I’m going to take a break from trying to be FAMOUS! to
be a little more intellectual. Just for now. This might be long and dense, so I
apologize in advance, but the topic has been on my mind for a while. Oppression.
Like most of you, I received the standard American liberal arts education. The
concept of oppression permeated the general curriculum. It seeped into our
political science and history classes. Art history classes. Sociology and
economics classes. By now, it has probably found its way into the hard
sciences, music, and physical education. In grad school, I did my master's in
Middle Eastern Studies, so you can imagine how much back and forth we did over oppression—the
oppression of regional populations by European imperialists, the oppression of
religious minorities, the oppression of women (of course this was the biggie), and
so on and so forth. Not surprisingly, the consensus among faculty and students
was that women are not oppressed. Not even the ones who are forced to cover
their faces, or who have minimal rights, or who suffer what to us constitute atrocities
at the hands of male relatives, and by that larger body of men we call
government. The reason they’re not oppressed? Because they don't believe
themselves to be. It’s as simple as that. So basically, being unconvinced
and/or unaware of your oppression means you are in fact not oppressed. Yes? By
that logic, a very young child who is molested is not abused because he/she is
unaware of it. Or a person who is born into and dies in slavery is not oppressed
because as far as they’re concerned, a) things have always been that way *for
their people*, b) they are unaware that things could be better *for their
people* and c) they are unaware that they have been cheated out of their human
dignity. Or, a North Korean. Not oppressed for the same reasons that apply to
slaves. These are three different examples with one thing in common: the object(s)
of certain behaviors or cultural institutions which most of us would describe
as abusive/oppressive does not know that those behaviors are considered abusive,
oppressive, and unhealthy by others. So that makes it ok, according to the
logic behind the assumption that lack of awareness of one’s oppression equals
lack of *actual* oppression.
