Systematic Oppression Quotes

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. - Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993

When I say that we must establish values with originate in sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a moment, male notions of what non-violence is. These notions have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The men who hold these notions have never renounced the male behaviours, privileges, values and conceits which are in and of themselves acts of violence against us.

We must stop pointing to the exceptions—these bright shining stars who transcend circumstance. We must look to how we can best support the least among us, not spend all our time blindly revering and trying to mimic the greatest without demanding systemic change.

Oppression describes any unjust situation where, systematically and over a long period of time, one group denies another group access to the resources of society.

In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous lives matter and that our planet matters.

Acts of brutality committed by the ruling elite and systematic oppression of the weak stain every era of civilization. Ethnic wars and religious cleansing still exist in the twenty-first century. Just as insidious as state sponsored murder is the escalating economic expansion that destroys the habitat and displaces indigenous tribes’ way of life under the false moniker of economic and social progress.

As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women’s rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related. Within

Resilience is a systematic adaptation of the oppressed self under the arbitrary imposition of the political order. Emancipation is the liberation of the self from the oppressive imposition of the political order upon the self.

The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged.

You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

Here is what I have come to believe: in the end, religion has done more harm than good. For one thing, there’s war, ethnic cleansing, genital mutilation, abused altar boys, the systematic oppression of women—the foundational text of Christianity locates women as the source of all evil, do not forget this when interacting with the faithful—as well as anyone who doesn’t fit into its narrow moral straitjacket. Hierarchy breeds corruption. Patriarchy cultivates debasement. Believing in something—anything—so blindly is corrosive. You follow a recipe instead of inventing your own world. There are certain corners you can’t see into. My mother used to say that raising your son or daughter to believe in God is child abuse. I have repeated this often, to shocked looks, even from my secular friends. I’m sorry: I believe it. Religious belief may be a pleasant distortion, a comfort, for a while, but too much, unexamined, for too long and it eats away at your body, turns you stupid, kills you. Serena was right: the effect is not dissimilar to alcohol.

With a [democratic] government anyone in principle can become a member of the ruling class or even the supreme power. The distinction between the rulers and the ruled as well as the class consciousness of the ruled become blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with a public government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened. While exploitation and expropriation before might have appeared plainly oppressive and evil to the public, they seem much less so, mankind being what it is, once anyone may freely enter the ranks of those who are at the receiving end. Consequently, [exploitation will increase], whether openly in the form of higher taxes or discretely as increased governmental money “creation” (inflation) or legislative regulation.

As Thomas Jefferson once noted, “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.” Another

Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.

Terrorism is defined as “the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.”39 It takes no more than a brief review of the historic and present-day examples of media manipulation and legislative oppression to acknowledge that we are indeed being coerced into body shame for both economic and political reasons.

In the world of animals, pain serves an equivocal role. Parental nips and swipes are common tools in upbringing. And socially, pain is sometimes used to maintain hierarchies of dominance. But this animal use of pain seems somewhat restrained, at least in contrast with the human situation. Here the capacity for pain is often used to systematically exploit and oppress at intensities often far beyond those seen in the behaviour of our nearest primate relatives. At the same time, at least in western culture, pain is rarely used for pleasure. Is it little wonder that all pain is viewed as intrinsically evil? Or that the pain-pleasure of leatherspace has been labelled torture?

To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health, agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly, over time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to conclude, in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or a ‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do not develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except as its systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal scale is required to even approximate to a practical egalitarian program, and if anything less ambitious is attempted, people get around it (some more competently than others).

As Virginia Woolf argues in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape—often accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered— was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is simply untrue.

Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not.

Bad social science might result from systematic bias, but to embrace blame analysis as a way of evaluating theory or to transform sociology into advocacy for the oppressed is to do something else entirely.

He could not blame the Army, Angelo could blame the Army; Angelo hated the Army. But he didnt hate the Army, not even now. He remembered what Maureen had told him once that it was the system that was at fault. But he could not even blame the system, because the system was not anything, it was only a kind of accumulation of everybody, and you could not blame everybody, not unless you wanted the blame to become diluted into a meaningless term, a just nothing. Besides, this system here in this country was the best system the world had ever produced, wasnt it? This system was by far and above the best system anywhere else in the world today. He felt if he did not find somebody to blame pretty soon he would hate everybody.

