REL 405: Ethics From the Perspective of the Oppressed
Five Faces of Oppression
1. Exploitation: a Marxist concept - oppression occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another - energies of the have-nots are continuously expended to maintain and augment the power, status, and wealth of the haves.
a. gender exploitation - transfer fruits of material labor to men and trnasfer of nurturing and sexual energies to men. Women transfer powers to men: freedom, power, status, and self-realization of men is possible precisely because women work for them:
b. race exploitation - menial labor (labor of servants) - racism assumes that members of oppressed racial groups are or ought to be servants of privileged group - dark-skinned servants in U.S. Service jobs are filled by black and Latino workers - they tranfer energies of workers where servers enhance the status of the served. Unskilled, low-paying work lacking in autonomy - Laborers on a construction sight - recognition goes to others, but they are at beck and call of everyone
2. Marginalization - system of labor cannot or will not use - the underclass - people are expelled from useful participation and suffer material deprivation as a result.
- Harms: material deprivation; freedoms and rights deprivations; opportunity deprivation.
"Dependency in our society thus implies, as it has in all liberal societies, a sufficient warrant to suspend basic rights to privacy, respect, and individual choice." p. 54. "Dependency should not be a reason to be deprived of choice and respect" - should have voice in decisionmaking to the dependent. Marginality can come from uselessness, boredom, and lack of self-respect. In other words, need to feel like one is producing and contributing, outside of the wage system.
3. Powerlessness - lack authority or power in relation to others, those over whom power is exercised without their exercising it; they take orders and rarely give them. Also includes incompetence - little opportunity to develop and exercise skills - the powerless lack the authority, status, and sense of self that professionals tend to have.
-Inhibition in development of one's capacities; No day to day work autonomy; No respectability
Racism and Sexism - women and persons of color must prove their respectability
4. Cultural Imperialism - dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one's group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one's group and mark it out as the Other.
- Dominant group brings other groups under the measure of its dominant norms - difference gets constructed as deviance and inferiority. Oppressed group's own experience and interpretation of social life finds little expression that touches the dominant culture, while that same culture imposes on the oppressed group its experience and interpretation of social life.
5. Violence - systematic violence and random violence - systemic because directed at members of groups simply because they are members of that group. Any woman should fear rape. Not just direct victimization, but knowledge that they are liable to violation because of their group identity. The threat alone deprives people of freedom and dignity.
Violence is a social practice