Recognizing intersectional oppressions involves awareness of how individuals, including ourselves, may benefit from and challenge unjust systems.
In this unit, we ask you to think about how systems of privilege and discrimination affect people’s lives, including your own. Ask yourself if you benefit from or push back on these unfair systems. How do race, gender, class, and other identities matter? We also encourage you to consider how you can work with people who are different from you to create change.
Some of the content in this curriculum includes topics that could be uncomfortable for some. As you engage with this content, we encourage you to take care of yourself in whatever way works for you.
This unit aligns with the following standards and concepts:
Learning For Justice
- Identity 5: Students will recognize traits of the dominant culture, their home culture and other cultures and understand how they negotiate their own identity in multiple spaces.
- Diversity 10: Students will examine diversity in social, cultural, political and historical contexts rather than in ways that are superficial or oversimplified.
- Justice 12: Students will recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g., discrimination).
- Justice 14: Students will recognize that power and privilege influence relationships on interpersonal, intergroup and institutional levels and consider how they have been affected by those dynamics.
- Justice 15: Students will identify figures, groups, events and a variety of strategies and philosophies relevant to the history of social justice around the world.
Critical Consciousness
Critical Motivation: The perceived capacity to effect social and political change by individual and/or collective activism. It follows that people will be much more likely to engage in critical action if they feel that they can create change.
CASEL 5 Social Emotional Learning Competencies (Equity Elaborated)
Social Awareness: Involves the ability to take the perspective of those with the same and different backgrounds and cultures and to empathize and feel compassion. It also involves understanding social norms for behavior in diverse settings and recognizing family, school, and community resources and supports.