When I was in my freshman year of college, I experienced post-traumatic stress for the first time. It shouldn’t have happened. There wasn’t a reason for it to happen, but it did. He never touched me and he never hurt me physically, he never even technically did anything that could be called abuse. Maybe I could have said he was harassing me, but even making the case for that would have been questionable. I allowed his actions to take place. But when I tell you I felt unsafe, I mean I felt really unsafe. I didn’t want to leave my dorm because I saw him in the dining halls just outside the Netherlands. I changed my route getting back from class because he caught me once walking on the Netherspan alone. When I had to sit in class, wondering where he would sit, I could feel myself overheating and my focus wavering. Every time now I see someone tall wearing a baseball cap, I flinch.

Last year, I got into my first relationship. I started dating a girl that I was best friends with. I thought it would be a great experience, but it wasn’t; it was toxic. Now we’re broken up and I still have to see her all the time. Seeing her reminds me of the low point I was in in my life when we were together. All last semester, we were in classes together. Now she’s still in my clubs and we share a lot of mutual friends. I can’t go anywhere on campus without seeing her. I can’t even get away from her now that we’re home. This isn’t a form of abuse. I can’t go to the Title IX offices to get her out of my life, but it is trauma that stays fresh every day. It is torture. 

This relationship, while it’s over now, affects my life still. It affects my education. It affects my friendships and my life at school. This relationship has haunted me. But we don’t talk about the way that people are triggers for us. We don’t talk about the fact that things that aren’t abuse can still be trauma.

Lynette Adkins uses her YouTube video “Being Black at a PWI” to start a conversation surrounding the intersectionality and the pressures put upon the black community, specifically in being asked to be an advocate for their entire identity group. Here, Lynette Adkins tackles this project of interviewing black students at University of Texas as a fellow student seeking answers about the experiences of her peers. We can tell that she is evaluating these circumstances from a level playing field because of the style she chooses to interview in. She constructs a very hands-off approach to her interview, allowing the answers of the interviewees to be the focal point of her video.

Here, Adkins allows her purpose to be giving voice to the black students of University of Texas. She addresses this purpose right at the outset of her video as she begins with an interviewee saying, “People keep on talking about how like Austin is like a really liberal place and it’s really diverse, but it’s not,” (Adkins 0:01). With this introduction, she attempts to dispel any of the misconceptions people have about the Austin, Texas area and allows this situation to speak more generally for the countless other universities that attempt to use diversity as a plug for incoming students while grossly under-delivering on their promise. In touching upon topics of how marginalized identities overlap and intersect, Adkins video becomes a conversation not just for the white students of her school, but for all of the students sharing space with these people of color. This is best illustrated when one of the interviewees says, “The gay community is very racist…and the black community is very homophobic…it’s like where do you fit in?” (Adkins 4:17). In including these statements, not only is Adkins showing that her purpose in creating this piece is to represent authentic black experiences at a white school, but also to show the ways in which even within already marginalized communities, internalized biases and prejudice can persist. By allowing this into her conversation, the audience therefore opens up to include the people in these marginalized spaces as well.

Adkins chose YouTube as the medium for this piece because it not only provides a platform to reach a larger audience, but the piece also takes on a new tone when displayed in a video format. The interview and response style allows for more candid, less scripted and edited responses, making it appear to be a more slice-of-life genre of video. It also allows for people to better connect with the topic of identity when you are able to see the person on screen talking about their experiences being marginalized. In putting a face behind the words, it helps to elevate the purpose of black people’s voices being heard in a space where they are a racial minority.

In Martinez’s text “Critical Race Theory Counterstory as Allegory: A Rhetorical
Trope to Raise Awareness About Arizona’s Ban on Ethnic Studies,” she highlights the way in which people can become undermined by using the allegory of a woman named Rosette Benitez. Rosette Benitez is an esteemed professor and a “pioneer in the field of Biomedical Engineering,” yet her identities as a woman of color have proved that these qualifications are often not enough to put her in the same league as her peers (Martinez 2). This is especially underscored through her relationship with the conservative senator, Russell Borne. Though her project working with immortality is intensely valuable to the society at large, she is under-credited and sought to be excluded from the group that receives the treatment she herself worked so hard to create.