All people, regardless of race, can hold some level of prejudice toward people who are not the same race as them. A person of any race can prejudge a person of any other race based on negative racial stereotypes and other factors. Prejudice is wrong, but it is not the same as racism. Racism is the coupling of prejudice with power, where the dominant racial group (which in a white supremacist society is people with white privilege) is able to dominate over all other racial groups and negatively affect those racial groups at all levels—personally, systematically, and institutionally. Therefore, though a BIPOC can hold prejudice against a white person, they cannot be racist toward a white person. They do not have the power (which comes with white privilege) and the backing of a system of oppression (called white supremacy) to be able to turn that prejudice into domination and punishment in a way that a white person would be able to if the tables were reversed.

Just as girls are pressured to yield that half of their human potential consonant with assertive action, just as they have been systematically discouraged from developing and celebrating the self-concepts and skills that belong to the public world, so are boys pressured to yield attributes of dependency, expressiveness, affiliation—all the self-concepts and skills that belong to the relational, emotive world. These wholesale excisions are equally damaging to the healthy development of both girls and boys. The price for traditional socialization of girls is oppression, as Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan put it, “the tyranny of the kind and nice.” The price of traditional socialization for boys is disconnection—from themselves, from their mothers, from those around them.

Individuals were all right, she said to herself, lots of them, but it was this rigid system that kept people from knowing each other. Was there another country in the world where the class barriers were so high as in England, and where it was so loudly proclaimed that none existed at all?

In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.… Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has pursued an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians throughout the territory it controls. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American. That is what we do.

Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a "scientific" hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. "Reason" became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.

In the case of the United States, Black and Native lives are systematically choked by an enduring white supremacy that thrives on oppression and settler colonialism, and is backed by drones, the dispossession of territory and identity to millions, mass incarceration, the un-peopleing of people, and resource grabs that deny that indigenous lives matter and that our planet matters. All around us and up close, we are being told not to care. Not to collectivize, not to confront.

One example of systematic oppression is structural violence. This concept was introduced in the 1970s by Johan Galtung, a pioneering Norwegian researcher in peace and conflict, and founder of the International Peace Research Institute. He describes structural violence as “a form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentricism, classism, racism, sexism, adultism, nationalism, heterosexism and ageism are just some examples of structural violence. Life spans are reduced when people are socially dominated, politically oppressed, or economically exploited. Structural violence and direct violence are highly interdependent. Structural violence inevitably produces conflict and often direct violence including family violence, racial violence, hate crimes, terrorism, genocide, and war.

In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which are economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, which the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, we shall see that premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddishm, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state.

Today, the War on Drugs has given birth to a system of mass incarceration that governs not just a small fraction of a racial or ethnic minority but entire communities of color. In ghetto communities, nearly everyone is either directly or indirectly subject to the new caste system. The system serves to redefine the terms of the relationship of poor people of color and their communities to mainstream, white society, ensuring their subordinate and marginal status. The criminal and civil sanctions that were once reserved for a tiny minority are now used to control and oppress a racially defined majority in many communities, and the systematic manner in which the control is achieved reflects not just a difference in scale. The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. Prior drug wars were ancillary to the prevailing caste system. This time the drug war is the system of control.

The reflections of Sir Mulberry Hawk—if such a term can be applied to the thoughts of the systematic and calculating man of dissipation, whose joys, regrets, pains, and pleasures, are all of self, and who would seem to retain nothing of the intellectual faculty but the power to debase himself, and to degrade the very nature whose outward semblance he wears—the reflections of Sir Mulberry Hawk turned upon Kate Nickleby, and were, in brief, that she was undoubtedly handsome; that her coyness must be easily conquerable by a man of his address and experience, and that the pursuit was one which could not fail to redound to his credit, and greatly to enhance his reputation with the world. And lest this last consideration—no mean or secondary one with Sir Mulberry—should sound strangely in the ears of some, let it be remembered that most men live in a world of their own, and that in that limited circle alone are they ambitious for distinction and applause. Sir Mulberry’s world was peopled with profligates, and he acted accordingly. Thus, cases of injustice, and oppression, and tyranny, and the most extravagant bigotry, are in constant occurrence among us every day. It is the custom to trumpet forth much wonder and astonishment at the chief actors therein setting at defiance so completely the opinion of the world; but there is no greater fallacy; it is precisely because they do consult the opinion of their own little world that such things take place at all, and strike the great world dumb with amazement.

