Identity

I really enjoyed reading the part of our text this week that explained explicitly what identity and group membership is and how it affects people. The sections with examples of how privilege works and why people are usually not aware of their dominant group membership status were especially eye-opening. Self-concept and how it is affected by critical life events also was really interesting to me. This week, I wanted to update this blog with an interview with my wonderful Grandmother Waynette Miles. We are very close and she is an extraordinary woman. She told me once that she took a career aptitude test post-retirement, and that it actually told her that she should be a social worker! When she had young children, she had a multiple foster children that she cared for in her home for many years. I thought I would talk to her about her individual identities and how events in her life affected the way she saw herself and the world. Since she can speak from experience on issues like civil rights, I think that this discussion will be extremely valuable not only to myself personally, but also to the class as we delve into the history of oppression.

Interview:

Name: Waynette Miles

Gender: Female

Age: 67

Race: Caucasian/ Native American

Ethnicity: Irish/Welsh/ Native American

National Origin: United States

Ability: Physically capable of pretty much anything (My fantastic Grandma does water aerobics twice a week!).

Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

Religion: Christian Protestant Non-Denominational

Class: Working Class

Critical life events

Q: How do you feel that marriage changed how you perceived yourself?

A: Marriage made me realize that I had to mature a whole lot. I wasn't very mature when I got married the first time, but I thought I was. It was just that everyone else in my age group was getting married and having kids around the same time in life that I was.

Q: How do you feel that you related to men as a woman throughout your life? Did anything in particular point out to you that women were a subordinate group in relation to men?

A: I always related well to men, probably because my Daddy was so great. He was very protective. When I started to work I could definitely tell the difference between the way males and females were treated at work. For example the men got promoted a whole lot faster than the women and there was a lot of jealousy among the women. The older women weren't advanced as quickly as young attractive women. And this was working in a government agency.

When I was younger there were some differences in the government between how men and women were treated. I did everything the men did in the warehouse because I wanted to, I got licenses to drive whatever I wanted in the warehouse including the forklifts and all that. Men called women "babe" and would sexually harass the women all the time, asking them if they wanted to go behind a pallet and such for so-and-so. Women didn't think much of it because it was just the way things were. Catcalls when you walk down the aisles. And this is in what's called a "professional" environment.

Q: How do you think the birth of your first child impacted your identity or the way you saw yourself and the world?

A: When your Daddy was born it made me much more aware that there were more important things to worry about than myself and my husband. It made me more thoughtful and less selfish. I was happy to have him, but if I had it to do over I would have waited until I was older because I was immature, but in that time that was just the way most girls thought. I don't regret any of it, I would just be a lot more concientious about things besides what everyone else was doing. The way I thought about getting married and having a kid wasn't because it was what my parents wanted, my Dad wanted me to go to college and even promised to buy me a car if I went to nursing school. But then along came a motorcycle with your Grandpa on it.

Q: How did the death of your daughter Dawn Michelle affect you at the time, and also looking back?

A: In regards to Dawn Michelle, that was probably the most traumatic and dramatic thing that ever happened in my life. I was very young and unprepared, I was 20 years old. At that age you think you're going to live forever and certainly that your kids are. It was really hard on me and your grandpa and your Dad as well. There's a lot of things that I think could have been done by the doctors that weren't done that could have kept her alive. But also I think that when it's someone's time it's just their time. My family and the Moores (in-laws) and Hensons (in-laws) were very supportive. I've blocked most of it out. We hadn't thought of anyone dying and having funeral expenses. Because of the Moores we had a nice burial because they helped us out financially. Young people need to think long and hard about life and being prepared for things that aren't supposed to happen.

Q: When you got a divorce, how did that affect you and the way you thought of yourself in relation to men and the world?

A: For some reason, when I got divorced I didn't have a very good opinion of myself. I've never figured out why yet. I was looking for something to make me think better of myself, which I don't think I ever found. I know now I have a higher opinion of myself but it took me thirty years. Getting older puts things in perspective. The only thing about the divorce is that I feel really guilty about how it negatively affected my kids. I've kind of overcome that too. It was for the best, I think for both of us and the kids have turned out pretty good I think.

Q: Were you very aware of the Civil Rights Movement when it was happening? How did you feel about race, yourself, and the way society addressed differences? Has anything changed?

A: I grew up in a really small town and in elementary, middle and high school the schools were segregated, but the town was so small that in middle and elementary there were no black students to have their own school. In middle school full Native American students were treated really differently by the students. They were shunned and ignored but I never saw anyone be really mean to them, they just didn't have anything to do with them. I knew I was at least a quarter Native American so that bothered me some., even though I look white.

