Oppression Dynamics 101
CW: Discussion of oppression, ableism, misogyny, racism, police violence
While it might not be obvious in the way we’re taught about oppression, as far as we’re taught about oppression at all, but all forms of oppression share certain dynamics. That’s not saying that all oppression is equal or that you can compare oppression. It doesn’t mean that being oppressed in one or multiple ways makes you an expert in forms of oppression that you are not affected by. It also does not mean that you cannot be oppressor and oppressed on different oppressive axes at the same time. Nor does it mean that you, just because you experience oppression, are automatically aware of all the ways in which you think, speak and behave oppressively. Heck, it doesn’t even mean that you are automatically aware of all the dynamics in which your own oppression affects you, just because you are oppressed.
I recommend at least skimming over this resource, as the dynamic of normativity and othering is an oppressive dynamic on its own:
Normalized Power Imbalances
This might seem obvious, but I’ll go over it nonetheless. At the basis of every oppression there is a power imbalance between the oppressed and the oppressor. Without such a power imbalance, it would just be a conflict between equal opponents. Not every power imbalance is also an oppression, but every power imbalance can lead almost organically to oppression if the people with power in this relationship just act on their power instead of respecting the humanity in those they hold power over. If such a power imbalance does not already exist, then it quite often will be created to make the oppression possible.
As an example: Ableism can be considered the oldest form of oppression and maybe even the root of them all. If a group of people is able to physically or mentally outperform another, then there is literally nothing stopping them from taking full advantage of this except their own sense of morality. Arguably they can only do so in utter disregard of their own humanity, by severing their own inherent ties to other human beings. Healthy humans are not cruel to their own kind. But that’s a topic of its own.
Ableism, as far as it concerns physical or mental differences that allow one group to dominate another, is quite obvious in how the power imbalance can become normalized and just taken for granted, or even be seen as the “natural order of things”. The latter is an extremely common narrative that seems like it has always existed and simply exists as a universal truth. But it isn’t. It’s an arbitrary narrative designed to make you accept injustice (especially when it does not negatively affect you personally) as an inevitable part of our human existence.
We are a part of “nature”, no matter how much we scream against it, no matter how well we fortify ourselves in concrete bunkers and artificial environments. And nature is always changing. Change is the only constant in nature and the universe. None of the natural systems we see are universally stable or last forever. The shift from one state, from one order to another, is just often so slow that we don’t recognize it as a dynamic and make ourselves believe that this is just a fixed frame. To some degree we have to, because most of the time, this is not something we need to actively concern ourselves with and our brain just notes this down as “normal” and moves on to more immediate issues.
When a power imbalance does not already exist but has to be created in order to oppress a group of people, then this is invariably accompanied by a move to normalize it, so people don’t even think about it as something that was artificially created or could be changed in the first place. In the most blunt form this is simply a matter of using violence to make a power imbalance exist for long enough that people don’t really remember how it all started. And this time frame isn’t very long, it’s actually less than a human lifetime. And the more intense the new order is repeated and rehearsed, the less time it needs. And if you’re born into such a power imbalance, it can become all but indistinguishable from the background noise of your existence.
Ironically the dislike humans have for change also means that no matter how much energy it costs to change things, if they stay changed long enough, often even the people that protested the change will now protest changing it back. And this works in the favor of oppressive systems, as ending the oppression or even just scrutinizing the narratives that justify the oppressive system means changing, so people will find even the most ridiculous ways to justify why everything should stay the way it is and that change isn’t just unnecessary, but actually wrong and harmful. One particularly common and effective method is convincing yourself that the power balance does not really exist and that the people screaming for removing the power imbalance are actually the ones that want to institute a power imbalance in their own favor. Conscious intention or self-awareness are not necessary for this dynamic to play out.
Recognizing power imbalances is an important first step to identifying oppressive systems. It is in the interest of every oppressive system to hide, deny or justify the imbalance.
