Blog Post #2 - Reed

Reading his chapters, I felt more compelled to write about chapter 4. However I'm going to emphasize on the gender AND race issue. While it is important to understand that women are most likely to be harassed or assaulted, the way issues are handled and the way they are publicized is an issue of race too. What I'm going to begin talking about is the fact that white women have more privileges than any other race. African-American women have stigmas attached to them, whereas white women don't. The closest a white woman can get to being stereotyped is being too "basic" or "blonde-jokes". African-American women, on the other hand are sexualized or stereotyped into being someone who is 'sassy' or 'don't-need-no-man' attitude, taking both stereotypes into jokes. African-American women's cases are seldom to be heard on the news, they experience the blow of sexism with little or no help from publicity, as people are outraged with the many stories of white women, the reports of other women are rare to see on the news. This also applies to the recent case of Mike Brown, where black people are shown as 'not an angel' even when they are the victims.

Reed's comment on the default and unintentional white-created internet is a relief to read from someone with a professional background. People can claim racism is over or that they 'don't see color', when in fact, the internet is, by default, a white, male community. Their privileges expand across languages, dominating the web with English rather than all the other languages that exist in the world today. What this shows is that sometimes the presence of other races is not welcomed online as it should be. On tumblr, people are dubbed as SJW (social justice warriors) and while this sounds like a positive thing, many (mainly cis-white-men) cry out how we are femnazis or too sensitive. But they don't understand anything outside their bubble of delusion. They don't understand that they don't experience racism. What is sad is a concept of white feminism. And it prevails today. Many white women involved in feminism looks past the issue of race. When someone of color calls them out on bigotry, they are quick to defend themselves. They also don't understand issues that they should if they want equal rights for EVERYBODY.

Now, on a personal note, the problem with race and being a women, I encountered one first hand. I'm not sure if this is TMI, but I think it's innocent enough. I love clothes, but only Asian-fashion clothes. I find myself wanting to buy them, but unless I live in Taiwan or in Chinatown I don't have access to their style of fashion. So I like to look online and see if I can buy them from companies instead. I found myself enjoying their lingerie, more cute and airy than the ones westerners wear and sell. So I googled "Asian lingerie". Lingerie is a word in fashion, is a word seen in store bold for women to see. However, some part of me wasn't surprised, but primarily disgusted, at first it was just weird festish-y sites. Then on the next page I started getting pornography. Pages of pornography. I never did it again. Fuck the internet. Why must you sexualize my people and slap them on the front pages of the web, when I just want to look cute.