Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult tells the story of Ruth Jefferson, an African American labor and delivery nurse who is faced with her biggest moral dilemma after a newborn codes on her watch and dies. The problem, though, was the parents, Turk and Brit, refused for her to care and even touch their baby because Ruth is Black. The novel follows Ruth as her knowledge and integrity are questioned harshly while she tries to navigate if she was in the right or the wrong for letting a child die.
Picoult’s main point with this novel is to emphasize the power structures present within these situations. Turk and Brit, the parents of the child, were extreme white supremacists. They believed any black person was dirty, inadequate, and/or less than them. In their heads, it gave reasoning as to why they were allowed to refuse Ruth to care for their child, but in reality, it was creating a hierarchy of power that, in turn, othered Ruth. They refused to acknowledge her as the well-trained nurse with 20+ years of experience and instead diminished her to her race. It perpetuates the ideas of power that white people have over people of color, not only because the hospital Ruth worked for allowed for her to be discriminated against, but also because Turk and Brit believed they had the right in the first place to keep someone from doing their job because they weren’t white.
This work calls into question the discrimination that people face due to the extreme prejudices and biases of those with power in our society. Their narrow beliefs create systems of power that create a cycle to help those who are at the top while putting blame on those at the bottom. The work focuses on how one has to navigate personal and societal standards to figure out how to act. It highlights how only more confusion is added as one has to change their identity to be seen as “societally acceptable,” and, even then, outward appearances, like race and gender, still cause biases and prejudices against them.
As Picoult is a white woman trying to write about the discrimination a Black woman faces, the book, in my eyes, is a form of subaltern-ing since she is trying to give a voice to a character that she gets to control and tell the story for. Though, her form of subaltern-ing is used to start a conversation on what structures of power are on their side or against them. Picoult, a white female who will never have to face the discrimination and hardships a person of color will face, knows she has the world on her side and uses her power as an author and white American to write about the real challenges a person of color will have to face in their life.
Author: oatney.18
Yo is This…. Systematic Injustice Paige Oatney, Bailey Wood, Kiki Olivera
Group A: Paige Oatney, Bailey Wood, and Kiki Olivera
Paige- okay, hello and welcome everyone to our podcast recording of “yo is this systematic injustice” my name is Paige Oatney
Kiki- Hi this is Kiki Olivera.
Bailey- My name is Bailey Wood.
Paige- So I think we can start off with just talking about some of the systematic injustices that we had talked about before and especially get in-depth with profiling and workplace systematic injustices as well as profiling within law enforcement. Bailey, did you want to start out with your one big example?
Bailey- So I did quite a bit of research about black kids being profiled from a young age in school, specifically with their hairstyles and there were many instances of black kids being forced to shave their heads or go home from school until they come back to school with a hairstyle that’s deemed more appropriate, but, these kinds of- there was one school that had a poster at their school that showed inappropriate hairstyles and appropriate hairstyles and the inappropriate hairstyles included braids, having beads in your hair or having designs in your hair but appropriate designs were having your hair shaved down closer to your head. And this kind of treatment really erases a culture from kids at a young age and it instills in them at a young age that their culture is something that is being questioned and under attack. And it really hinders their ability to express who they are. But, A kid should not have to question who they are and question their identity and their role in society at such a young age when they’re just trying to get an education
Paige- Ya. And I think that’s also like, a really big idea that all of those kinds of systems are forced on them so young and they’re being forced into this role of “oh you have to conform with what everyone else looks like” and what is deemed “normal in society” and I think that is one of the main things of discrimination that we see is just because they aren’t seen- even going into AAVE and people using AAVE vernacularly its… it’s not seen as something that’s okay because it’s not “normal English.”
Bailey- Right we have a very Eurocentric standard in the United States.
Kiki- And it’s definitely interesting because a lot of these people don’t realize that the texture of black women’s hair or black man’s hair, they have to be in these certain hairstyles like braids, or box braids in order to protect their hair or if they don’t want to grow their hair so by them by not making it appropriate or not profession all they’re doing is just forcing these people not only to get away from their culture but to damage their hair. and to some people, their hair is their life, so it’s not fair that one culture, one race, is forced to have damaged hair while the other one is allowed to have their hair looking however they choose. That’s just, that’s just absurd to me.