Normalized Perspectives
When we look at the roles and perspectives of oppressor and oppressed respectively, then we find that they are not just a disagreement, they see the world through different metaphorical eyes, with the oppressor’s perspective being distorted through — at the very least — the normalization of the oppression that benefits them. Few oppressors would refer to themselves as oppressors or would refer to the people they oppress as oppressed. People just generally tend to think of themselves as good people and so they will choose, where available, a worldview and set of beliefs that validates and reassures their assumption. And the privilege of being the oppressor rarely allows their assumptions and beliefs to be challenged by reality, no matter how far the two may be from each other.
As an oppressed or marginalized person this luxury is for the most part unattainable. To the oppressor being oppressed is an abstraction, to the oppressed its the very fabric of reality. Not even the most absurde or distorted assumption or belief an oppressor can hold about the oppressed will change their privilege of being an oppressor. No matter the strength of belief of the oppressed, however, will change the reality of the oppressed. There is no argument to be made that forces an oppressor to recognize the reality of the oppressed, so the discussion of the reality of the oppressed is little more than an opportunity to practice their wit and rhetorical flexibility for the oppressor. And since there is no pressure to concern themselves with the actual reality of the oppressed at all, the oppressor rarely develops an interest, leading to a widespread and deep ignorance and lack of knowledge about the experience , wants, needs and perspective of the oppressed in the oppressor.
For the oppressed, though, knowing about the experiences, wants, needs and opinions of the oppressor is necessary for survival, as their reality is fundamentally shaped by them. The oppressed by their very circumstances have a more complete picture of society than the oppressor. This only complicates communication between oppressor and oppressed further, as the oppressor, to gain a more complete picture themselves, would see their assumption of being a good person challenged on multiple fronts at once. Not only would they have to realize that the luxury they take for granted is inherently unjust, but also that their own perspective comes from ignorance, undermining their own assumption of being competent and knowledgeable enough to make a mostly correct assessment of reality.
If you’re oppressed you do have the option of convincing yourself that you’re not really oppressed, or at least not quite as oppressed as your peers may have you believe. And it can be a quite enticing option, as the toll of being aware of your own oppression resonates in an exhausting and demoralizing way with the way you’re treated by society under the control of the oppressor. Yet no matter the conviction, your treatment will not change significantly. It may change somewhat, because the oppressor might reward you with slightly better treatment than your peers for helping them see themselves as good people. That improved treatment does not, however, change the fundamental nature of you being oppressed and will not survive you outliving your usefulness to the oppressor.
The over-representation of the oppressor in, among other things, art, film/television, books and public consciousness feeds back into the normalization of the power imbalance between oppressor and oppressed and presents the oppressor as the representative picture of the whole society. The realities of and contributions by the oppressed on the other hand is portrayed as coming from the fringes of society, if not from outside of society itself. They are seen as exotic, as exciting flavor, as something to enrich the oppressor and thereby “society”, as something to be discarded if it is no longer deemed interesting. Quite often the oppressed are barred from contributing to the overall societal perspective at all and will even have their own history suppressed or erased. Both in the public consciousness and by destroying physical evidence of it.
So for example as a man in a patriarchical society (which currently is almost all of them) you do not experience the obstacles, the harassment, devaluation and exploitation that non-men in the same society experience. They are invisible to men and they could only gain an understanding if they listened to non-men share the stories of their experience. These experiences directly implicate men as responsible, benefiting, complacent and/or complicit in these primarily negative experiences of non-men. The inevitable clash of men’s assessment of themselves as fundamentally good people is thereby challenged and they are able to just dismiss the realization and the discomfort that comes with it by dismissing non-men’s accounts as they see fit. It has basically zero consequences for them, as their privilege does not depend on them formally recognizing it. They will continue to not experience aforementioned plights of non-men and can therefore refer to their own lack of experience with these things to deny that anyone else could have those experiences.
Recognizing how oppression affects the context of a perspective is vital to gaining an appropriate understanding of society. It is in the interest of every oppressive system to dismiss and ridicule everything that does not fit the self-serving perspective of the oppressor.
Normalized Dehumanization
With the oppressed being so thoroughly othered and robbed of any peaceful way to make the oppressor aware of their experiences comes a — most unconscious — dehumanization of the oppressed in the mind of the oppressor. After all, from the perspective of the oppressor, the oppressed are in their own supposed nature inferior, unfortunate and irrelevant. The reasons for the situation the oppressed find themselves in is in the view of the oppressor not the effect of the latter oppressing the former, but an expression of the essence of the oppressed. After all, oppression is a bad thing that good people wouldn’t do and therefore incompatible with the self-assessment of the oppressor as good people.