Throughout this story, Benitez faces a lot of bigotry, especially that directed at her by Borne. Many of the initiatives that Borne wanted to put into action were considered “‘anti-chicano,'” and Rosette’s cousin, Alejandra, had a personal vendetta against him as she considered him hugely racist (Martinez 5). Though at first Benitez thought that Alejandra was overreacting, this proved not to be true as Borne opted for wanting to completely dismantle bi-lingual education for Spanish-English speakers, restrict Hispanic/Latinx cultural practices to the home, and to remove immigrant-related history from all textbooks (Martinez 6). Essentially, Borne wanted to erase the voices and identities of Spanish speakers in the United States. At first, Benitez did not take issue with these seemingly radical motions, that was, until Borne took away her voice as well. Not only did Borne refuse to refer to her as “Dr.” and tell her to dumb down her language for a more general audience, Borne also gets all of the press and attention for her ideas regarding immortality, and once they turn her project against her, they then ask her to spearhead the campaign supporting it (Martinez 11).

Martinez uses this narrative to give voice to the real problems that people of color face in everyday life. She proves here through her allegory that people of color are constantly forced to play by the rules of people in more privileged positions and sacrifice their own moral judgments at times in order to get ahead. Not only are they often times spoken over, but they do not receive the proper attention or credit for the work they have done in generating ideas and being innovators and people of influence. Martinez is able to express this frustration through her story because even though Benitez does everything right and doesn’t make waves, something that people in minority groups are told to do all the time, in the end, she is still, for lack of a better term, screwed over.

Martinez, Aja Y. “Critical Race Theory Counterstory as Allegory: A Rhetorical Trope to Raise Awareness About Arizona’s Ban on Ethnic Studies.” Across the Disciplines: Anti-Racist Activism: Teaching Rhetoric and Writing, 7 Aug. 2013.

In Min-Zhan Lu’s text “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle,” Lu describes her experiences growing up in China in a family that spoke predominantly English at home. From an early age, she was taught by her family that English was what made her father successful. She therefore began to equate her ability to speak English with her status as a member of a higher class of society. This ability to speak English set her apart from her peers, and Lu reflects on her experience speaking English with her teacher in her second grade classroom in saying, “I began to take pride in my ability to speak it” (Lu 438). At first, her experience with English was a positive one because it made her feel intelligent. However, when the 1949 Communist Revolution took hold of China, Lu became increasingly aware of how her status negatively impacted how others viewed her. It was then that English became a shameful, secret experience for her.

She then felt that her identity was something she had to hide. She constantly became aware of what she was writing and how she was writing it, censoring herself at every step of the process, and in doing so, losing her own voice. She has turned her own experience into a lens with which she should approach her own work as an educator. Even still, she sees the way in which the pressures she felt at the time manifest themselves into problems her students face. She recounts her experience, saying, “I am especially concerned with the way some composition classes focus on turning the classroom into a monological scene for the students’ reading and writing” (Lu 447). She feels that in instructing students to think in one way, it limits their ability to think for themselves and to generate new thoughts. In this way, they are cut off and removed from themselves. This type of learning leaves no room for self-expression and no room for originality or voice. They become one of a hive mind.