Paige- and I think also, that’s like really into the idea of othering and how the one group, they’re not trying actively to understand and learn what the other- the minority group is about. It’s about wanting to force them into these strict roles of “oh you need to look like me so that way everyone in our society is similar” and it’s this… another example one big example that we can bring into this is even white people appropriating black hairstyles because they don’t understand the context and the culture of everything that’s behind it.
Bailey- There’s a very deep and rich history of what hair means to black people. Like, it has signified cultural status and your marriage status and like who you want to be in society. It is with travel association, so it’s definitely something we need to consider when we start to use words like inappropriate or unprofessional because it’s just something that grows out of people’s heads.
Paige- Because I think also, some research that I was also doing on this, and something that I also didn’t know was that different style box braids- I don’t know if you guys have seen videos of like black women getting their hair done and all the intricate designs and everything- in like- when black women were still slaves they would use these braids as maps and actually map out on their heads escape routes and how to get to freedom. And I never knew, and I also think that’s something that there’s this lack of learning that we don’t understand about other cultures because we’re so focused on like the American white culture that we have.
Bailey- That is something that’s very interesting I didn’t know that
Paige- Ya!
Bailey- I think after slaves were given some sort of freedom they were still like kind of forced to shave their heads or wear their hair a certain way because they weren’t actually being given freedom, they were just, like, they thought they had a little more freedom but they still had to be submissive under what the white people in society wanted them to do.
Paige- ya…
Kiki- ya… and all that education, it comes from the school system because when you’re in school all you really learn about when it comes to minorities is the bad, it’s never really like… the good that happens. Not only is it, like, the people to blame its really the school system to blame as well because they’re not taking the time nor the initiate to be like “okay let’s talk about something completely different, let’s talk about hairstyles,” because they probably see it as something not as important or just something else to be a little their culture, their whole race… that’s just… that’s crazy to me. That’s just something that needs to be learned because it’s such a big part of their culture. I’ve heard that like on Instagram that that was something that they did that it was something we should have learned when we were back in high school or even middle school so that way when we grow up and we come into college were not- were not ignorant about these types of things. And it’s never our fault, for most of us, it’s not our fault if we grew up in a predominately white place compared to someone who grew up in a place full of minorities. It goes hand in hand.
Bailey- I don’t know about you but I didn’t start to learn about like minorities and celebrating their culture until high school but that was because I was taking good classes dedicated to learning about different cultures.
Paige- ya and it was also like, my own doing of having to break out of “the mold” and teach myself certain things. And I think that’s also where we can see a disconnect of like what’s systems are really against this whole trying to integrate and trying to teach us about different culture because schools should be I think teaching us more than just an Americanized version of our history and teaching us about, like, everything. Like I- this is just like an example for schools and stuff but I didn’t know until probably my junior year of high school that the whole thanksgiving that happened… all of that was kinda a hoax and it wasn’t really a big coming together of the native Americans and the pilgrims. They have given them blankets with smallpox, they were actively trying to kill them. And I think it’s just like this, washing and this glazing over of how much injustice is actually happening.
Bailey- ya and I think it really shows you just how ingrained it is in our society and how it really is at this systemic level that all of the things we know and that we thought we know are just like wrong and just the hate that exists in our world is just, for no good reason.
Paige- ya, and I think also like, bringing back to our idea of the one and the other how our system of school kinda perpetuates the idea of keeping the ones at the one while keeping the others at the other, and its also kinda like re-ingraining that by not teaching us about other cultures and keeping this want of having the other as dismissed while keeping white people, essentially, as the one.
Bailey- right because all of that discrimination is built into our education systems and like the workplaces and our criminal justice system, so it… it’s just, especially because those kind of culturally diverse groups are usually at a disadvantage just historically, their culture- their cultural identification is just the thing that we view first, like who they are what they look like its what we view first in society and that’s what everyone is being told is not okay about them.
Paige- ya, and Kiki I think you were going to say something?
