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ANN E. CUDD

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Analyzing oppression / Ann E. Cudd.
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For Neal, with love and gratitude
 Preface

uman beings suffer myriad kinds of harms. Like all other animals, we wither and
Hae of disease and injury, in pregnancy and childbirth, and from old age. Like
some other animals, we sometimes inflict injury and death upon each other. In this,
as in many other respects, our abilities are vastly superior to the other animals. Not
only can we harm each other one by one, we have systematic ways of uniting to harm
whole collections of other humans. We wage war, we annihilate, we execute, we
enslave, we retaliate, we punish, we dominate, we terrorize, we tyrannize, we exploit,
we coerce, and we oppress. Unlike the other animals, we morally judge our actions
that harm each other, justifying some, denouncing others. This book is about one of
these kinds of harms that we systematically inflict on persons: oppression.
Although “oppression” is a widely used concept, political philosophers, espe-
cially in the liberal and analytic philosophical traditions, have provided little in the
way of careful conceptual analysis of the term. Aside from short articles and books
on specific instances of oppression, there exist no book-length comprehensive,
general analyses of oppression by analytic philosophers, though there are such books
on related concepts of coercion and exploitation.! This is not to say that there is
a dearth of literature on oppression. Quite the opposite: Oppression is a common
theme in literature, in memoirs, and in books detailing the history of most of the
human past. The books that have been written about oppression would fill a very
large library, and it would be impossible for one person to read them all in a lifetime.
Oppression is both widespread and deeply felt. Books are difficult to write, but
oppression sufficiently motivates many to take on the task, whether to inform, to
indict the oppressors, or to bear witness to suffering.
So how could philosophers avoid theorizing oppression? I would offer a few
reasons by way of speculation on this question. First, philosophers tend not to come
from oppressed groups. Philosophizing is an activity for which one has to have time
and space in which one is not pressed by mere physical survival tasks. Oppressed
persons typically are so pressed. While one need not suffer oppression in order to see
it or to be motivated to write about it, clearly it helps. Consider those philosophers
viii Preface

who have written about oppression; the majority are Jews, women, members of
colonized nations, or members of racial minorities. Yet these groups, even when
taken together, form a minority of the professional philosophers on the planet, and
especially among analytic philosophers. If there is a connection between being from
a minority or being a woman and writing about oppression, as I think there is, then
this could in part explain the dearth of work on it. Second, oppression raises strong
emotions, which philosophers tend to shy away from. No one can write about
oppression without becoming angry, deeply saddened, or perhaps even defensive.
Yet to do philosophy is to apply one’s reason to the matter at hand, in what Hume
called “a cool hour” of thought and reflection. I have found the writing of this book
to be a deeply emotional experience at times, and I have had to put the book aside
at times to regain my composure. While I would not want to argue that philosophy
cannot or should not be done passionately, it is more difficult to reason objectively
when one feels great emotion. Furthermore, philosophers tend to think of passion as
unseemly for professional work. Since there are a great many fascinating philo-
sophical issues that do not raise this difficulty, many philosophers simply avoid the
issues that do. A third reason for the neglect of oppression is that analytic philos-
ophy has gravitated to the most abstract analyses of human experience, regarding
abstraction itself the hallmark of philosophical thought. Since understanding op-
pression involves considerable empirical exploration, at least much of that work is
considered “not philosophy.” But this is a mistaken prejudice, perhaps even a ratio-
nalization for lazy armchair theorizing. Analytic philosophers of science seem to have
outgrown their prejudice for empirical work, and it is time that analytic political
philosophers and ethicists do so as well.
A more theoretical reason for the lack of attention by analytic philosophers is that
justice has long been the primary concern of political philosophers. Although most
consider injustice also important, it has been an abiding prejudice of political philos-
ophers (especially in the liberal, Anglo-American tradition) that injustice is simply the
negation of justice. John Rawls’s twentieth-century classic Theory of Justice, for in-
stance, leaves injustice virtually untheorized.” This prejudice is mistaken; justice can
fail in many different and nuanced ways, as this book points out.
One of the recurring themes of this book concerns the difficulty of recognizing
some forms of injustice. Consider some historical examples. It has not always been easy
to recognize that the confinement of women to social roles that entail less access to
social resources or greater burdens in the provision of social benefit is unjust. It has not
always been recognized that persons forced to work for their pay at rates determined by
market forces not of their own making are enslaved unjustly. It is not easy to recognize
the difference between just and unjust wars. It is not easy to determine when com-
pensation is owed for past injustice, or to whom. Without a proper theory of op-
pression, we will not be able to recognize injustice in all its forms, however.
I have come to study oppression for reasons that are both personal and theo-
retical. | have always seen myself as a feminist and have witnessed and experienced
the sting of injustice suffered by my sex. But I was a philosopher before I was a
feminist philosopher. My early work was on game theory and philosophy of social
science, but I soon saw how those theories might be applied to questions of femi-
nism and oppression.
 Preface ix

