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.