In my own educational experience, I cannot say that I have ever experienced anything to the degree that Lu has. Growing up a white girl in an upper-middle class suburban area (which was also predominantly white) afforded me many more privileges and freedoms with my language than some have. I am also fortunate enough to have grown up in a family where questions and free-thinking were always encouraged. It was seldom that my brother and I were ever told what to do without room for explanation. There was always, at least to a certain extent, an open dialogue that occurred between my parents and me. That being said, there were still certain environments in which I felt that my voice was not valued, that this idea of creative, free thinking was the sign of something incorrect or morally wrong. Surprisingly, it was often in the areas where I believed I could be the most creative that I felt the most constrained. In my art class in elementary school, I was told not to include certain images in my drawing because they were not conventionally attractive. I was instead to model my art after what the teacher had shown us. In poetry classes I was told that I must stick to a form, and when my words did not align themselves with those conventions, I was told to rework them. In argumentative essays, I was told not to use personal pronouns or biased language. Most recently, I took up writing a blog for Her Campus, a space in which I felt I would be able to express my opinions and my personal feelings towards the music I was writing about, but I was told that I had to maintain the voice of the chapter. None of these conventions are inherently wrong, and I understand the reason for their being there, but it has made me come to wonder what we see so non-credible about the personal voice.

Lu, Min-Zhan. “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle.” JStor, 1987.

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I feel that my heritage language is fairly similar to the way that I represent myself in positions where I have to be more professional. I think that the main difference depends on the audience I have. Sometimes, even in a professional setting, especially at my job as a peer Writing Tutor, I will find myself slipping into a more colloquial tone in order to better present myself to the student I’m working with. I feel particularly that I will use certain phrases or styles of colloquial language in certain groups of friends that emphasizes a certain part of my personality so that I am more easily approachable and relatable, whereas among other groups, I may feel much more comfortable speaking at a higher, more intellectually-driven level. I feel that while I don’t necessarily conflate intelligence and colloquial language, I do tailor my own language based on the amount I want to appear intelligent to a group of people. I believe that these patterns in my speech are dialectic. As the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCC) defines it, “A dialect is a variety of a language used by some definable group. Everyone has a personal version of language, an idiolect, which is unique, and closely related groups of idiolects make up dialects. By custom, some dialects are spoken. Others are written. Some are shared by the community at large. Others are confined to small communities, neighborhoods, or social groups” (CCC 5). In these varying social groups, I realize that I have completely different dialects. Even among close friends, I don’t talk to one person the same as I do another, but I still consider all of the ways in which I speak to be authentic to myself and my personality. 

As a white female student, I’ve never been othered by the ways in which I take agency of my language. When I speak informally in the classroom amongst my teachers and peers, no one ever bats an eye. Even most of the time when I speak more casually in the workplace, it is not seen as an issue. My whiteness affords me a privilege over my language that many people of color do not have. I have never been told that my English needs to be fixed. 

As a Writing Tutor, I have worked with numerous international students whose first language is not English. A number of them have explicitly stated that their professors have sent them to the writing center to “fix their English,” and when reviewing professor comments with the student, I will often see far more comments about the student’s lack of grasp of standard academic grammar rules than comments about the ideas presented in their work. Most of these students I’ve met with have clear ideas that fully support the arguments that they are making, but they are made to feel as though that they are not as competent or intelligent because they are still adapting to a new language they are being required to write in. I will often be asked “Is this good?” which feels to me like such an arbitrary question, because of course, the work is good, but this is often not what the student means. What they really want to know is “is this living up to my professor’s expectations?” which is a much more difficult question to navigate. 

Zitkala-sa’s narrative acts to subvert the ideas represented in Pratt’s text because she underscores the ignorance and lack of understanding that the white people had towards herself and her people. While Pratt totes the idea that whiteness is equal to being civilized, she constructs a story that paints a very different image. In her passage The Land of Red Apples, Zitkala-sa describes her encounters with white children by saying, “ Directly in front of me, children who were no larger than I hung themselves upon the backs of their seats, with their bold white faces toward me. Sometimes they took their forefingers out of their mouths and pointed at my moccasined feet. Their mothers, instead of reproving such rude curiosity, looked closely at me, and attracted their children’s further notice to my blanket. This embarrassed me, and kept me constantly on the verge of tears” (Zitkala-sa). In this passage, she shares with her audience the blatant disrespect that was shown to her by the white children and her own discomforts with their behavior. In this way, Zitkala-sa proves that it is in fact she who is the more civilized individual. The other children around her were making a spectacle of her as if she were some animal at the zoo. The fact that the adults also encouraged this behavior from their children goes to show that they did not hold any value to Zitkala-sa’s feelings and that they did not treat her like a person. The most interesting part of this exchange, however, was that Zitkala-sa felt embarrassed not of herself, but for the other children. To her, they exhibited behaviors and practices that would be seen as shameful in her own culture.

