"I'm not oppressed" - "Yes, you are."

Great Debates
1

There sometimes arises a very rare, but very odd, situation in political debate where a man will declare that women are oppressed by patriarchy, and a woman will say that she is not, or a white person will say that racial minorities are oppressed but a racial-minority person will say that he/she is not oppressed. (This could apply to gays, Muslims, etc. as well.)

However, I don’t mean this to be a zoom-in of those issues specifically. It doesn’t have to be about race, gender, religion or anything; it could be something else. My question is:

When Person A tells Person B that Person B is oppressed, and Person B denies being oppressed, who’s right?

It might be comparable to how some domestic-abuse victims deny being abused, or some brainwashed people don’t realize they’re brainwashed; oftentimes the person ***in ***the situation cannot see things as clearly as someone ***outside ***the situation. But can Person A legitimately claim to know better than Person B what Person B is experiencing?

2

That sounds like it would be the patriarchy / white privilege / mansplaining at work. I can scarcely imagine a more condescending and arrogant attitude to take with a member of some minority community than “you’re too dumb to know you’re being oppressed, trust me.”

3

We can (and should) ensure people have equal rights. We can’t (and shouldn’t) force them to exercise those rights.

4

Has this situation happened in real life? Or are you just putting out a hypothetical? (I’m genuinely curious).

5

Isn’t this what is called “false consciousness”? The term is taken over by Marxists, but it also occurs in feminism and other forms of politics as well.

I don’t think it is possible to determine in general who is right. Maybe people don’t recognize that they are badly off. Or maybe they know better than anyone else what they want.

A common form of the argument on the SDMB is “the GOP is the party of rich people, therefore the working class should vote Democratic”. To which one response is something I read quoting a French voter. “I voted for the socialists because they were going to stick it to the rich. Then they got elected, and I discovered that I’m the rich.” It doesn’t always work out that way, but it doesn’t never work out that way either.

Regards,
Shodan

6

I had a female friend in college who wouldn’t call herself a feminist because she believed she had never been discriminated against. Now let’s leave the part aside that you don’t have to even be female, much less be subjected to outright discrimination, to call yourself a feminist.

However she adamantly refused to believe that she had ever been treated worse because she was female, either indirectly or directly. Maybe she hadn’t, or maybe she accepted certain types of treatment as normal and didn’t see that they were examples of discrimination or bias, I don’t know.

7

Oppression isn’t an individual thing. It’s a group thing. This goes for both oppressor and oppressed. There has never been an oppressed group in which all the individuals were equally victimized. There’s always going to be a diversity of experiences. See “intersectionality” to learn more.

Additionally, an individual can be a victim without knowing they are one. Plenty of abused spouses deny they are abused. They think they deserve their treatment, or that the treatment they receive is as good as they can reasonably hope for.

8

It’s a half-hypothetical. A while ago, there was a white woman who was decrying a smartphone app as being morally wrong (it would make people’s faces appear to have a ‘coolie hat’ and some other ‘Oriental’ features.) I was asked how I felt about it (since I’m Asian.) I said that it might be in poor taste, but not morally wrong, and the white woman seemed surprised, “But wouldn’t you find it offensive?”

But again, I’m not trying to zoom-in on one specific anecdote (and am hoping the thread won’t focus on any single on issue,) just giving a personal example.

9

It’s a case by case answer, IMHO. Some people think they’re being treated fairly until they get all the facts, other people have unreasonable expectations, and claim they’re oppressed by gravity.

10

People can be objectively wrong about whether they are oppressed. Isn’t that so obvious as to be trivial?

11

On a side note, isn’t it true that there are some people who claim that BDSM is abusive, no matter how consensual it may be or how much the people getting beaten/whipped claim that they genuinely enjoy it?

12

But who decides, and does the outside party have more authority to be correct?

If someone enjoys being married to a pushy spouse, are they in an abusive or harmful marriage? Does the outside party know the person better than they know themselves?

13

Oh, condescension and arrogance can go to much higher levels than that! Is it really more cruel to tell someone “you don’t recognize how you’re being oppressed, and here’s how” than to tell them “your oppression is justified, and here’s why?” The latter happens a lot, and has - IMHO - much more insidious consequences than the former.

Obviously, the circumstantial truth of these two kinds of claims matters a lot when judging them against each other. It’s worse to falsely tell someone that they are being oppressed by the Illuminati lizard people - especially if they believe you, and even if you’re sincere! - than to tell them they’re not ready for the advanced statistics class because of their prior math grades.

But the consequences of these claims matter even more. As an example, deriding today’s Ben Carson as an “Uncle Tom” is - IMHO - far less worse than telling a young Ben Carson that black people can’t be doctors because they’re stupid. Even though both are bad.

14

What exactly do you mean by “decides”? Like who do you see having to abide by this decision? You also use the word authority. What sort of authority is at play here?

Don’t both parties decide for themselves what they think of the situation? Why would either side have to accept the decision of the other side? Isn’t this just like any case where there is a difference of opinion?

15

I’ve only ever had this kind of discussion with other women (about sexism), and this is my take on it too. The argument from women who don’t believe sexism is still a problem is almost always based on one or more of the following:

  1. They have bought into our societal gender assumptions to the point that they will defend inequality as deserved and correct (of course high-level corporate executives are overwhelmingly male, men are just inherently better at that sort of thing).

