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Oppression
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Oppression is the use of power to disempower, marginalize, silence or otherwise subordinate one social group or category, often in order to further empower and/or privilege the oppressor.
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Encyclopedia
Oppression is the use of power to disempower, marginalize, silence or otherwise subordinate one social group or category, often in order to further empower and/or privilege the oppressor. Social oppression may not require formally established organizational support to achieve its desired effect; it may be applied on a more informal, yet more focused, individual basis.
Social oppression has in recent times been an epiphenomenon of various types of social dysfunction, whereby discrimination against an identified group is stimulated, encouraged and reinforced by way of promoting antagonism towards the Other. The term itself is derived, in a direct experiential sense, from the sensation of being pressed or weighted down by a greatly superior force.
Systematic oppression
Anarchists and other species of libertarian, at either end of the political spectrum, argue that police and law themselves are oppression. The term oppression is primarily used in such instances to refer to the subordination of a given group or social category by unjust use of force, authority, or societal norms in order to achieve the effects noted above. When institutionalized, formally or informally, it may achieve the dimension of systematic oppression. Oppression is customarily experienced as a consequence of, and expressed in, the form of a prevailing, if unconscious, assumption that the given target is in some way inferior. Oppression is rarely limited solely to formal government action: an individual may be the particular focus of oppression or persecution and in such circumstances have no group membership in which to share, and thus maybe mitigate, the burden of ostracism.
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. Modern-day groups that actively oppose oppression include Ligali, a British African organization headed by civil rights activist Toyin Agbetu.
See also
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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.
- Smith, Morgan. 2008. Why I stick it to the man, and why you should too. New York: HarperCollins Publishers
- 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.
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