Privilege & Power

In this video, photojournalist Ben DeSoto discusses "Understanding Poverty," an exhibit featuring images of people and communities affected by poverty and homelessness.

In this poem, the speaker explores how our culture would be lacking—in people, in music, in movements, in contributions—without contributions of African Americans.

In this poem, the speaker--who is Native American--responds to a series of unspoken discriminatory questions. The reader can deduce the missing questions based on the speaker's responses.

In this poem, a black woman carefully analyzes her interaction with a white waitress, whose actions, although civil, are smoldering with superiority.

In this excerpt, Virginia Woolf declares that any talented woman born in the 16th, 17th, 18th or even 19th centuries would have been so hindered from sharing her gifts due to her sex--and if she somehow overcame this obstacle, her name would not have been tied to her work.

Although her husband died in the September 11 attack, Arissa is targeted for being Muslim. In this excerpt, she is held up by a group of men who berate her and threaten to kill her until they realize she is pregnant.

In this video, young people reflect on society's rules for what males and females can and cannot do.

This graphic from Mother Jones magazine depicts income inequality in the United States.

This excerpt from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto establishes the dichotomy between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which is merely a new relationship of oppressor vs. oppressed in the history of class struggles, as Marx and Engels argue that all societies have had these kinds of contending classes.

This excerpt focuses on the lives of African American students during Freedom Summer. After reading Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in class in 1963, students in main character C.J.'s school are asked to share their dreams at an assembly.

Rosie Molinary describes how she felt as a Latina teenager in the United States, caught between disparate and unrealistic beauty standards.

In this essay, the author gives a short history of race riots, showing how they were originally organized by whites in an effort to show dominance over African Americans, particularly in the South.

In this blog post, Houska emphasizes the enduring spirit of the Native American people and their culture, outlines the group’s past and present obstacles and calls to action young Native Americans to carry on the torch of resilience.

In this blog post, the author details the internal struggle she feels when coming to terms with the bloody heritage she shares with conquistadors like Christopher Columbus and the pride she takes in remembering, embracing and living out her cultural history.

In 1830, the government began systematically removing all Native Americans from the Eastern United States. The removal of Cherokees from Georgia in 1838 has become known as the Trail of Tears. But there were, in fact, many such trails, as the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and other tribes were forced to abandon their homelands.

In this essay, the author identifies vague terminology used by the United States government during World War II to describe their actions toward Japanese Americans and outlines terms that would more appropriately describe the government's actions.

This graphic from Mother Jones depicts income inequality in the United States.

In this essay, the author describes the Nativism movement, capturing the ways in which it dips and surges based on immigration cycles.

McIntosh's article details the ways in which white people—male and female—are given unacknowledged advantages. She focuses on situations in which skin-color is the dominant priveleging factor (over class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location) but acknowledges that many of these attributes are interconnected.

“The desert-dwelling Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians were uprooted from their ancestral lands. For decades, they were cheated of the property rights deeded to them by the U.S. government, and then subject to restrictive deed provisions. Not until the 1980s were they able to develop their own land in Palm Springs, and only recently have they begun to restore the springs revered by their ancestors. Tribal council member Anthony J. Andreas III battles the severe mental health problems that afflict the traumatized tribe by reviving ancestral practices. Traditional Bird Songs and pottery help today’s youth draw strength from the tribe’s sources of spiritual resilience.”