Edison Pan, Period 2, 10/18/22

Edison Pan, Period 2, 10/18/22

Modern Mythology 2023

Socio-political Consciousness

What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power?

How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

In my opinion, inequality in society is mostly motivated neither racial nor gender. Instead, I believe that it occurs through a concept that has been there since near the beginning of human history. The concept of wealth itself is the root of all oppression. Looking back at the past, the reason why slavery was so widespread in America was not because there was widespread hatred towards the color black. No That would be unreasonable. No, instead slavery became popular because it was profitable. It is in human nature to desire. To fill your desires you need wealth.You can desire for material objects or desire conceptual things such as power. However to achieve these things, you require a certain amount of wealth. In fact,near the beginning of the United States, our founding fathers created the ⅗ fifths law where slaves counted as ⅗ of a man , just to satisfy the desires of the slaveowners.

Even disregarding racial oppression, wealth is a major factor in other types of discrimination as well. In many nations ,hundreds of years ago, women lacked many fundamental rights they have today. One of those rights was the power to control their finances. Instead all the power went to their husbands instead. To keep their strong hold over wealth, men set up a culture that heavily emphasized on a patriarchal society. This culture dug deep within society and became a major obstacle that had to be overcome by the future generations.

Even though nowadays racial and gender discrimination are no longer as it was in the past, there is another form of discrimination that people tend to ignore. This concept of discrimination of wealth has been in effect for so long that it now seems so normalized compared to other types of inequality, but it is in fact just as bad as the other two forms of discrimination and has been set in place since the beginning of human history. Unlike the other two forms of discrimination that targets characteristics, this form of society is based off on a concept rather than something physical. Someone who is seen as more wealthy than another receives better treatment and often heavily influences the actions of others and throughout history this remained unchanged and probably will continue to stay that way.

Personally, thinking about this led me to realize just hard it is to get rid of discrimination as a whole. Discrimination and oppresion is deeply ingrained in human nature and because of that it is extremely hard to get rid off and will always be a part of society in some way or another. As a human, I realized that I am also affected by all this and I started to think that maybe I am not so different from those that oppressed others in the past after all. Like many others, I too have preconceived notions of others based on various factors such as wealth. But maybe, just maybe if I just ignored all those factors and throw away all my preconceived notions, I will finally be able to truly see and judge people for who they are on the inside.