It's Our Responsibility

            "Responsibility to yourself." Adrienne Rich makes this the central theme of "Claiming and Education". She demands that we go out and get the education that is rightfully ours. We shouldn't let our faculty, peers, or in her words "depersonalizing and cheapening pressures" hinder us from claiming what is ours. I like the idea of an educational contract between the professor and the student. I think that this illustrates the idea that students have rights and no matter their gender they shouldn’t be infringed upon. What I interpret Rich’s idea to be responsible to yourself to mean is that you have to hold people accountable. You shouldn’t let someone get away with saying a sexist comment or approaching you in an undesired way because of your gender. You have a responsibility to demand the respect you deserve and create your own opinions and ideas. You have a responsibility to be you.

This article is eye opening in the sense that I didn’t realize how deeply our society is affected by gender bias. The article by Rich and an article by Alison Coil, “Why Men Don’t Believe the Data on Gender Bias”, both supports the idea that even the sciences can be bias by not taking into consideration what makes individuals different, such as their skin color or gender. Coil’s article goes on to say that women have to work more than twice as hard as men just to be considered “equal”.  “Demanding Kinder Classrooms Doesn’t Make You a Snowflake”, by Daniel Justice also agrees with the idea of equality and fairness and respect in the classroom. These articles all seem to flow with one another, one not out rightly disagreeing with the other, showing a consensus about how fairness is displayed in society. Equality is something that shouldn’t have to be fought for, it’s an inborn right that everyone males, females, black people, white people, Hispanics, and so on, deserve to have.

This article is challenging the idea that “I can sit back and let what happens happen and it’ll be okay.” I realize that not everything, if nothing, in life will be handed to me on a silver platter and I have to fight for the things that I deserve, things that could be considered a basic human right, I have to fight for. I have to fight against the stereotypes of young black women. To me it feels like black women are expected to get pregnant young, drop out of school, and/or have very low professional goals. I find Rich’s article about responsibility most interesting because she talks about these assumptions people have of women and she specifically tells us to defy those ideas. She tells us not to take the easy way out and that, in summary, we are just as able as men.


 



-Tatiana F.

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