The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

What memory do you have of an incident when you experienced bias, prejudice, and/or oppression, or witnessed someone else as the target of bias, prejudice, and/or oppression? 

When I think about an incident when I experienced bias prejudice or oppression I think about when I wasn’t encouraged to try out for the JV Boys soccer team at my high school.  When I was in high school there was no Girls JV Soccer team.  I was in my last year of Barrens Soccer league because of my age and I really didn’t want to give up playing soccer because it was my favorite sport.  I had the ability to play with the males that were my age.  I had proven it because I had been playing on an all almost boys team for Barrens league for several years.  I could play just as well or even better than the best of them.  Yet, although I had expressed a desire to continue to play no one encouraged me to go out and try out for the boys’ team.  Many of the responses I got when I expressed this desire to continue to play soccer was “Why don’t you try out for the girls field hockey team?” or there was no real response at all.  To me this was a microinsult because it made me feel inferior to boys because I was a girl (Laureate Education, 2011)(Sue, 2011).  

Was it because I was a girl and they thought I wasn’t good enough because I was a girl or was it because they felt I wouldn’t be welcomed on the team because I was a girl?  To this day I wish I had the courage to just have gone out for the boys team even without the “approval” of others. 

In what way(s) did the specific bias, prejudice and/or oppression in that incident diminish equity?

This incident diminished equity because it made me feel that my opportunities were not as abundant as those of the boys at my high school. The girls were “stuck” playing certain sports as well as the boys no matter what your interests or talents were. 

What feelings did this incident bring up for you?

This incident made me feel trapped, as if my life was going to be run by my gender and the opportunities in my life were going to be determined by my gender. 

What and/or who would have to change in order to turn this incident into an opportunity for greater equity?

I feel that they either need to create a girls soccer team or make the soccer team unisex and advertise try outs for both boys and girls.  It may have been that I could have tried out for the soccer team but because it was never advertised as unisex most people thought that girls were not allowed to try out. 

Laureate Education (Producer). (2011). Microaggressions in everyday life[Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Sue, Derald Wing. Microaggressions in Everyday Life : Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley, 2010. p 160. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/waldenu/Doc?id=10366615&ppg=186 

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