the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook was not only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded eighty-five well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder and other weaponry. Much of the information collected by the expedition – particularly the astronomical, geographical, meteorological and anthropological data – was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered’, most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.2 In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never recovered. An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were completely wiped out, to the last man, woman and child, within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. The few survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity and various ‘productive skills’ such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress – death. Alas,

During his use of this method in the post-literacy stage, Bode observed that the peasants became interested in the discussion only when the codification related directly to their felt needs. Any deviation in the codification, as well as any attempt by the educator to guide the decoding discussion into other areas, produced silence and indifference. On the other hand, he observed that even when the codification30 centered on their felt needs the peasants could not manage to concentrate systematically on the discussion, which often digressed to the point of never reaching a synthesis. Also, they almost never perceived the relationship of their felt needs to the direct and indirect causes of these needs. One might say that they failed to perceive the untested feasibility lying beyond the limit-situations which engendered their needs.

For the dialogical, problem-posing teacher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition—bits of information to be deposited in the students—but rather the organized, systematized, and developed “re-presentation” to individuals of the things about which they want to know more.

Here, the modern requerimiento pressures Indians either to leave the reservation and enter an American society where they will be bereft and cultureless people in a land where poor people of color suffer systematic oppression and an ever-worsening condition of merciless inequality, or remain on the reservation and attempt to preserve their culture amidst the wreckage of governmentally imposed poverty, hunger, ill health, despondency, and the endless attempts of the federal and state governments at land and resource usurpation.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.

The fact is that, after the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, the Irishmen who’d fought in the Great War didn’t fit the new way the country imagined itself. If the British were our sworn enemies, why had two hundred thousand Irishmen gone off to fight alongside them? If our history was the struggle to escape from British oppression, what were we doing helping Britain out, fighting and dying on her behalf? The existence of these soldiers seemed to argue against this new thing called Ireland. And so, first of all, they were turned into traitors. Then, in a quite systematic way, they were forgotten.’ The boys listen palely, the lucent grass-green of the empty park shimmering around them. ‘It’s a good example of how history works,’ Howard says. ‘We tend to think of it as something solid and unchanging, appearing out of nowhere etched in stone like the Ten Commandments. But history, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn’t make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn’t fit. And often that is quite a lot.

EXPOSING THE LIE In this book I expose this progressive narrative as a lie. In reality the Democratic Party is now what it has been from the beginning—the party of subjugation, oppression, exploitation, and theft. The Democrats are not the party of justice or equality, but rather, of systematic injustice and inequality. Far from championing the cause of women, blacks, and other minorities, Democrats have historically brutalized, segregated, exploited, and murdered the most vulnerable members of our society.

Much of western european history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.

One's privilege can make it harder to get critical insights into the things affected by that privilege, for the simple reason that the workings of privilege are usually far easier to notice and understand when you are not their beneficiary. Beneficiaries of privilege often are not even aware of its existence: they have never needed to be. To compound this problem, it can be deeply uncomfortable to regard one's own favorable position within a social structure as due to privilege rather than solely one's own merits and efforts. So the beneficiaries of privilege can be strongly motivated to ignore it. If you are trying to figure out how romantic love works at a time when it is intimately bound up with sexism, heteronormativity, and other systematic oppressions, privilege is a philosophical hindrance.

Bosnian Americans are a minority even though they are of European origin and have white skin. They have been systematically oppressed for a very long time by those who support Serbian and Croatian nationalism. They are not formally accepted as a minority, but I think that their horrifying conditions qualify them to be one. Bosnians have not received any “white privilege” and this is particularly true for Bosniaks. I had classmates attack me for being a Muslim. I faced severe xenophobia and Islamophobia. My classmates had the audacity to scream that I would bomb their house.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power.

