Patricia Leavy 
Privilege Through the Looking-Glass [PDF ebook] 

Privilege Through the Looking-Glass is a collection of original essays that explore privilege and status characteristics in daily life. This collection seeks to make visible that which is often invisible. It seeks to sensitize us to things we have been taught not to see. Privilege, power, oppression, and domination operate in complex and insidious ways, impacting groups and individuals. And yet, these forces that affect our lives so deeply seem to at once operate in plain sight and lurk in the shadows, making them difficult to discern. Like water to a fish, environments are nearly impossible to perceive when we are immersed in them. This book attempts to expose our environments. With engaging and powerful writing, the contributors share their personal stories as a means of connecting the personal and the public. This volume applies an intersectional perspective to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, education, and ableness converge, creating the basis for privilege and oppression. Privilege Through the Looking-Glass encourages readers to engage in self and social reflection, and can be used in a range of courses in sociology, social work, communication, education, gender studies, and African American studies. Each chapter includes discussion questions and/or activities for further engagement. “Privilege Through the Looking-Glass offers a varied and profound examination of how privilege functions as the underside of power. This is a powerful and important book about inequality, identity, agency, and the challenge of addressing difference as part of a democratic ethos in a time of growing authoritarianism all over the world. Every educator should read this book.” – Henry A. Giroux, Professor, Mc Master University “A courageous volume that blends theory, personal experiences, and reflections on contemporary debates over identity. This is a book that is more about the politics of identity than identity politics. It is a powerful testament to theurgency of understanding privilege and deserves to be read widely.” – Peter Mc Laren, Distinguished Professor, Chapman University “Privilege Through the Looking-Glass unmasks the casual ‘isms’ that suppress the best aspects of our humanity, by assembling a powerful and honest collection of parables. Poignant and unflinching, the contributors eschew to the cloak of objectivism to give the hard truth about privilege as a social ill, and the collective responsibility of the conscious community to confront all forms of oppression… this book has lessons for anyone with the spirit to explore better ways to be themselves and relate to others.” – Ivory A. Toldson, Professor, Howard University, and Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of Negro Education Patricia Leavy, Ph.D., is an award-winning independent sociologist and best-selling author.

Содержание

Acknowledgements; Introduction to Privilege Through the Looking-Glass; Unpacking (Un)Privilege or Flesh Tones, Red Bones, and Sepia Shades of Brown; Men Hug Me at Work: Juxtaposing Privilege with Everyday Sexism; The Voice of White Male Power and Privilege: An Autoethnography; I Am My Grandmother’s Child: Becoming a Black Woman Scholar; Angryblackscholar: Unpacking White Privilege as a Black Female Unapologetically Claiming and Asserting My Right to Live My Dreams; My Responsibility to Change; Black Here, Oburni There: Differentials in Race and Privilege in the United States and West Africa; Buying a Better World? The Intersections of Consumerism, Class, and Privilege in Global Women’s Rights Activism; Reflections on Rural: Why Place Can Be Privilege and How “Common Sense” Understandings Hurt Rural Students; Being a (Gay) Duck in a Family of (Heterosexual) Swans; Swirling Shades of Right and Wrong; Male or Female? Everyday Life When the ‘Or’ Is ‘And’; Transcending Gender Binarization: The Systematic Policing of Genderfluid Identity and Presentation; Titanium Tits; On Not Being a Victoria’s Secret Model: A Critical Analysis of My Struggle with Social Comparison and Objectification; The Ephemeral Passport; It’s a Small World: The Metabletics of Size; The Pen Stops; Responsive Stories: Sharing Evocative Tales from the Inside, Out; Death by a Thousand Cuts: From Self-Hatred to Acceptance; About the Contributors.