Margarita: Blog Assignment #3

One article that stood out to me was "American's Have a Different Attitude" by Yen Le Espiritu. She discusses how Filipino women view White "American" women as sexually immoral because White women are promiscuous and don't value their virginity. In the Filipino culture, women are taught to value family and be very family-oriented and to have sexual restraint. Saving sexual acts for marriage is highly valued in the Filipino culture, so it shocks them to come to the US and find that White American women are so liberal and behave differently, "they have sex without marrying. They want to do their own thing," claims a Filipino man stationed in the Phillipines, looking for a wife. I personally feel it is both a sexist, and a racist remark to claim that White American women are immoral simply because they may or may not have had sex before marriage. It is stereotyping all American women as promiscuous and devalues them. While reading this article, I began to think about racism from different points of view. I felt as though we have grown to accept racism against White people, but only towards White poeple. We stereotype White people as selfish, uncaring, wealthy people who think they are better than us, but we fail to see our own racism in thinking about White people in that way.

The song presented in section, "Everybody is a little bit racist" by Avenue Q, came to mind while reading this story. I feel like we have an automatic reaction when someone accuses us of being racist, to say "Oh no, I don't hate Black people!" We fail to see that there exists this double standard that we are we are solidifying when we accept people's comments against White individuals. It's as if there existed an exception to racism, as if it were no possible to be racist against White people.

In her article "Age, Race, Class, and Sex," Audre Lorde focuses on the rejection of simple dichotomies. She claims that most movements fail to see beyond their simplistic oppositions. the Women's Movement, for instance, only focuses on women's empowerment. It does not take into consideration the ethnicity or race of a woman or her sexuality, claims Lorde. "White women ignore their built-in privilege of Whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone." As to sexuality, most cultures valued sex in different ways. In Espiritu's article, the Filipino women would see the Women's Movement as White American women's form of deviance and wanting to sleep around. I do believe in equality, but I also understand that different cultures have different values and that we should not be too quick to stereotype everyone who fits a simple category. Everyone is different. Just as there are White women who are promiscuous, there are also White women who save themselves for marriage and carry similar values as "traditional" Filipino women. And just as there are virgin Filipino women, there are promiscuous Filipino women who do not value sex as important enought to wait for marriage.

I do not believe "situated knowledge" is an ipediment to seeing the world clearly because I think we are all entitled to knowing some "history." If we want the world to be a better place, we need to know what it is that we need to change. We need to understand why segregation occurs, why there exist prejudices. Some things we learn to be the way they are, and some of us may be comfortable with that. Like certain stereotypes, we do not challenge them even though we know they are just stereotypes. I think with situated knowledge, we are more esily comfortable with things, but that doesn't mean we can't see things clearly.