Why would I want to be related to a bunch of slaveowners?” I ask. “Would you?” “Of course not. But if you are related to Joshua Ward, you can’t erase that history,” she says. “You can’t ignore your family’s role in slavery or systematic oppression. No European descendant can.

humanitarian grounds, failed to understand that the rapidly developing capitalism of the North was also an oppressive system. They viewed slavery as a detestable and inhuman institution, an archaic transgression of justice. But they did not recognize that the white worker in the North, his or her status as “free” laborer notwithstanding, was no different from the enslaved “worker” in the South: both were victims of economic exploitation. As militant as William Lloyd Garrison is supposed to have been, he was vehemently against wage laborers’ right to organize. The inaugural issue of the Liberator included an article denouncing the efforts of Boston workers to form a political party: An attempt has been made—it is still in the making—we regret to say—to inflame the minds of our working classes against the more opulent, and to persuade men that they are condemned and oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy … It is in the highest degree criminal, therefore, to exasperate our mechanics to deeds of violence or to array them under a party banner.58 As a rule, white abolitionists either defended the industrial capitalists or expressed no conscious class loyalty at all. This unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist economic system was evident in the program of the women’s rights movement as well. If most abolitionists viewed slavery as a nasty blemish which needed to be eliminated, most women’s righters viewed male supremacy in a similar manner—as an immoral flaw in their otherwise acceptable society. The leaders of the women’s rights movement did not suspect that the enslavement of Black people in the South, the economic exploitation of Northern workers and the social oppression of women might be systematically related. Within the early women’s movement, little was said about white working people—not even about white women workers. Though many of the women were supporters of the abolitionist campaign, they failed to integrate their anti-slavery consciousness into their analysis of women’s oppression.

Who is responsible for the incredible mess the present-day generation of Americans find themselves in? In this book, I hope to show exactly how this happened. A series of deadly, inexplicable decisions by our elected leaders and corporate executives have paved the way to the crisis we must deal with now. Corruption has grown entrenched, like an inoperable disease, in nearly every organ of the establishment. We must heed the words of one of America’s greatest statesmen, Thomas Jefferson: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day. But a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers [administrations], too plainly proves a deliberate systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.” The American people have been dealing with just such a “series of oppressions” now for well over a century, and there can be little doubt that it is the result of a “deliberate systematic plan.” The best word to describe it is conspiracy.

The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and post-liberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible . . . God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. . . . In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.[65]

From fear of death to sexualizing the normal and marking children, religion is hell bent on creating an environment that is sexually negative –an environment that systematically and arbitrarily restricts options for people. Regardless of the biological map of an individual, religion will do its best to impose its map. The map is almost always focused on what not to do. Since humans can rarely, if ever, live up to such a restrictive standard, it gives religion a huge opportunity to develop guilt and shame, leading the person back to the religion for relief. The map bears no resemblance to human sexuality. It is an artificial and arbitrary set of rules imposed by the religion on its adherents. The result is oppression of women, sexual misinformation, fear of death, repression of homosexuals and much more.

Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of 'all men.

Learning has been liberated from the despotism of the few and is now available to the mass public for one's own evolution. Yet many of us continue to find solace in illusions, in conformity to systematical oppression, in distractions that keep us mentally, socially and often physically retarded.

As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women.

A politically incorrect point must be noted here. Of the countries where women are held back and subjected to systematic abuses such as honor killings and genital cutting, a very large proportion are predominately Muslim. Most Muslims worldwide don't believe in such practices...but the fact remains that the countries where girls are cut, killer for honor, or kept out of school or the workplace typically have large Muslim populations.

Systematic cruelty does not only show its face in a major event like a massacre. The worst atrocities can also be found in the regime’s daily, mundane presence.

Timoshevski gaped. “You have a Cornucopia machine?” he demanded breathlessly. Burya bit his tongue; an interruption it might be, but a perfectly understandable one. “Yes.” “Will you give us one? Along with instructions for using it and a colony design library?” asked Burya, his pulse pounding. “Maybe. What will you give us?” “Mmm. How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production?

Should people’s Blackness be the end of them?

Some will say that enduring invisibility isn’t the same as “oppression”—however, what happens as a result of systematic erasure, verbal abuse, and misunderstanding can be oppressive.

