Read This To Get Smarter

Highlights

• Many of the understandings we have been taught and socialized to believe are based on the assumptions of long dead European colonizers who worked to maintain systems of supremacy and dominance instead of presenting fact, evidence, or truth.
• Personal identity is the way a person perceives themselves, while social identity is the way others perceive them.
• Stereotypes, erasure, and oppressive systems mean that many of us are perceived in ways that are fundamentally disconnected from our personal reality. Despite this, our personal identity is still valid even if it is not honored externally in our social identity.
• Society made me feel like my identity was too much, too other, and too different—but that is not true at all. Who we are is real and valid regardless of whether we are understood by others.
• remember that there is no such thing as “difficult names” or “easy names.” There are simply names you are familiar with and names you have yet to come across—and there are certainly more of the latter than the former.
• Today, “they” is often used as a singular third-person pronoun when the pronouns of a person are not known. In English, we do this quite naturally all the time. For example, if you are at a gathering and there’s an unclaimed jacket on the couch afterward, you might inform the host by saying, “Someone left their jacket” rather than “Someone left his or her jacket.”
• Unfortunately, people who object to using or respecting the use of they/them pronouns often point to “grammar” as the reason they cannot use someone’s correct pronoun. These people are both disrespectful and incorrect: the singular “they” in the English language dates back to the 1300s. Regardless, grammar is a pathetic excuse to deny someone their humanity and not use their correct pronouns.
• Get smarter about pronouns by remembering that we have been incorrectly taught that our perceptions of people are more important than their reality, and that must change. Pronouns are personal, and when we misspeak or fail to use someone’s correct pronouns, it is more than an error—it’s invalidating a person’s experience and reality.
• Critical thinking can help us fight something called confirmation bias, which is the propensity to seek out information that aligns with what we already believe and value, even if that information is poorly sourced, skewed, and biased.
• While it’s okay for people to have differing political beliefs, if an individual’s beliefs are dehumanizing, you are allowed to reject those beliefs. You do not have to “see the other side” of an argument if the other side is rooted in denying other people’s humanity and dignity and disrespecting others.
• Also understood as “mutual respect,” ubuntu requires us to acknowledge the humanity of the other parties in every relationship and in every interaction as a matter of principle.
• The idea of “the Western world” is rooted in European colonization, and social “progress” is incorrectly assessed accordingly. For this reason, it’s accurate to say “Eurocolonial” when describing what is inaccurately known as “the West” or “Western world.”
• Those who are deemed less valuable by society are pushed into work that is deemed less valuable by society.
• Professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies Dr. Jennifer C. Nash highlights how intersectionality is not itself a tactic for fighting oppression, but is instead a lens through which anti-oppression tactics can be devised.
• All people deserve to be recognized as inherently worthy by virtue of our existence, and we should not be ranked in a hierarchy based on how much we contribute—or are perceived to contribute—to an economy or a society.
• (Note that the word primitive should be avoided, as it is Eurocentric—it considers Eurocolonial society to be the definition of modernity and progress, and is often used in Eurocolonial contexts to describe anything related to Indigenous or other racialized peoples.)
• Much like feudalism, the people tilling the land or making the products benefit the least from their labor under capitalism, while the company leaders or owners benefit the most. Political and economic theorist Dr. Cedric Robinson’s approach to the intersection of capitalism and racism examines how the social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalism continue to the present day. In many cases, the benefits of capitalism are only beneficial because of the superexploitation of other people.
• In the United States, a cherished fixture of our infrastructure is the United States Postal Service. The Postal Service is a socialist program, and despite the fact that only 42 percent of US citizens approve of socialism, 91 percent approve of the Post Office.
• As civil rights organizer and Pan-Africanist Kwame Ture declared, “Every economic system must answer one fundamental question: who will own and control the wealth of the country? The question can only be answered in two ways: either a few will own, or everyone will own. It’s as simple as that.”
• As of this writing, Elon Musk has hoarded so much capital that he could spend $500,000 every day for the next 100 years and not run out of money.
• The Spanish company Mondragon is the world’s largest corporation based on the model of interconnected worker cooperatives (also called co-ops). It is worker owned and directed, and wages are determined though democratized voting, which has been successfully utilized since the company’s founding in 1956. Workers should be the ones to benefit most from their labor, and while the Mondragon Corporation is still a retail service company that participates in capitalism, it does so in an innovative manner informed by socialism.
• Demystifying Disability by Emily Ladau, disability and critical race scholar Imani Barbarin defines disability as “a holistic experience, so it must have a holistic definition. Disability is not just a physical diagnosis, but a lived experience in which parameters and barriers are placed upon our lives because of that diagnosis.”