This story also reflects the very real presence of violence against the Native American people. It shows that the intent of the Carlisle school was not to make Native American people more human, but instead to dehumanize them. In the section The Cutting of My Long Hair, Zitkala-sa expresses that “Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!” (Zitkala-sa). This ritual of cutting hair was something that brought shame upon the people of her culture, and therefore, to have her own hair cut unjustly felt like the most dehumanizing act of all. She was not able to prove her bravery or cowardice; that choice was taken from her. In this way, instead of associating the education and “civilization” she was receiving from the Carlisle school with being made more human or more learned, she could only associate the experience with embarrassment and degradation. The mere act of cutting one’s hair as punishment is also an assault on their person. She did not make the choice to make herself looked more Americanized and it was not a way for her to feel agency by fitting in, it was simply a way of taking away her agency.

Zitkala-sa. “American Indian Stories.” American Indian Stories., digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/stories.html.

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In Paolo Freire’s first chapter of his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire discusses the important differences between privilege and oppression and where the lines between the two exist. This chapter explores the power dynamics of the oppressor and the oppressed, highlighting the fact that often the oppressor does not realize they are creating a state of oppression. Freire discusses the concepts of humanization and dehumanization, arguing that while humans can build each other up and create a greater human experience, only non-human entities can dehumanize others.

Towards the end of this chapter, Freire touches upon how oppression often becomes an integral part of the oppressed’s identity. Freire refers to this as the “existential duality” in which the oppressed become “themselves and the oppressor whose image they have internalized” (Freire 61). In becoming so entwined with the oppressor in their identity, the oppressed often lose sight of their identity outside of their oppression. Freire calls for the action of separation, however, this is easier said than done. As a part of one’s personal history, oppression will always remain a part of one’s identity because it shapes their worldview and their actions. However, those that only involve themselves with their oppression and take it on as their sole identity can become overwhelmed by this image. In this way, Freire believes that “people must re-examine themselves constantly” in order to fully develop their position as both a “proprietor of revolutionary wisdom” and as a human being (Freire 60).

Freire also brings up the fact that it often falls on the oppressed to educate those more privileged than themselves. He believes that “Only through comradeship with the oppressed can the converts understand their characteristic ways of living and behaving” (Freire 61). In this way, a privileged person can only see how privileged they are in comparison to their less-advantaged friends. Because of this reality, the less privileged person will almost always have to teach those more privileged than them to see the inequalities and disparities that exist.

Freire’s concepts can be examined in almost any minority community, including the LGBTQ+ community. From my own personal experience as a member of the queer community, I have experienced first hand the ways in which identity and oppression co-exist. In my freshmen year at Hofstra University, I wanted to become involved with the campus GSA, the Pride Network. As a bi woman, I was excited to find a place that I felt I could freely express my identity and meet like-minded people; however, the reality was much different than what I had envisioned. In this space, I met many people who used their experience with oppression as a queer person as their only apparent identifying characteristic, and while many of them were perfectly nice, well-meaning people, I found it hard to connect with them. There were also several of these people who used their identity as an opposition to hetero-normative society. To put it casually, the space felt cliquey and negatively charged. I heard a lot of joking comments about straight and cis-gendered people, and while I myself was still a part of the community, as a bi person, I felt ostracized, like I wasn’t gay enough to fit the precedent. In a space where I had believed I could connect with others over my identity, I began to feel more cut off from them.

In some ways, my experience lines up with Freire’s position; however, people most certainly do dehumanize other. People, even those in our own communities, are most often our oppressors.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.