Archaeology's calling card - the masonry trowel - does not necessarily inspire joy among people who see it routinely used to systematically dissect their ancestral places. In such contexts, it is not at all difficult to see archaeology as an instrument of settler colonial oppression.

Ccru engages with peripheral cultures not because they are ‘down-trodden’ or oppressed, but because they include the most intense tendencies to social flatness, swarming, populating the future, and contagious positive innovation, hatching the decisive stimuli for the systematic mutation of global cybernetic culture.

systematic oppression and underprivilege lead individuals to be adjusted to the misery and tragedy of human existence which

I felt sorry for the woman because, despite my age, I understood that those in power led people to believe that they were responsible for their failures when, in truth, the system failed them.

United States as a cultural form that expressed the angst, rage, joy, and politics of the Black and Latinx experience in a country that had systematically oppressed these groups for centuries. This was a history and experience that the white people buying

Yoga, whether dualist or nondualist, is concerned with the elimination of suffering (duhkha). Here suffering does not mean the pain resulting from a cut or the emotional torment experienced through political oppression. These are simply manifestations of a deeper existential suffering. That suffering is the direct outcome of our habitual sense of being locked into a body-mind that is separate from all others. Yoga seeks to prevent future suffering of this kind by pointing the way to the unitary consciousness that is disclosed in ego-transcending ecstatic states. From the viewpoint of traditional Yoga, even the pleasure or well-being (sukha) experienced as a result of the regular performance of yogic postures, breath control, or meditation is suffused with suffering. First of all, the pleasure is bound to be only temporary, whereas the innate bliss (ānanda) of the Self is permanent. Second, pleasure is relative: We can compare our present sense of enjoyment with similar experiences at different times or by different people. Thus, our experience contains an element of envy. Third, there is always the hidden fear that a pleasurable state will come to an end, which is a reasonable assumption. Yoga is a systematic attempt to step out of this whole cycle of gain and loss. When the yogin or yoginī is in touch with the Reality beyond the bodymind, and when he or she has a taste of the unalloyed delight of the Self, all possible pleasures that derive from objects (rather than the Self) come to lose their fascination. The mind begins to be more equanimous. As the Bhagavad-Gītā (2.48), the most popular Hindu Yoga scripture, puts it: “Yoga is balance (samatva).” This notion of balance is intrinsic to Yoga and occurs on many levels of the yogic work. Its culmination is in the “vision of sameness” (sama-darshana), which is the graceful state in which we see everything in the same light. Everything stands revealed as the great Reality, and nothing excites us as being more valuable than anything else. We regard a piece of gold and a clump of clay or a beautiful person and an unattractive individual with the same even-temperedness. Nor are we puffed up by praise or deflated by blame. This condition, which is one of utter lucidity and serenity, must not be confused with one of the many types of ecstasy (samādhi) known to yogins. Ecstasies, visions, and psychic (paranormal) phenomena are not at all the point of spiritual life. They can and do occur when we earnestly devote ourselves to higher values, but they are by-products rather than the goal of authentic spirituality. They should certainly not be made the focus of our aspiration. Thus, Yoga is a comprehensive way of life in which the ultimate Reality, or Spirit, is given precedence over other concerns. It is a sacred path that conducts us, in the words of an ancient Upanishad, from the unreal to the Real, from falsehood to Truth, from the temporal to the Eternal.

…the authors of these coercion laws [in Russia] began to find it a serious administrative problem what to do with subjects [Jewish people] for whose systematic oppression they alone were responsible.

The Church today still thinks of the poor as objects rather than subjects of their own liberation. That is due to focusing more on hand-outs and band-aid solutions rather than substantial systematic change, which will arise only by empowering the poor and oppressed in their struggle for liberation. Thus, the Church does not properly help the poor by standing above them, offering occasional top-down help. Instead, the Church serves Christ in the poor by joining their plight directly, and by taking up solidarity with the oppressed. Accordingly, the Church is not merely the Church for the poor but of the poor. This radical solidarity empowers the poor and oppressed, who have been so often subject to the brutalization of powerlessness, to organize and struggle for their rights to life, dignity, and humanity.

