity also shape systems of privilege and inequality. To emphasize this, we have opened this anthology with the classic essay by noted feminist Audre Lorde, now deceased. Her essay, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” remains a critical and inspiring statement about the importance of thinking inclusively and across the differences that too often divide us.
The opening section of this book also includes two important historical essays, intended to anchor the book in an admittedly brief, but nonetheless essential, presentation of how our nation’s institutions have evolved as a result of the exclusionary treatment—indeed, even annihilation—of certain groups. This is essential to understanding who we are as a society and a culture. We open this section with Ronald T. Takaki’s “A Different Mirror.” Takaki shows common connections in the histories of African Americans, Chicanos, Irish Americans, Jews, and Native Americans. He argues that only when we under- stand a multidimensional history that encompasses race, class, and gender will we see ourselves in the full complexity of our humanity. C. Matthew Snipp’s review of how American Indians have been removed, restricted, relocated, and robbed of resources recounts the extent to which “American” settlement and seizing of lands—along with cultural annihilation—have marked our nation’s history.
Understanding the diverse histories, cultures, and experiences of groups who have been defined as marginal in society has been vital to the formation of our social institutions. Beyond this important fact is the reality that groups outside of the dominant culture have been silenced over the course of history, leading to distortions and incomplete knowledge of how society has been organized. Ignoring the experiences of those who have been on the margins results in a distorted view of how the nation itself has developed.
You might ask yourself how much you learned about the history of group oppression in your formal education. Maybe you touched briefly on topics such as the labor movement, slavery, women’s suffrage, perhaps even the Holocaust, but most likely these were brief excursions from an otherwise dominant narrative that largely ignored the perspectives of working-class people, women, and people of color, along with others. How much of what you study now is centered in the experiences of the most dominant groups in society? Have studies that have been defined as classic been generated from research samples that have only studied certain populations (such as middle-class college students in psychology studies or mostly White people in other social science research)? Is the literature you are assigned or artistic creations that you study mostly the work of Europeans? Men? White people? How much has the creative work of Native Americans, Muslim Americans, new immigrant populations, Asian Americans, Latinos/as, African Americans, gays, lesbians, or women informed the study of “American” art and culture?
By minimizing the experiences and creations of these different groups, we communicate that their work and creativity is less important and less central to the development of culture than is the history of White American men. What false or incomplete conclusions does this exclusionary thinking generate? When you learn, for example, that democracy and egalitarianism were central cultural beliefs in the early history of the United States, how do you explain the enslavement of millions of African Americans, the genocide of Native Americans, the absence of laws against child labor, the presence of laws forbidding intermarriage between Asian Americans and White Americans?
Haunani-Kay Trask shows (“From a Native Daughter”) that there can also be a gap between dominant cultural narratives and people’s actual experiences. As she—a native Hawaiian—tells it, the official history she learned in schools was not what she was taught in her family and community. Dominant narratives can try to justify the oppression of different groups, but the unwritten, untold, sub- ordinated truth can be a source for knowledge in pursuit of social justice. This book asks you to think more inclusively. Without doing so, you are prone to understand society, your own life within it, and the experiences of others through stereotypes and the misleading information that is all around you. What new experiences, understandings, theories, histories, and analyses do these readings inspire? What does it take for a member of one group (say a Latino male) to be willing to learn from and value the experiences of another (for example, an Indian Muslim woman)? These essays show that, although we are caught in multiple systems, we can learn to see our connection to others.
Engaging oneself at the personal level is critical to this process of thinking differently about race, class, and gender. Changing one’s mind is not just a matter of assessing facts and data, although that is important; it also requires examining one’s feelings. We incorporate personal narratives that reflect the diverse experiences of race, class, gender, and/or sexual orientation into the opening section of this book to encourage you to think about your personal story. We intend for the personal nature of these accounts—especially those that describe what exclusion means and how it feels—to build empathy among groups. We think that empathy encourages an emotional stance that is critical to relational thinking and developing an inclusive perspective. As an example, Jeremiah Torres’s essay (“Label Us Angry”) describes how his seemingly trouble-free childhood changed overnight when he became the victim of a hate crime in a community known for its acceptance of multiculturalism. His narrative reminds us that learning about race, class, and gender is not just an intellectual exercise; experiences with these forms of oppression are personal and often painful.
We hope that understanding the significance of race, class, and gender will encourage readers to put the experiences of the United States itself into a broader context. Knowing how race, class, and gender operate within U.S. national borders should help you see beyond those borders. We hope that developing an awareness of how the increasingly global basis of society influences the configuration of race, class, and gender relationships in the United States will encourage readers to cast an increasingly inclusive perspective on the world itself.

REFERENCES

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Streb, Michael J., Barbara Burrell, Brian Frederick, and Michael A. Genovese. 2008. “Social Desirability Effects and Support for a Female American President.” Public Opinion Quarterly 72 (Spring): 76–89.