Kiki- Just, it just should be a requirement at this point, you know? It’s just too many things are happening in the United States and too many people are getting, just, how do I say it? They’re just, it’s not fair at all. And then it’s causing the minorities, their mental health, to just be demolished completely because- I can’t imagine being at such a young age and just constantly learning that your ancestors were getting- were being insulated by white people. And that’s just something that just can only take a toll on a kid’s brain, or like your mom is doing your hair and you’re being told that that’s not professional, but that’s all you know at the end of the day.
Paige- ya…
Kiki- it’s just absurd to me.
Bailey- I remember when the Black Lives movement started getting like more speed last year that one of my former high school classmates, they posted like a picture of them holding a sign that said like “when did I go from cute to dangerous?” And that like really resonated with me because, like they’re just kids, and like at one point society just switches to being like “no your identity means that you’re dangerous, you’re unprofessional, you don’t know what you’re talking about” and I think that’s just really wrong and we really need to work to combat that.
Paige- And I also think that’s a really interesting point because I, I think that more needs to be looked at of when does that disconnect happen of like when a kid goes from “oh my gosh you’re so cute!” To “oh you’re dangerous” and I think we can also see in the news like, what was it a couple of years ago there was the young boy that was carrying around the toy gun and he was shot and killed because they thought it was an actual gun. Like… I just… like that kind of stuff like when it’s also seeing oh this discrimination is happening past “oh you’re a cute kid,” it’s, “oh I can see you as dangerous at any age simply because you’re black or because I have these ingrained prejudices against you.”
Kiki- And it’s just, it goes back to the school system needs to do better, but you can teach someone something in school but if you go home and their family is uneducated, everything they learned in school just went down the drain. So it’s more like how can we as a society better the school system but also educate the parents of those in school because I feel like some people will reach a certain age and it’s just like.. that’s how they are. And like that’s not fair that generation after generation is just, not knowing any better, it’s causing things like this to happen.
Paige- Ya and I think this is also like, the system that is just perpetuating these injustices and until something happens to stop it I think we’re only going to continue to see like this system continue. Okay well, I think our conversation today was fantastic, and I just want to thank everyone for coming and listening to this. I hope you all have a very nice rest of your day. Thanks again, bye!
DSI Showcase – The Tuskegee Experiment and Third-Worlding
In my research methods in psychology class here at OSU, we talked about the topic of ethics in scientific research. The main example that my professor wanted to talk about was the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment that took place from 1932 to 1972. The so-called experiment looked at the long-lasting effects of syphilis if it went untreated in a group of 600 Black men from Alabama. The population of Black men was poor, purposefully targeted, and not given treatment for syphilis when a cure was found. I later did more research, looking at the effects of the study on the Black community and their relations with healthcare in the United States. Especially right now with the wide distribution of the COVID-vaccine, I found direct articles, like this one, from the CDC about how minority populations are more hesitant to get the vaccine. Healthcare is a topic that seems to have everyone’s attention. From lack of it, the cost, and even if it should be a universal right. Though, more than who is receiving healthcare, the principle to think more about is how the healthcare system is targeted toward certain groups and is often scary or out of reach for others.
Black Americans are much more hesitant to reach out for medical assistance due to a history of unethical, unjust, and racist practices that continue even into our modern era. According to a poll done by the NPR, they found that one in five African-Americans will abstain from seeking medical care due to worries about discrimination (Stein, 2017). This can be seen as not taking health symptoms seriously, presumptive biases about the African-American body, and more.
Nurse collecting blood for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. HistoryCollection.com. Newsweek—African and American Men Receiving “Special Free Treatment” from Physicians and Nurses. From Wiki Commons.
This discrimination seen is a part of a long history that goes back to the idea presented by Ahmad of third-worlding. False medical studies, which have since been debunked, that circulated in the United States and much of the world at the beginning of the 19th century stated that Black people didn’t feel/perceive pain the same way that white people did. These thoughts were perpetuated off of ideas of power that Ahmad defines in the roots of capitalism and modes of production. White people defined the existence of Black citizens based off of, as Ahmad states, “those who make history and those who are mere objects of it” (Ahmad, 78).
