Journal #1 Revisited

Looking back at this entry, I find a lack of emotion and interest. Despite the fact that I was very interested in the discrepancies in hiring and treatment in Walmart, I apparently could not find the words to describe my thoughts. I will revisit this entry and create a more thoughtful entry.

"Undergraduate students overwhelmingly described sexism as a less serious problem than racism. Despite the fact that those same students were more likely to have experienced, observed, or heard about acts of sexism than of racism on their campuses, and despite the fact that the sex-based ones were far more likely than the race-based ones to involved physical acts including violence, from men grabbing and groping women to raping them, the majority of our participants said that they find racism more upsetting and consider it more of a problem that needs to be dealt with than sexism. Sexism, some even suggested, is only natural" (Flanders).

The previous quote was taken from the article "Walmart: Too Big to Sue?" from CommonDreams.org. I find this quote interesting because before reading it, I would have agreed with the fact that racism is more of a problem than sexism because it is easy to simply observe society without asking critical questions and "WHY?"
However, after asking myself why this is happening, I can conclude that sexism and racism are socially stigmatized. Racism has been stigmatized as the most prevalent problem concerning equality in our society, whereas sexism has been underplayed. There are multiple reasons for the stigmas attached to racism and sexism, but there is clearly a problem with the way sexism is dealt with among undergraduate students, as was displayed in the previous quotation. University education is supposed to produce enlightened and critical thinkers, aware of the world around them. It is interesting that schools, including Eastern, offer an array of gender-based courses in the realms of Sociology, Psychology and more, yet sexism is still not being taken seriously. So perhaps this comes down to the old saying "practice what you preach." Professors and faculty at Eastern may be teaching all of the right material, but students might not be learning how to transform classroom material into a skill set for life.
So to conclude, the issue of sexism is not unique to the Wal-Mart corporation, but rather our society as a whole. Just as we have discovered the multiple divides between law and society, I have also realized the massive gap between education and society. I'm seeing a trend!