The Man

This weeks service learning journal

The Man that so many people speak of can be more accurately described as a set of cyclic and problematic systems established in a racist American past. The title we give this machine factory of inequality is a misnomer because there are many men, women, and children who are involved with it. Willfully or in ignorance, many of us play rolls in these deeply rooted systems perpetuating the ideologies of white supremacy and the result of white privilege. I couldn't get past the first line of the Invisible Backpack with out stumbling across evidence of this scenario in the authors life.

"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group"

"The Man" taught this woman that racism and racial suppression was unique, confined and individual. It may be real. It may be wrong, but it wasn't pandemic. Thinking like this can pull a wool over the eyes of many rational people and hide the ugly truth of America's administrative failures on the behalf of the impoverished and non white. Which in turn slows the progression of removing those unbalanced systems, continuing the racial suppression of many.