When we lived in Caldwell the Mexicans were integrated with the whites. There wasn't a whole lot of mistreatment that I saw, but the man we rented our house from was a cotton farmer and he kept the Mexican workers in the barracks in the back behind the house. I never went there, but it certainly didn't look like much. White girls were encouraged not to date Mexican boys but it still happened. High schools were segregated but there were not really any Blacks in that school. The only time I saw blacks was when I was downtown, and the bathrooms and water fountains were separate. I always wondered about it but no one ever gave me any answers. I remember one time when Mom and I were going to town and I was probably 11 and we got a flat tire. She was trying to fix it and she accidentally hit herself in the mouth with the tire jack and busted her lip. A black man came out of his house and took us inside and his wife fixed up mom's lip and he changed the tire for us, and after that I really didn't understand why they were treated differently. I never saw blacks being mistreated necessarily. The neighbors we had that were black were lovely. The husband was so polite and loving towards his daughter and I related to and respected that a lot.

I definitely did have the sense of being better off because I was white, that I had certain privileges that others didn't have. Honestly, I think if I had been any older and my Dad hadn't been so protective of me at that time, I probably would've gotten myself killed. When I was 15 I was working in a restaurant by the bus station in McAllister as a waitress and I remember a busload of soldiers coming in and they started ordering and some black men came in with them and the owner told me not to wait on them and to take them to the back of the restaurant to be seen. I quit right there. I refused to treat people that way and I knew they were going to fire me anyway, so I just said goodbye to them then. My Dad was a little upset with me. He wasn't prejudiced but he didn't make any waves. My Mom agreed with me and thought I had done the right thing. I don't know where I got my bullheadedness. I guess my Mom's family. I know Grandpa would have gone outside to argue with a cow.

Q: How did the death of your parents change how you saw yourself and the world? How did it affect you?

A: It made me feel older. I knew it was hard to lose someone, but I didnt realize how long it took to realize that someone was really gone. That I couldn't pick up the phone and call my Mom and say "what's goin' on?" Getting through that phase of not being able to talk to her was really hard. I would go to pick up the phone to call my Mom and Tom (her husband) would say to me: " Well, no you're not."

It was a whole lot harder with my Daddy because we were very close, and I could talk to him about anything. If I was having problems he understood everything and he would talk to me about problems he had with mother when I talked about my marriage problems. I felt like a whole part of me was gone.

Q: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about or that you think has had a big impact on your life?

A: Moving to Florida. After my divorce I moved to Florida and it was pretty traumatic. I was moving completely away from my parents and my sons. I felt like if I took them with me I didn't know what I would be causing for them. They were secure in Midwest City Oklahoma where they were. I didn't want to uproot their security. It was probably the worst three years of my life when I first moved there. I didn't even have a job when I first moved.

Entry One.

No joke, this class terrifies me. Today was great exercise in being uncomfortable. I sure do need it though, to become a more empathetic, compassionate and authentic person.

The articles we read for class this week on social justice policy really challenged my ideals. Even though I felt that the Pelton article proposing social justice policy address each person as an individual according to need rather than as a member of different socially constructed groups (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class) had a conservative slant, I found that I agreed with him that it was the most "fair" way to treat the marginalized and oppressed people in society.

Because I typically think of conservatives as having a highly individualistic value system, versus liberals ideologues (such as myself) who I see as collectivist, I was surprised that I felt this way. I agreed that :"(T)his (group) approach is inadequate because it ignores individuals who are not part of particular oppressed populations, and yet are experiencing deprivation, inequality, or suffering."(Scanlon 2001). Yet soon afterwards I found that Scanlon and Longres made an excellent point that I have often subscribed to; that group-based interventions are important in cases in which certain groups have been significantly more disadvantaged than others.

I don't really have an answer, except that while group membership should be considered when distributing different sorts of aid to those in need, it should not be the biggest piece of the puzzle. It just isn't cut and dried because people don't fit into neat little categories.

We did a really interesting exercise in my Human Sexuality class today. Shane Whalley (some of you will recognize the name, ze is the education and outreach coordinator for the Gender and Sexuality Center here at UT Austin) was the guest speaker and we were instructed to fill in two different colored sheets with information about ourselves. The yellow sheet had "easy" information: Favorite color, food, quotation, music, and book. The blue had information that can be a little harder to define: Gender identification, ethnicity, religious affiliation and societal class. It was interesting because in discussing these worksheets, we found as a class that it was much more difficult to comfortably share the information on the blue sheet. We are repeatedly classified, yet few of us really feel at home with the stereotypes that come along with these classifications.

Unraveling stereotypes in society at large and within ourselves as social workers is going to be so important in moving forward and supporting policy change that assists those in need, and in making case-by-case decisions without being discriminatory in any fashion. In that vein, I think that personally I need to work on becoming more aware of my own biases and prejudices. We don't like to talk about that stuff, I certainly don't, but it's impossible to move past errors in our own thinking if we refuse to see them.