Resources for Marginalized Dalton State College Students: Educate

About               Thanks, Bart

This guide seeks to be nonpartisan and focuses on student safety, wellbeing, and social justice.

Thanks to Heidi Johnson at the UNLV Libraries and her permission to borrow her work.

Educate Yourself

How do we teach a child. . . to have compassion:

to allow people to be different;

to understand that like is not equal;

to experiment; to laugh; to love; 

to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have or need answers.

~Madeleine L'Engle

The first step to fighting injustice is to understand it. Below you will find a number of resources

• about evaluating news sources. Why waste your energy on bogus info?
• understanding different types of oppression 
• about what to do if you witness harassment or bigotry (intolerance of others based on their identity).

It is especially important to learn about the oppression of marginalized groups that you do not belong to if you want to become an ally or engage in activism around those issues. All people experience power, privilege, and oppression in different ways, depending upon their multiple, intersecting identities. For example, power, privilege, and oppression are experienced on the basis of race; ethnicity; nationality; class; gender; sexual identity; physical, developmental, and psychological ability; and religion. For each aspect of your identity, you experience either privilege or oppression. Once you become aware of the ways in which you are oppressed, you can get support for and advocate for those marginalized communities that you are a part of.

Then, what you do with your power and privilege matters. You have the opportunity to use your power and privilege for good - to become an ally and activist for marginalized communities that you are not a part of. Being an ally within the dominant group that you are a part of can help bring attention to the issues and causes that others experience. This is an important part of the process of fighting for social justice and working to dismantle systems of power and oppression in our society.