It is natural that society has expectations on how genders are supposed to act. Based on how the world portrays men and women in the media, women are expected to be seen as more reserved and act more feminine whereas men are seen as more forceful and masculine. These stereotypes are presented all the time in society and these traits in women and men is what most people would expect when meeting a man or woman. Gender Role expectations has become so prevalent in society that men and women who act outside of the norms would be viewed as more inferior and most likely face some sort of oppression. For example, if a man would be seen showing more feminine mannerisms, they are more likely to be seen as more inferior and not as “manly” like. People would also try to associate sexual orientation with masculine and feminine personality traits. If a woman were to be presenting more masculine mannerisms, people would most likely that she would be a lesbian. A couple years ago, I was trying to catch a bus ride home from my community college and I was just sitting down on a bench at the bus station. There was man who walked up to me trying to sell his mixtapes and played some of his music for me. I gave a listen, and we started talking about music and stuff. Later in the conversation, he suddenly stops talking and looks at the way I was sitting on the bench. I had my legs crossed sitting down and I he apparently viewed that as how a women would sit. He then asks me, “Why are you sitting like that?” and he also asks, “Do you really want to have that lifestyle?”. I told that this is just how I sit and he didn’t say anything afterwards. The fact that he had asked me those questions made me feel like I was different and that I should not be sitting the way I was because that’s not how men are supposed to sit. He was making the association of my feminine mannerism and my sexual orientation and make it seem like I’m choosing to have this lifestyle.

Have you ever wanted to insult people in a way that makes it impossible for them to call you out on it? Are backhanded compliments too direct for you? I have just the thing for you. It’s called a microaggression. You may be wondering; “Gee willikers! What makes something a microaggression? Why is it micro and not regular-sized or macro?” Well, allow me to explain.

A microaggression is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)”. This technique is usually used to demonstrate a person’s place in a sociological hierarchy without outright speaking about it.

This can happen in many different ways for many different people. I will now provide a couple of examples I have witnessed.

During one of the meetings for a hobby group, the members were discussing cosplay. One of the people mentions that they saw a person whose gender they were unable to assume. Because of this, they chose to say, “I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl so I just called it an it.” I would consider this a microaggression because their language implied that when a person does not conform to the gender norms engraved into their mind, this person would no longer consider the gender non-conforming person to be a human being. This is obviously bad because we are dehumanizing living human beings for very arbitrary reasons, and alienating trans people who hear ideas or statements such as this.

Another example would be from a friend. They were walking to school and someone, out of nowhere, began to touch their hair. This is unusual because the person had seen hair that was different from theirs, and decided to touch it without asking. The friend found this experience to be similar to that of an exotic animal in a petting zoo. It was also dehumanizing and uncomfortable. 😦

A question plain and simple but as it passes my ears it’s as complex as latin 

Like an ancient spell I don’t quite understand what it’s asking of me

Then I see as I feel my body contort and transmute under the syllables 

Bones crack and fur grows I am now beast relegated to glass enclosures and timed meals

I am watched daily to dangerous to be let free of my cage but just exotic enough to be entertaining 

It’s then that i’m released into open air where my fur is once more just hair my fangs once more become teeth I am human

Yet i feel that beast pawing at me under my flesh waiting to be released by that spell once more 

It was Christmas morning in San Francisco, California and my uncle was taking care of my aunt’s pets before coming over to my grandparent’s house to meet up with everyone for Christmas festivities. As my uncle was walking back to his car, one of the neighbors approached him to complain about how he couldn’t see down the hill to get out of his parking space because my uncle’s van was too big. (My uncle drives a large white utility van. It’s for his work and his only means of transportation.) The neighbor, living in an affluent area in San Francisco, immediately assumed my uncle didn’t live there and had no right to park his car there. He didn’t know my uncle was staying with family and that he had just come from the house next door. The neighbor backed up his demands that my uncle moves his car with several rude, racist, and classist comments to my uncle, including the rallying cry of racists everywhere, “go back to where you came from.” The kicker of the story is that my uncle is actually Native American (Navaho). This white man, who is living not only in a state, but a country that was stolen from Native Americans told a Native American man to “go back to where he came from.” This was Christmas morning and my uncle, who has a “let’s all get along temperament, was left feeling pretty down. The whole encounter made him feel like he was just viewed as an unwanted outsider, who could be treated as a lower life form who had no right to park in a particular neighborhood. This wasn’t the first time people have discriminated against him based on his appearance, nor was it the most dramatic and potentially life-threatening occurrence. The thing that really hurt was that it was Christmas morning and the racist Scrooge of the neighborhood had not discovered the true meaning of Christmas. People make assumptions, that’s normal, but feeling justified in acting in a hurtful and hostile manner simply because of these assumptions is wrong. That neighbor didn’t just assume my uncle was Hispanic, he also assumed that because of what my uncle looked like, he didn’t belong in such a wealthy area. The neighbor also assumed that he then had the right to order him to move his car and throw in a racist rant as well. Why? Why did the neighbor feel he belonged there and not my uncle? Why did he feel free to treat someone this way? Because America is a segregated country, not only by skin color but by income and since my uncle didn’t fit the norm of the neighborhood, this man decided to come outside of his multi-million-dollar house on Christmas morning, morph into the love child of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch and feel entitled to dump his racist vitriol on my friendly and kind uncle. The moral of this story is whatever your assumptions are, everyone, deserves to be treated with respect, and don’t be a racist bigot.

