Safe Spaces

                               Gerri August’s Safe Spaces is an article on LGBT and how we as a society do not include LGBT people in our ways of bring up our youth. August talks about how we discuss many issues in our classrooms and at home in regards to race and gender but when it comes to sexual orientation the topic gets pushed aside more so than the others would.  While August does address how people are raised in different family environments and that will have an impact on how they look at things in life, she really wanted us to focus on how educators in the country affect students in especial regards to LGBT students. “Classrooms lay the foundations for an inclusive and safe society: a just community where common interests and individual differences coexist.”(August p3) This quote to me was a great line to have toward the beginning of the article, noting that classrooms are where all demographics of every type should feel welcome and safe. The issue becomes that LGBT students do not feel safe in these environments quite often. The issue is that as adults or teachers we do not send a message to students that a student being LGBT is no different than a student being of a different race, in the sense that it should not affect how you look or treat that person. The other issue is what Delpit talks about when she discusses the “culture of power”. Delpit talks about how the “norms” get pushed onto us in society, in this case the “norm” being heterosexuality. The perfect example of this in the August text is when Maria has an issue with her Spanish teacher. Her teacher marked her answer wrong on a test when she used the female tense on the word “sweetheart” rather than the male tense because the teacher wanted a heterosexual answer even though the answer was correct both ways. Even though her teacher marked this incorrect it is not necessarily coming from a place of hatred for LGBT individuals. The professor marked the answer wrong and could have just thought she messed up translation. However, instead of finding out if the student was aware of what was on the test and if it was in fact done for the right reason, the teacher just assumed that the answer was incorrect. Once again this is a way that teachers or adults can have a negative impact on LGBT children or students.

            Another interesting point that August makes is that we teach students at an early age that families come in all different forms. “The oft-stated objective is for children to learn that families come in different shapes and sized, live in different dwellings, observe different traditions, and celebrate different holidays.” (August p5) She mentions the different parenting types like single parents, foster parents, and the two parent households, but what she also says is that we don’t embrace a same sex couple raising children the same way we do the others. It is still a really big issue today that with all the political correctness that we try to do, for some reason the nation still has an extremely hard time accepting two people of the same sex raising a family. It is not displayed on television, movies, or magazines, and if it is, it becomes extremely controversial. And the ones that are displayed are not always the best representation of the LGBT community. 

googled image of LGBTQ characters on South Park

With everything that August beings up being so accurate in how we look and treat LGBT individuals it’s no wonder why people don’t feel comfortable identifying their sexual orientation especially at younger ages where the concern of judgement from peers is highest. We need to work on this a society to fix the injustices that are happening every day.