Babylon was and is a timeless trope for empires and nations and powers that systematize injustices, oppress the people of God, and suppress the truths of liberation. Babylon is no more a city of the future than it is a city of the here and now.

Patriarchy, racism, and capitalist exploitation cannot be solved on a per individual basis by celebrating exceptional cases who survive and thrive despite those systematic oppressions.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior. Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.

But abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.

As Virginia Woolf argued in her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, this imbalance should not come as a surprise. Woolf would agree with Storr that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state. To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

Scholar Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to describe the interlocking forces of oppression.16 If you stand close to a birdcage and press your face against the wires, your perception of the bars will disappear and you will have an almost unobstructed view of the bird. If you turn your head to examine one wire of the cage closely, you will not be able to see the other wires. If your understanding of the cage is based on this myopic view, you may not understand why the bird doesn’t just go around the single wire and fly away. You might even assume that the bird liked or chose its place in the cage. But if you stepped back and took a wider view, you would begin to see that the wires come together in an interlocking pattern—a pattern that works to hold the bird firmly in place. It now becomes clear that a network of systematically related barriers surrounds the bird. Taken individually, none of these barriers would be that difficult for the bird to get around, but because they interlock with each other, they thoroughly restrict the bird. While some birds may escape from the cage, most will not. And certainly those that do escape will have to navigate many barriers that birds outside the cage do not. The birdcage metaphor helps us understand why racism can be so hard to see and recognize: we have a limited view. Without recognizing how our position in relation to the bird defines how much of the cage we can see, we rely on single situations, exceptions, and anecdotal evidence for our understanding, rather than on broader, interlocking patterns. Although there are always exceptions, the patterns are consistent and well documented: People of color are confined and shaped by forces and barriers that are not accidental, occasional, or avoidable. These forces are systematically related to each other in ways that restrict their movement. Individual whites may be “against” racism, but they still benefit from a system that privileges whites as a group. David Wellman succinctly summarizes racism as “a system of advantage based on race.”17 These advantages are referred to as white privilege, a sociological concept referring to advantages that are taken for granted by whites and that cannot be similarly enjoyed by people of color in the same context (government, community, workplace, schools, etc.).18 But let me be clear: stating that racism privileges whites does not mean that individual white people do not struggle or face barriers. It does mean that we do not face the particular barriers of racism.

New Testament scholar and systematic theology professor Dr. Obery Hendricks Jr. has noted, “When the demon-possessed man referred to himself as legion, he was using a military term.” A legion was a Roman unit of three thousand to six thousand foot soldiers. Dr. Hendricks suggests to us that in casting out the legion of demons, Jesus was casting out the oppressive Roman Empire and sending them back across the sea. When the demons went into the water, Jesus was sending the Roman Empire, the source of this man’s victimization, back across the sea. 1 Sue Ann Johns was much like the demon-possessed man in Mark 5. Her suffering was due to systemic injustice and oppressive power. And just as the demon-possessed man could not be rendered healthy until his oppressor was annihilated, Sue Ann could never be delivered from her suffering until the demonic yoke of Slavery was cast into the sea.

Many mistakenly think that remaining silent until finding another job is the safest and least costly approach, only to find out once at a new job, that the same old game starts all over again. The reason for this is simple: there is no escape. The issue is not about a specific company or corporation, even though it is true that some of them are much more oppressive and unbearable than others. The reason why changing employers never solves the problem is because the problem is systematic, structural, and indeed cultural. The fact that this reality of toxic workplaces has been tolerated for so long has turned it into a normalized and acceptable culture. It is very dangerous when anything becomes an accepted culture or norm. This point is crucial to ponder if we want to resist and change this unhealthy culture. The toxicity of many workplaces in America has been so normalized that people do not even question them anymore. Also, predictably, over time, things normalized become moralized. By moralized I mean that this toxicity is now considered as a moral way of earning one’s living, despite much evidence that it’s at once unhealthy and demoralizing. It is considered moral to work hard to earn your living, and it has become accepted that work is simply what it is and there is nothing you can do about it.