Everyone has different body images and their own definitions of body image. To me body image is my own opinions about my appearance. We all have our own body and we are the one controlling them to how they look like.

People tend to have stereotypes for body images. Some people think that women should be skinny, have long hair, wear heels, and have hourglass body figure; As for men, they should be muscular, tall, and have short hair. A lot of people are likely to get judged on their body image by their gender and race. Some of Asian’s beauty standards expect people to have slim figure, double eyelids, pale skin and melon-seed-like face shape.

Body image judgment has been causing health concerns to people, both mentally and physically. People get depressed and think they look bad because other people judged them on how they look. Some people may develop eating disorders from other people’s opinions. Just because you’re a little chubbier than other people doesn’t make you a bad person or anything. I hate how some parents be telling their kids that they should lose weight because they are fat. Like it’s your own child and you are hurting their feelings by calling them fat. We have full control of how our bodies look like.

I personally love food and I don’t workout at all. My mom would tell me to exercise more. I do agree with her because I do feel weak sometimes like when my back starts hurting from carrying my backpack around for a long time and my legs being sore after walking. But I still haven’t start exercising yet because I am also a lazy person. I don’t really care about what others think about my body image because I know humans are not perfect and there’s always some flaws about our bodies. I wish people will stop judging other people’s body and stop body shaming. Your body image is how YOU think and feel about YOUR body, NOT how others think about it. Be more confident about your body!

History of kings and queens, prosperous lands, and successful societies at peace. Riches from gold and silver to the richness in the soil that makes the fruits of labor even sweeter. History that was wanted by the fairest of skin. From prosperous lands to slaving over the white man’s lands the darkest of us have been turned into the outcasts of society. White skin is the standard while darker skin is considered a curse from God for our sins. But is it really a curse? Or is the true curse being “blessed with white skin “because no one on this earth has made life more difficult for black people than white society and because white is the societal standard black people are pushing and fighting over the approval of the white man. We change our hair to look like them, even going as far to bleach our skin, we speak differently to not come off as ghetto or too ethnic, we change our demeanor to not come off as the aggressor of an attack against us but yet we are still the villain of our own suffering. They sit back and watch as we destroy each other because of a problem they created.

Now see the world through our eyes. Did your parents have “the talk” with you? Not the talk about the birds and the bees, but thee talk. The talk about how you should act when being pulled over by a cop or being talked down to by an aggressive white person. The talk about how you can’t do what your white friends are doing or can’t be out past the streetlights because you live in a sundown town. The talk about how you are guilty until proven innocent in eyes of the law. That talk? The history that is engraved in our skin is deeper and filled with triumph, our veins pierce with gold but we have long since been whipped, beaten, and bled out of that motherland and placed onto a new land, long years of harsh slavery to be followed up by ongoing years of discrimination and violence and with all of that white society still tends to have it rain bullets in our already gaping wounds. The white man’s Constitutional Amendments say that we have the right to free speech, but is it really free speech when you are being beaten and killed for expressing your frustration over how this society treats you? We were told that we were no longer slaves because the white man’s constitution said so, so they made prisons for us, but at least it’s not slavery, right? And the reason I call it the white man’s Constitution is because it controls us. We are nothing unless the white man says we are something, we were slaves until the white man told us we weren’t. we were segregated and lynched until the white man-made that illegal. The info structure of our society has been written by white men for the benefit of white men and white women. We are not free until the white man tells us we are free and even then, we are not truly free. They are told to be afraid of us “aggressive, violent, suspicious dark character” but black people are tough that we should be afraid of because the power of a white person is as powerful as a nuke, destroying families, homes, and countries. 

“Women, Life, Freedom!” These are the chants being heard around Iran right now. Twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested for breaking strict hijab laws earlier this week – a few days later she died in police custody. This has sparked outrage in the country that hasn’t been seen since the protests of 2009. In 2009 it was a different story, and protests were silenced promptly with killings by the harsh regime. Today – we are connecting even faster with the advance of social media and communication systems, giving the world a glimpse of injustices all around. We are seeing the women of Iran dancing on the streets sans headscarves, clashing with morality police. We are seeing the men of Iran standing side-by-side with their women counterparts, dreaming of a better future for their children. For too long have the women of Iran, with their strong resolve and hope, been the victims of an inhumane system. These laws have been around for a little over 40 years. My parents escaped in 1980 because of the change in dynamic that came after the revolution – everyone was scared of what would happen next. My parents thought it would only be a few years before they could go back home –  they didn’t think they’d have to start whole new lives somewhere else. That wasn’t the case, however, and there are many people (members of the diaspora) just watching on the sidelines, hoping that one day they can go back home too. 

This is the phenomenology that I experience through my mom and dad, through the memories of when I was a kid, or through my family members who weren’t as “blessed” as we were to leave. Our land was taken over by vultures – who were only there to line their own pockets and suck out every last drop from the innocent. The cowards say it’s in the name of God, but these people aren’t Muslim or even religious for that matter – they’re thieves hiding behind a facade and destroying a beautiful culture and country in the process. If recent history shows anything, I think these protests will be on the news for a few days to be eventually forgotten – but I don’t think the will of the Iranian people is one to forget. They are hungry for change and I hope that we get to see that, at least in my lifetime. No government, no power, no faction, and no regime is stronger than the will of a woman – and with that, I am confident.