This dehumanization finds expression in the unconscious assumption that the oppressed have lower standards, reduced needs and a higher resilience than the oppressor. Less than what an oppressor would expect for themselves in the worst of circumstances seems more then good enough for the oppressed to them. Suffering itself becomes part of what is expected of the oppressed so thoroughly that is is not even recognized as avoidable suffering anymore. It is not an injustice that the oppressor relates to, but a part of the natural order of things. And so the oppressor will be sure that they’re treating the oppressed fairly, but at the same time would very much wish to never trade places. The humanity of the oppressor is taken for granted, the humanity of the oppressed is always in question.
Any focus on the avoidable suffering of and discrimination against the oppressed will feel like preferential treatment of the concerns of the oppressed over the concerns of the oppressor to them. The oppressor is not even necessarily conscious of this double standard, but rather holds it as a given, just like not to feed pets from the good china or keeping livestock out of your bedroom. It’s this deeply ingrained difference in humanity that the oppressors reserves for themselves and that they graciously dish out to the oppressed that enables the oppressor to convince themselves that society is fundamentally fair, but also recognize how they would very much object to being treated in the same way as they treat the oppressed.
We can see this aspect play out very obviously in the current struggle and discussion surrounding police brutality in the settler colonialist United States. The disproportional death toll of BBIPOC (Black/Brown/Indigenous People of Color) murdered by police is an undisputable fact. It is a lived horror for all the affected to either be killed without a pretense or see people that just like them be killed this way. To them it’s a constant reminder that their lives are cheap and expendable in the eyes of “society”. To white people it’s just the evening news. The do not experience anything comparable, they don’t have a history of being oppressed, exploited, dehumanized and enslaved by BBIPOC for hundreds of years. They cannot from their own experience gain any meaningful understanding of what it means to be subject to institutions, laws and social norms being created intentionally to take away their humanity, agency and identity based on a racial categorization created by other people for the sole purpose of putting white people at the very bottom of the hierarchy. And at the same time they collectively benefit from this oppression, if not in personal, then in generational wealth, in being able to live in the better parts of towns and with better access to education, loans and employment.
So to soothe the cognitive dissonance that comes with taking your benefits for granted and wanting to see yourself as a good person (heavily aggravated by the christian assertion that for your belief alone you’re already guaranteed a place in heaven anyway, and heaven is only for the good people) they create a millions of stories that explain the status quo in a way that does not put any blame or responsibility on them. BBIPOC victims of police violence are consequently portrayed in the media in the worst possible way, even if that involves inventing lies about them. Every parking ticket, paid or unpaid, will be held against them in a frantic effort to create a narrative in which “they had it coming”. Essentializing narratives are created to assign attributes and traits to all BBIPOC that in one way or another relativize, justify or outright deny the injustice done to them. Nothing comparable exists for white people when they become victims of police violence. Quite to the contrary, if white people commit crimes motivated by and beneficial to white supremacy, their connection to white supremacy is denied and buried at all costs, because that would implicate white people in general. At least as long as their actions are actually seen as crimes, they will be othered to protect other white people’s self-assessment as good people. The more one buys into the dehumanizing narratives about BBIPOC, though, the more a white supremacist criminal will even seem like a hero to them.
Recognizing how we assign a lesser humanity to some than to ourselves can make visible the ways in which we’ve internalized and support avoidable inequalities in society. It is in the interest of oppressive systems that you think of suffering of the opppressed as being their own fault.
Conclusion
The aspects we just looked at are common to every kind of oppression. Of course this list is not exhaustive and I’ve only named some of the more prominent forms of oppression. We did not look into lookism, sanism, ageism, transantagonism, homo/bi/panantagonism, islamantagonism, anti-semitism, etc, or any of their specific backgrounds. You will find the same patterns as above with content and context changed in any of those and always in the context of exploitability or the lack thereof. Armed with that knowledge, though, it is easier to recognize oppression in its many different forms and trace their origins from policies and social structures.
