Students share folk beliefs that make it difficult for them to understand inequality, especially the harmful consequences of social practices they routinely engage in, are attached to, and take for granted. Four of these beliefs include: (a) harm is direct, extreme, and the product of an individual's intentions; (2) harm is the product of the…

This paper offers six strategies for dealing with students' resistance to learning about the oppression of women: making the familiar strange, substituting race for sex, distinguishing between intentions and consequences, imagining men in women's bodies, exposing students' claims of equal gender oppression as false parallels, and analyzing some of…