  2. They have never felt that they personally were at a disadvantage for being female, and thus no-one else is either.

  3. They will only identify as sexism the most obvious and blatant examples, where the perpetrator pretty much openly says they’re prejudiced; anything indirect or even lightly cloaked in any other justification is just whiners being oversensitive. It’s even illegal to discriminate against women, so that proves that sexism isn’t a thing any more. (Men are by far more likely to argue this way, but some women do it too.)

I obviously disagree with these arguments.

16

Correctness is not determined by who you are. It is the state of your beliefs and assertions being reflected in reality. Obviously, the person on either side of this interaction might be right or wrong.

If we’re talking about rules of thumb, I’d say that the putatively oppressed person should probably be given the benefit of the doubt. Though Americans tend to afford that deference only when the putatively oppressed person is rejecting the label, rather than claiming it.

17

Who can say? It’ll vary, case to case.

I’ve certainly been in situations where I thought I knew better than friends/acquaintances about how they were living their lives. E.g.: abusive relationships, substance abuse, psychological issues.

The last one is a particularly strong example for me: taking a friend to the hospital more than once, even though she was convinced that she wasn’t crazy and her ex-roommate really had installed cameras in the bathroom. (He hadn’t - I looked.)

I’m not trying to equate a non-feminist woman with a delusional person like my friend; just pointing out that sometimes outsiders see our situation more clearly than we do ourselves. I don’t see why that can’t sometimes be true of people who don’t consider themselves oppressed or whatever.

(All that said: there are obviously situations where you should be kind, as with my delusional friend - and where you should keep your mouth shut [“are you really going to marry her???”])

18

This is an interesting topic. Some thoughts:
(1) Clearly, experience varies greatly person-to-person. For instance, it’s generally agreed upon that women have been historically dissuaded from pursuing careers in the hard sciences. But there’s also been backlash against that. So you could easily have two women working side by side in a physics lab somewhere, one of whom had gotten a special scholarship for female physics students, and had strong female teachers and role models mentoring her every step of the way; and her coworker had teachers subtly or not-so-subtly trying to dissuade her, or disrespecting her, or harassing her, her entire life. And they might give very different answers to the question of whether they had felt oppressed or victimized as female scientists. And both would be right.

(2) There’s a big difference between “you, personally, are oppressed” and “you are a member of a group which is, in general, oppressed”. For instance, there have been some very damning recent studies in which job applications with stereotypically “black” names are rejected at a much higher percentage than otherwise-identical applications with “white” names. A black guy who has worked hard and gotten a job and done well for himself might not claim to be personally oppressed (either for the straightforward reason that he has rarely-if-ever encountered any oppression, or for the more political reason that he doesn’t want to define things that way), but just being black doesn’t give him the power to wave away studies which show that blacks in general still face difficulties due to their race

(3) There’s also a subtle issue of identification and victimhood. To what extent does being black, or gay, or female, or trans, and the oppression that those groups have faced and continue to face, inform not just things like getting into colleges and getting jobs, but day to day interactions and judgments? Can one go too far, and start to view everything through the lens of oppression? Or is it even reasonable for someone like me (a straight white cis man) to ask that question? I dunno, interested to hear other people’s thoughts on the question.

19

I was involved in a conversation where an Asian snowflake was trying to explain to a black man how college admissions were racist against blacks. He looked at the Asian dude and laughed really hard.

20

I addressed this general question in a paper I did back in my grad school days.

1) Can one be oppressed and not know it? Well, if not, then there wouldn’t ever be any need to do consciousness-raising to encourage the oppressed to rise up against their oppressors. There would be no such thing as “false consciousness”, a Marxist term for thinking things are OK and reasonably fair when they aren’t. It’s actually difficult to successfully oppress people unless a large chunk of the oppressed accept the situation as inevitable. Reciprocally, I suppose, if a situation is inevitable, and can’t be resisted, some people may not see it as oppression but as a fact of life, like the weather.

2) If one can be oppressed and not know it, how the ^$!@@ does one come to know with any meaningful accuracy whether one is in fact oppressed? Marxism has no good answers for us there; they wrap it as a tautology: the working class has false consciousness if and when they do not realize they are oppressed by the ruling class, and accurate class consciousness when they do so realize; the correctness of the latter and the falseness of the latter lies in the inaccuracy of the concepts held as true by the latter. But sociological theories that assume people’s attitudes are entirely shaped by socialization (social determinism) can’t explain how an oppressed population can recognize their oppression, as the oppressors would be teaching them that how things are is how things are supposed to be.

**3) Radical feminism, explicitly, looks to emotionally-driven cognitive processes, a political epistemology ** you could call it, for recognizing when “how things are” is not how things ought to be, and for exploring how things could be different or better, etc. Emotional states are more typically allocated as personal problems, and dissatisfaction as the proper subject for therapy, not politics, but here, too, radical feminism explicitly upends that and says “the personal is political”. Essentially, you can’t oppress people and not make them psychologically distorted in the process. Victims are not happy people.

None of this rules out the possibility that person NOT part of an oppressed category can perceive oppression where one of its victims do not, and yes that does happen. Consider children who are abused by their parents. They may state that what is being done to them is appropriate and/or that they brought it on themselves.

But at the same time it’s arrogant of someone who has read some social theory to tell someone “you are oppressed” as if it is a subject that has already been given all the consideratio that it is due and a verdict reached and hey, this is just how it is, you’re oppressed. In fact, that’s a disempowering way to treat someone in and of itself! If you respect someone as a person, you owe it to them to listen to their story and their situation as they theorize it. (Yeah, including abused children). After all, the goal is communication and, presumably, seeing the apparently-oppressed person become more empowered. Consciousness-raising is not a lecture, it’s a dialog.