Race, Class and Gender

The United States is a nation where people are supposed to be able to rise above their origins. Those who want to succeed, it is believed, can do so through hard work and solid effort. Although equality has historically been denied to many, there is now a legal framework in place that guarantees protection from
discrimination and equal treatment for all citizens.
Historic social movements, such as the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, raised people’s consciousness about the rights of African Americans and women. Moreover, these movements have generated new opportunities for multiple groups—African Americans, Latinos, white women, disabled people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) people, and older people, to name some of the groups that have been beneficiaries of civil rights action and legislation.
We have also now had an African American president; gays and lesbians increasingly have the rights to same-sex marriage; women sit in very high places—as Supreme Court justices and CEOs of major companies; disabled people have rights of access to work and schools and are protected under federal laws. The vast majority of Americans, when asked, say that support equal rights and nondiscrimination policies; indeed, over 90 percent say they would vote for a woman as president of the United States (Streb et al. 2008). Why, then, do race, class, and gender still matter?

Race, class, and gender still matter because they continue to structure society in ways that value some lives more than others. Currently, some groups have more opportunities and resources, while other groups struggle. Race, class, and gender matter because they remain the foundations for systems of power and inequality that, despite our nation’s diversity, continue to be among the most significant social facts of people’s lives. Despite having removed the formal barriers to opportunity, the United States is still highly unequal along lines of race, class, and gender.
In this book, we ask students to think about race, class, and gender as systems of power. We want to encourage readers to imagine ways to transform, rather than reproduce, existing social arrangements. This starts with shifting one’s thinking so that groups who are so often silenced or ignored become heard. All social groups are located in a system of power relationships wherein your social location can shape what you know—and what others know about you. As a result, dominant forms of knowledge have been constructed largely from the experiences of the most powerful—that is, those who have the most access to systems of education and communication. To acquire a more inclusive view— one that pays attention to group experiences that may differ from your own— requires that you form a new frame of vision.
You can think of this as if you were taking a photograph. For years, poor people, women, and people of color—and especially poor women of color— were totally outside the frame of vision of more powerful groups or distorted by the views of the powerful. If you move your angle of sight to include those who have been overlooked, however, you may be surprised by how incomplete or just plain wrong your earlier view was. Completely new subjects can also appear. This is more than a matter of sharpening one’s focus, although that is required for clarity. Instead, this new angle of vision means actually seeing things differently, perhaps even changing the lens you look through—thereby removing the filters (or stereotypes and misconceptions) that you bring to what you see and think.