Opposition to global hegemony cannot be the same as opposition to traditional oppression. It can only be something unpredictable, irreducible to the preventive terror of programming, forced circulation, irreducible to the White terror of the world order. Something antagonistic, in the literal sense, that opens a hole in this Western agony. Something that leaves a trace in the monotony of the global order of terror. Something that reintroduces a form of impossible exchange in this generalized exchange. Hegemony is only broken by this type of event, by anything that irrupts as an unexchangeable singularity. A revolt, therefore, that targets systematic deregulation under the cover of forced conviviality, that targets the total organization of reality.

Some try to tell themselves that they tried to make changes from within the system the best they could. Unfortunately, however, anyone who has had the chance of working inside brutal, unjust, and systematically racist and oppressive institutions knows that trying to make changes from within is not only a myth, but more likely than not, the huge, sophisticated and unjust institutions will change you to conform to their agenda rather than the other way around. At best, if one tries to make changes or challenges brutal workplaces, one would either lose their job, or – if lucky enough – would simply remain static and never advance in their job or pay. In other words, they will remain poor and powerless, which, by definition, significantly limits any possibility for challenging, let alone, changing such institutions or corporations from within.

A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.

Failing to notice a lack of Latino and African-American representation in congress is a result of systemic oppression – racism. General indifference to the fact that white men dominate large corporations is part of the invisibility of both racism and sexism. A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.

All human beings are systematically socialized to oppress cattle, chickens, snakes, mice, dogs, and all other nonhuman individuals. After the fashion of Sojouner Truth, might cows and chickens ask: “Ain’t I a female, too?” And would not dogs and snakes ask, "Ain't I a living being, too?

Oppressions are linked. We cannot free human beings without freeing cows, sows, and hens along with women and men who are systematically oppressed by those in power. Rather than seek to fight our way up the patriarchal ladder, those working for social justice need to dismantle hierarchies, and cease to exploit all those who are less powerful—even if we must give up a few culinary favorites in the process. (Those who have taken up a plantbased diet for any measure of time never want for fabulous foods. From my experience, people who discover the vast array of wonderful plant-based foods that are readily available in most of our communities never look back.) Each of us decides, over the course of our daily lives, whether we will ignore the suffering of nonhuman animals who are caught in laboratories, veal crates, circuses, and slaughterhouses, or choose to invest in compassionate, healthy alternatives . . . . We choose where our money goes, and in the process, we choose whether to boycott cruelty and support change, or melt ambiguously back into the masses.

The U.S. system of justice contains laws whereby nonhuman animals have no legal standing, but are defined as “property,” as wives and enslaved Africans once were. Other animals (including mice, rats, and birds) are excluded from the legal definition of “animal” in the U.S., thereby denying these individuals whatever slight protection might be provided by U.S. animal welfare laws, and allowing science to use these sentient beings in any way researchers see fit, without fear of legal sanction. Other speciesist laws prevent animal advocates from using free speech on behalf of hunted animals, while protecting right-to-life advocates who speak out on behalf of fetuses. Institutionalized support for the systematic oppression of nonhuman animals is also evident in the recent Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, as well as in the mainstream media, both of which – unbelievably – label animal advocates as “terrorists.

Oppressions are linked. We cannot free human beings without freeing cows, sows, and hens along with women and men who are systematically oppressed by those in power. Rather than seek to fight our way up the patriarchal ladder, those working for social justice need to dismantle hierarchies, and cease to exploit all those who are less powerful—even if we must give up a few culinary favorites in the process . . . . Each of us decides, over the course of our daily lives, whether we will ignore the suffering of nonhuman animals . . . . We choose where our money goes, and in the process, we choose whether to boycott cruelty and support change, or melt ambiguously back into the masses.

culture of victimhood that’s . . . circulating on the Internet is . . . as if the experience of the general frailty of being human and the vulnerability we all have to trauma is . . . being confused for the systematic victimization and oppression of an entire class of people.

But there is a difference between the systematic evil of totalitarianism and the ordinary corruption we find in all institutions, at all times. Totalitarianism is a system of highly organized murder and oppression, driven by ideology. American institutions, in comparison, were not created to facilitate mass murder and dictatorship.

Oppression occurs when individuals are systematically subjected to political, economic, cultural, or social degradation because they belong to a social group. Oppression of people results from structures of domination and subordination and, correspondingly, ideologies of superiority and inferiority.