Week 1

Vance Lockmiller
A02
Week 1

After thinking about the reading,  Fight the Power written about Professor Valverde's life, I quickly came to realize how powerful the stories in the reading really were.    This reading kept displaying the many times Professor Valverde encountered discrimination in some form in her life.  A couple examples include racial and gender - based discrimination.  Although this reading did bring to the forefront a real life example of discrimination and mistreatment from peers, this is not the first time an issue like this was presented to me.  While working as an IM Soccer ref here at UC Davis, all employees were emailed an online program to help educate us on sexual violence and sexual harassment prevention; not the same issues present in the reading but I still consider this a similar topic.  At first I just thought the department was required to give us a training each quarter about different topics and the training wouldn't necessarily be important.  But as I went through the online training, I started to realize this issue could occur at a campus like UC Davis.  Sure enough towards the end of the training real life examples of racial and or gender based discrimination were presented to us.  The worst part was, they had all occurred at UC Davis.  Being a white male, I haven't had exposures to any sort of discrimination at any point in my life but I have been shown first and second hand accounts of discrimination. It is not fair in any way and no person deserves to be harassed, especially in an environment where we all came to get a higher level education.


I thought this was a great image because of the simple message it conveys.

My question for this weeks reading topic is: Why do select people feel it is acceptable to discriminate against others?  Could the world become educated enough so one day discrimination does not exist?

References:
1. Is it Discrimination? Most Common Employee Issues. UELG. (2015, January 14). Retrieved April 05, 2017, from http://www.sanfranciscoemploymentattorneys.net/california-discrimination-employee-issues/
2.Valverde, K. (2013). Fight the Tower: A Call to Action for Women of Color in Academia. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 12 (2)