• Activist and speaker Rebecca Cokley defines disability as “a lens that crosses all communities and centers on the health implications and infinite creativity of a people subjected to ableism.”
• ableist societies build stairs in places where ramps would serve the same utility
• The individual model of disability places the responsibility on disabled individuals to deal with the challenges that can come with having a disability.
• The social model of disability holds that disabled people are not impaired by their bodies or by medical diagnoses, but by ableist ideologies and social and literal constructions within society.
• if there is no wheelchair-accessible entrance to a location, the medical or individual models of disability incorrectly identify the individual using the wheelchair as the problem, while the social model understands that the problem is the location’s lack of a ramp, elevator, or other wheelchair-accessible entrance.
• In 2019, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated, “Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation.” That is to say that while human biological variations or differences like our facial features, hair textures, skin colors, and more do exist, these differences are not what constitute race. Scientific research has conclusively determined that “race” is not genetic or biological, nor is it a naturally occurring phenomenon. Race is a human invention,
• Social constructions are the ways humans organize society to support their assumptions about humanity.
• How humans perpetuate, maintain, and recreate social constructs over time is called social reproduction.
• Children with one racialized parent and one white parent are often described as “half-Black,” “half-Indian,” etc., while it is assumed that the other unnamed “half” is white.
• It was best said by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
• The very definition of “beauty” that is still perpetuated today comes from the eighteenth-century fabrications of Christoph Meiners, which are falsely presented as fact.
• Crucially, however, that does not mean that everyone can personally experience racism—in systems of white supremacy, there is no racism against white people because white people are benefactors of racism. “Reverse racism,” or the notion of racism against white people, does not exist. This is because racism exists for the benefit and upliftment of white people. White people may experience other forms of oppression and discrimination like sexism, classism, and ableism, but these will be exacerbated for everyone else because of racism. It’s all connected.
• By as early as three years old, children will have absorbed and learned false conceptions of superiority and inferiority based on race.
• Microaggressions can be better understood as “death by a thousand cuts,” which can be detrimental to a person’s health, safety, opportunities, livelihood, personhood, and more.
• It is our responsibility to be aware of our racist behaviors, impulses, and thoughts, resolve them within ourselves intrapersonally, and take accountability for them and make amends when they affect others interpersonally.
• Following are the six most commonly occurring chromosome pairings that result in what we may understand as one aspect of sex traits. • X: Occurs in about 1 in 2,000–5,000 people • XY: Commonly understood as male • XYY: Occurs in about 1 in 1,000 people • XXXY: Occurs in about 1 in 18,000–50,000 people • XX: Commonly understood as female • XXY: Occurs in about 1 in 500–1,000 people
• Intersex children and adolescents are often subjected to medical violence in the form of invasive and unnecessary surgeries that prioritize conforming diverse bodies to an antiquated binary instead of basing care on the health, well-being, and autonomy of intersex people.
• Cisnormativity and sex binarism systematically harm everyone.
• It is important that we understand human variation as simply human variation, not as “anomalies” or “abnormalities,” because there is no such thing as a “normal” or “default” human body.
• “Gender is not what people look like to other people; it is what we know ourselves to be.”
• The gender binary, or the incorrect notion that there are two distinct and opposite genders, is a Eurocolonial invention that prescribes how we should exist, behave, interact, regulate, and organize ourselves.
• Our society must reflect the fact that human beings exist in infinite diversity and infinite combinations, and that this diversity extends to gender identity and expression.
• birth. (Trans means “on or to the other side of.”) As a cisgender woman I am harmed by sexism and patriarchy, yet I simultaneously benefit from cisgender privilege because as a cisgender person I am considered normative in society.
• While many of us may be most familiar with the gender identities of “man,” “woman,” and even “nonbinary,” there are myriad names for countless other gender identities, including genderfluid, genderqueer, bigender, demigender, and more.
• It is important to create space for complexity and nuance, because that is what is so beautiful about the human experience. Instead of thinking of gender as a spectrum with only an x-axis, think of it as a fully dimensional universe with constellations, galaxies, and nebulas representing the people who may share communities or similar methods of self-expression and self-understanding.
• As a teenager, I incorrectly thought that heterosexuality (or being straight) was the “default” and that anyone who was not heterosexual had to figure out their sexual orientation and had to tell others in their lives about it or risk “living a lie.”
• the complex nature of human sexuality cannot and should not be understood based entirely on previous sex acts, sex partners, and sexual experiences.
• We must recognize that using phrases like “hiding your truth” or “living a lie” and other euphemisms make malicious assumptions about why someone may not be out, public, or open about their LGBTQ+ identity to other people.
• If someone is sharing their innermost reality with us and we reject them, we discard part of their humanity.