In turn, the long, prejudiced history of inadequate medical treatment in the Black community is due to ideas built off of capitalistic power. Since Black Americans’ heritage has come from Africa, seen as a third-world to the United States, it has affected the thoughts and feelings of healthcare today and how minorities receive treatment. Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker noted in their study, “Tuskegee and the health of Black men,” that, “individuals are more responsive to injustices perpetrated against their own group and more empathetic to individuals in closer ‘proximity’ to themselves” (Alsan 2019).
These deep-rooted notions of the third-world still being present in our systems of healthcare today have manifested into more extreme problems. The CDC found that life expectancy for the Black population was 72 years, which was the lowest it has been since 2001 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2021) and is significantly lower than the life expectancy of someone who is white. Our system meant to protect and help the wellbeing of everyone is, somehow, not doing it equally for each person.
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text, no. 17, Duke University Press, 1987, pp. 3–25, https://doi.org/10.2307/466475.
Alsan, Marcella, and Marianne Wanamaker. “TUSKEGEE AND THE HEALTH OF BLACK MEN.” The quarterly journal of economics vol. 133,1 (2018): 407-455. doi:10.1093/qje/qjx029
Stein, Rob. “Troubling History in Medical Research Still Fresh for Black Americans.” National Public Radio, National Public Radio, 25 Oct. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/10/25/556673640/scientists-work-to-overcome-legacy-of-tuskegee-study-henrietta-lacks.
Things Fall Apart: The History of Missionaries
In the book, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo, the main character, deals with a set of missionaries that come into his mother’s tribe. They tell him, along with his community, that their beliefs and religion are wrong and that they should convert over to Christianity that only worships one God.
This book is set in the late 19th century, around the 1890s, in Nigeria. During this time, many European countries were in a scramble to take control of Africa, known as the Conquest of Africa, or the Rape of Africa. While many power-elite countries were in a hurry to seize as much land as possible, they were also trying to spread as much of their culture and beliefs as possible as well. This became known as the “Revival” movement of the Protestant and Catholic church whose goal was to give a “new lease of life and expected them to proclaim the good news of Salvation by Christ throughout the world” (Zorn, “The Missionary Movement”).
The Revival was a crucial part of the colonization of Africa and contributed to the feelings of superiority that many missionaries and European intellectuals had, according to J.D. Fage. The supremacy they felt caused them to push their denomination onto many African tribes and alienate them in their own homes by denouncing their faiths. Their practices, as seen from the perspective of a missionary, were seen as “witchcraft, devil-worship, and a thousand other foolish things” that they wouldn’t follow or succumb to “because the light of Heaven shines upon us” (84, Flickinger).
The idea was that converting African tribes to Christianity, or the main religion of a European nation looking to colonize, would aid in a “regeneration” of African people (97, Achebe). Their goal was to overtake the culture of the area they wanted to control and convert the people native to that land in order to make it more their own. As Robin Horton wrote in “African Conversion,” European countries were unstoppable forces that Christianity became tied to. Along with that, “the push of Western education, colonial administration, commerce, and industry… These changes created a much more favorable climate for conversion” (90, Horton).
Works Cited
Zorn, Jean-François. “The Missionary Movement.” Musée Protestant, Fondation Pasteur Eugène Bersier, 14 Jan. 2015, museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-missionary-movement/.
J.D. Fage, A History of Africa Third Edition, 1995 11 New Fetter Lane London.
Flickinger, D. K. Ethiopia, Or, Twenty Years of Missionary Life in Western Africa. Kessinger
Pub., 1873.
Achebe, Nwando, Samuel Adu-Gyamfi, Joe Alie, Hassoum Ceesay, Toby Green, Vincent Hiribarren, Ben Kye-Ampadu, History Textbook: West African Senior School Certificate Examination (2018), https://wasscehistorytextbook.com/
Horton, Robin. “African Conversion.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 41, no. 2, [Cambridge University Press, International African Institute], 1971, pp. 85–108, https://doi.org/10.2307/1159421.