Table of Contents
Introduction
Background of Study
The world is full of people with different identities such as race, sex, class, sexuality, or religion. Somehow, not everyone in society gets treated equally, many people experienced discrimination that is based on their identities. Roberts argued that discrimination happens because they have the identity that is considered as bad or inferior by a dominant group (qtd. in Okechukwu 3). For example, in many parts of the world, women had been treated unequally and have limited access to pursue education and get the right to work. It revealed that even in this decade, women are still the minority in powerful positions like politics or professional academics (Morgenroth and Ryan 671). Women also still be the victim of sexual abuse whether in workplaces, schools, universities or even in their own home (Fitzgerald 1). Women’s experiences of inequality are in need to be heard and to be discussed for the sake of finding solutions to their problems and a better world for them.
The aim to understand any woman’s life experiences should consist of the recognition that her life is not simply determined by her sex, but also her other identities such as race, ethnicity, class or sexual orientation (Rosida and Rejeki 135). Rosemarie Tong in her book, Feminist Thought, believed that every single identity of a woman takes parts in explaining her subordinate status (Tong 213). In other words, it is essential to observe deeply a woman’s identities that affect her life and not simply based on her being a woman.
This idea of understanding the experience of being a woman by not solely look at her gender was first offered by black feminists that aim for the liberation from the interlocking system of racism, sexism, and classism. Black feminist scholars realize that black women are “theoretically erased” from feminist that fought for equality and the anti-racist movement that fought against racism because both movements tend to prioritize the rights of their race and sex only (Crenshaw 139-140). In other words, while the anti-racist and the feminist group fought for their rights, they were unaware of the black women’s position that are prone to discrimination that is based on their sexuality and their racial identity.
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The discrimination that based on race, sex, and class often make most scholars and activist tend to rely on a “monist” approach, which means they positioned race, class, or gender as a single inequality and that each one of them occurs independently (Harnois 972). Deborah K. King, a black feminist scholar, criticized this in her article in 1988, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” She argued that separating racism, classism, and sexism to black women’s lives will lead to misunderstanding how systems of inequality operate and are experienced. She advocated for an alternative approach, that the disadvantages of black women experience by race, class, and gender are not simply additive, instead of these systems of inequality interacting with one another.
During the slavery era in America (1619-1865), both black men and women suffered the same physical labor and punishment as a slave. But black women were also suffered from the oppression that only applicable to women, which is rape. This case not only became the evidence that the black women’s slavery experiences are distinguished from the black male’s experiences, but also from the white women’s sexual oppression experiences. Because the sexual oppression of being a sex slave to white men “could only have existed in relation to racist and classist forms of domination” (King 47).
In her article King also argues that black women’s experiences with multiple jeopardy also came with “multiple consciousness” which is an awareness that there are multiple systems of inequality that work with and through each other. In other words, those who hold multiple minority statuses and whose lives are shaped by multiple jeopardy have an understanding of how inequalities work together to structure power and privilege (Harnois 973).
One of the films that depicted the life of black women is Hidden Figures that released in 2017. The film is based on a non-fiction historical book with the same title written by Margot Lee Shetterly and directed by Theodore Melfi with the help of Allison Schroeder as the screenplay writer (IMDB). This film took set in Hampton, Virginia, United States of America in the year 1961, around that time the slavery has ended but racial segregation was still happening.
