Oppression.html



This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2007)

Oppression derives from the concept of being weighted down, and is often depicted as such. Here, a Jew labors in a political cartoon under the metaphorical oppression of the Russian Tsar

Oppression is the act of using power to empower and/or privilege a group at the expense of disempowering, marginalizing, silencing, and subordinating another group. Oppression does not need established organizational support; it can be rendered on a much smaller individual scale. It is particularly closely associated with nationalism and derived social systems, where in identity is built by antagonism to the other. The term itself derives from the idea of being "weighted down."

Systematic oppression

The most famous type of oppression in society is the legal system. Anarchists argue that police and law itself is oppression. The term oppression is primarily used to describe how a certain group is being subordinated by unjust use of force, authority, or societal norms in order to privilege another group. When this is institutionalized formally or informally in a society, it is referred to as "systematic oppression". Oppression is most commonly felt and expressed by a widespread, if unconscious, assumption that a certain group of people are inferior. Oppression is rarely limited solely to government action. Individuals can be victims of oppression, and in this case have no group membership to share their burden of being ostracized.

In psychology, racism, sexism and other prejudices are often studied as individual beliefs which, although not necessarily oppressive in themselves, can lead to oppression if they are codified in law or become parts of a culture. By comparison, in sociology, these prejudices are often studied as being institutionalized systems of oppression in some societies. In sociology, the tools of oppression include a progression of denigration, dehumanization, and demonization; which often generate scapegoating, which is used to justify aggression against targeted groups and individuals.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the concept of Human Rights in general were designed to challenge oppression by giving a clear articulation of what limits should be placed on the power of any entity to unfairly control an individual or group of people.

When oppression is systematized through coercion, threats of violence, or violence by government agencies or non-government paramilitiaries with a political motive, it is often called Political repression. More subtle forms of political oppression/repression can be produced by blacklisting or individualized investigations such as happened during McCarthyism in the United States.

Transnational systems of oppression include colonialism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, and can generate a resistance movement to challenge the oppressive status quo.

==Note: Hierarchy has multiple definitions; some structures which can be defined as hierarchial, such as a representative democracy or a republic, may not necessarily be seen as oppressive, since the upper ranks are representatives and may be prevented from acting in a repressive way by the ability to recall them or vote them out. The 'imperfectness' of representative democracy however, particularly in the face of dominant interest groups and a media that imperfectly conveys information, means that the oppressiveness or not of a democratic government can be perceived very differently by different people.

Internalized oppression

In sociology and psychology, internalized oppression is the manner in which an oppressed group comes to use against itself the methods of the oppressor. For example, sometimes members of marginalized groups hold an oppressive view toward their own group, or start to believe in negative stereotypes of themselves.

For example, internalized racism is when members of Group A believe that the stereotypes of Group A are true and may believe that they are less intelligent or academically inferior to other groups of people.

Any social group can internalize prejudice.

Indirect oppression

Indirect oppression is oppression that is effected by psychological attack, situational constraints or other indirect means. It has been a popular tactic practiced in single power, power monopoly or other authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.

Resistance

Several movements have arisen that specifically aim to oppose, analyse and counter oppression in general; examples include Liberation Theology in the Christian world, and Re-evaluation Counselling in the psychotherapuetic arena.

References

External links

• Oppression.org: Raising awareness on issues that are often ignored because they concern a people and place that, to some, seem so foreign
• COPSHOTS.org: Documenting Police Brutality, Documenting the Police
• A Short Essay on the History of Oppression

Bibliography

• Guillaumin, Colette. 1995. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. London: Routledge.
• Hobgood, Mary Elizabeth. 2000. Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press.
• Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 1996. The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Noël, Lise. 1994. Intolerance, A General Survey. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Felice, William F. 1996. Taking Suffering Seriously: The Importance of Collective Human Rights. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.
• Feagin, Joe R. and Hernan Vera. 1995. White Racism: The Basics. New York: Routledge.
• Pincus, Fred L. 1999 and Howard J. Ehrlich, eds. 1999. Race and Ethnic Conflict: Contending Views on Prejudice, Discrimination, and Ethnoviolence. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.
• Beck, Aaron, M.D. 1999 Prisoners Of Hate. New York: HarperCollins Publishers
• Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, "The Gulag Archipelago," Harper and Row, 1973
• Kiernan, Ben, "The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79," Yale University Press, 1996
• Cudd, Ann E. 2006. Analyzing Oppression. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Deutsch, Morton. 2006. A Framework for Thinking about Oppression and Its Change. "Social Justice Research", Vol. 19, No.1, March 2006, pp. 7-41.