The era of the MeToo movement may have brought an important issue to light the issue of sexual harassment, especially by powerful men towards women in workplaces. The question here is: should the public take a page from the MeToo movement to tackle other despicable acts in our society, such as gender and racial discriminatory practices? Before we go any further, let us dig deeper to get a sense of the geneses of the Me Too movement. The Me Too Movement stemmed from despicable sexual harassment people go through in life, especially by women who often are subjected to demeaning and dehumanization acts often mostly in the hands of powerful men who purport to be leaders in workplaces. The victims of sexual harassment and their narratives cumulatively expose the anguish and pain associated with. The Me Too movement is essentially a reactive movement against sexual harassment and assault that is ubiquitous and yet nobody does anything, except allow the perpetrators to threaten and revictimize their victims with retaliation.
MeToo is a direct reaction and response to pervasive acts of sexual harassment which spread virally like wildfire in October 2017 as a hashtag used on social media in an attempt to demonstrate the ubiquitous acts of sexual assault and harassment, especially in workplaces. MeToo movement had been primarily suggested to be a direct response to the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The origin of the Me Too movement has been credited to Tarana Burke, an American social activist who began using the phrase “Me Too.” A phrase that later gained acceptance and popularized on Twitter by an American actress, Alyssa Milano, on Twitter in 2017. Subsequently, Milano has done more work to further expose sexual harassment by encouraging victims to tweet about their varied experiences and thus “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” With the power of multimedia and encouragement by activists like Alyssa Milano to further expose sexual harassment via tweet, more people are taking it further, and calling out on victimizers of women through sexual harassment to step up and face their terrible past deeds.
For instance. In a recent article by Justin Kroll (https://tinyurl.com/y7k3dhxf), he described an incident in which James Gunn lost his position and was unlikely to return as the Director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 projects. According to Justin Kroll’s article, James Gunn’s loss of his job as the director stemmed from his tweets over a decade ago, tweet that had been characterized as “joke tweets” about pedophilia and rape which surfaced by alt-right agitators according to Kroll. As pointed out by Kroll, the incident and Gunn’s association with tweets led to the action by the Studio to remove Gunn from the position of Director while actively working round the clock to ensure that he does not come back to that position.
Perhaps the Me Too is providing the public with a roadmap and strategy that could be replicated in tackling other terrible acts such as racism and discriminatory practices in our society. If that’s the case, perhaps the only way to prevent ubiquitous discriminatory practices in our society that continues to ruin lives whether it’s consciously or unconsciously done is for the people in workplaces to begin to expose those who perpetuate those terrible acts/ The acts may be done consciously or unconsciously, but the consequences or outcome is usually the same- painful and sometimes ruinous to victims’ lives. Imagine the incident of discriminatory practice in schools such as one in Washington states https://tinyurl.com/yd4zzql3.
These acts are driven by the unconscious mindset of some teachers. I don’t believe that any teacher would deliberately discriminate in their practices as pointed out in this and so many similar reports nationwide, including in predominantly minority schools. As a nation, we are in trouble if we allow those who deny the existence of inequality to continue to use covert and overt means to sweep reality-ubiquitous inequity and flat-out denial of existing racial and gender bias and sweep those under the rug while employing bold-faced lies to claim that discrimination does not exist. If discrimination does not exist, how come we have data showing discrimination against minorities in almost every metric in our societal lives? As you can see from the Washington State’s report above, it’s unbelievable what people go through, in this case, even elementary school children; it’s disturbing. It’s despicable that even children have to endure these horrible acts anywhere, including those in schools. We are not talking about middle school, or high school, the fact is that these terrible things happen, and by and large, the conception that these happen, especially to innocent kids in elementary schools is outrageous and should be of concern to any social justice-minded individual.