For a couple of weeks, I have noticed something that has been circling my life, that something is oppression.
Everything I see in the world has been shaped by this thing that no one ever wants to talk about because it is something that has been portrayed as scary and only happens in “our minds”. When people finally go out and speak against this oppression, they go out into the street and put their bodies out on the line. Something that people do not think about as much is that oppression puts people’s bodies on the line every single day of their life.
Oppression is about making sure that the ideology in power stays in power by keeping others under them. In my opinion limiting education is the greatest type of oppression, by limiting education you are limiting the understanding someone has of their own mind. How their mind grows to understand itself, understand other people, and the thing that holds its mind… it’s body. The more I became in tune with my our mind, the more I understood my body, and the connection they have with each other. By maintaining oppression through the denial of education, we are limiting people’s’ understanding of their connection between their minds and bodies.
I believe that through oppression, people have been taught to hate their bodies. If only I wasn’t this color, weight, size, gender… if only I was not different from those bodies that people in power say are perfect, maybe I would not live the oppressed life I live. Maybe I would not be putting my body through amounts of stress in order to live up to the standard that someone with a different body has put on me?
Unruly Bodies 
Hello Shaysua,
Thank you for this post. I completely could relate to this, especially when you wrote “people have been taught to hate their bodies.” in my out I wrote about how I have had a curvy body since puberty and my parents would always dictate what I could wear and what i couldn’t. However, My younger sister who isn’t very curvy was allowed to wear things I wasn’t because she had smaller assets and to my parents wasn’t “looking to grown for her age” (note: we’re a couple months apart). Even now I tell myself “I want smaller boobs” but to be honest I know there is nothing wrong with my body.
Anyway, there is one post going around on social media that says “Tell Black girls they are beautiful, they shouldn’t have to wait until their in college to believe it for themselves.” Your post reminded me how a lot of young black girls due to society and oppression believe they are not beautiful by specific standards. So it really hit home when you wrote “Maybe I would not be putting my body through amounts of stress in order to live up to the standard that someone with a different body has put on me?” I thought it was a great sentence and it really hit home and it is a question that I will be asking myself from now on.