Feminists have long recognized the oppression of women but have had a hard
time convincing others that women are oppressed. One of the main motivations for
my work has been to construct a general theory of oppression to demonstrate that
women are harmed unjustly in ways that are similar to the unjust treatment of other
groups who are generally recognized as oppressed. Likewise, for those who can readily
recognize the oppression of women, but not other groups, by showing that there are
deep similarities in the cases they can be convinced that there is serious unjust harm
going on in these other cases as well.
Injustice, since it necessarily comes at the hands of other persons, is surely one
of the most painful forms of harm that a person can suffer. And so we should want
urgently to eradicate it. I shall argue in this book that the fundamental injustice of
social institutions is oppression, and oppression can best be recognized, explained,
and ultimately eradicated by the theories, principles, and methods that underlie the
liberal and analytic traditions.
 Acknowledgments

have been working on this book for nearly a decade, and in that time I have
|ecateaiet many debts to acknowledge. First, | acknowledge permission to re-
print in part four of my previously published works: “Oppression by Choice,” pub-
lished in the Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 25 (June 1994), pp. 22-44 by Blackwell
Publishers; “Strikes, Housework, and the Moral Obligation to Resist,” published in
the Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 29 (Spring 1998), pp. 20-36, by Blackwell
Publishers; “Nonvoluntary Social Groups,” published in Christine Sistare, Larry
May, and Leslie Francis, eds., Groups and Group Rights, 2001, pp. 58-70, by the
University Press of Kansas; and “Psychological Explanations of Oppression,” pub-
lished in Cynthia Willett, ed., Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current
Debate, 1998, pp. 187-215, by Blackwell Publishers.
Some of my debts are institutional in nature: The University of Kansas and the
Hall Center for the Humanities funded research leaves over three semesters during
which I wrote and revised large portions of the manuscript. My colleagues in Phi-
losophy and Women’s Studies, especially Rex Martin, Thomas Tuozzo, and Ann
Schofield offered good advice on the content of the book and on the publishing
process. Nancy Scott Jackson was an early supporter of the project, offering good
advice that I sometimes ignored to my later regret. Lara Zoble and Peter Ohlin, my
editors at Oxford, have been helpful, patient, and generous in their assessment and
acquisition of the book.
Other debts are both philosophical and personal. Tamara Horowitz provided
me with the initial education and inspiration required to undertake this project, and
I deeply regret that her untimely death means she is not able to read and engage the
full book. Her comments on my early work on oppression were invaluable to me; her
mentoring and friendship means more to me than I can ever say. Marcia Homiak
has been a constant friend in the deep, Aristotelian sense that she has taught me to
appreciate and practice. She offered valuable insights and suggestions on the book
manuscript, as well as on my earlier articles on oppression. Anita Superson likewise
has been a philosophical friend and has offered valuable comments over the years
xii Acknowledgments

on work that forms this book. Julie Maybee and Cynthia Willett helped me think
through this book at an early stage. Claudia Card, Sally Haslanger, and an anon-
ymous reviewer offered challenging criticisms along with encouragement to make
the book better.
I have been inspired and challenged by my students, and several deserve
particular recognition. Roksana Alavi, Pamela Belman, Pelle Danabo, Stephen
Ferguson, Tamela Ice, Pinfei Lu, Xiufen Lu, John H. McClendon, III, Anne Mor-
gan, Jorge Mufioz, Gina Rose, and Almas Sayeed have all helped me in my thinking
about the subject and arguments of this book. Pelle also assisted me with the
preparation of the final manuscript.
My deepest debts are personal. My mother, Bernice Daniels, has taken care of
me and mine, entertained us with wonderful diversions, and modeled for me a life of
courage, perseverance, and hard work. My father, Kermit Cudd, has encouraged
and supported me always, particularly through the frustrations of academic life. He
is always a fountain of wisdom, whether academic, familial, or spiritual, and of love.
My brothers, Ben Cudd and Tim Cudd, provide friendship and friendly competition
that motivates me. My stepparents, Anne Cudd and Edward Daniels, have loved
and supported me most of my life. My sons, Alex and Thomas Becker, have not yet
known a time when I was not writing this book. I thank them for the playtime, the
love, and the times when they gave me the space and the time to work without
resenting my absence. Finally, my husband, Neal Becker, read and critiqued much
of the book. Many of the thoughts and ideas of chapter 5, in particular, can be
traced to discussions with him over the dinner table or during long driving trips.
Neal has been my best friend and closest collaborator for over twenty years. His
wisdom, gentleness, generosity, and love sustain me.
Contents

Part I. A Framework for Analysis

1. Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of
Social Institutions 3
2. Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 28
3. Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 55

Part II. Forces of Oppression

4. Violence as a Force of Oppression 85
5. Economic Forces of Oppression 119
6. Psychological Harms of Oppression 155

Part III. We Shall Overcome

7. Resistance and Responsibility 187
8. Fashioning Freedom 222
Appendix 239
Notes 243
References 259
Index 271
 PART I

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

 Oppression: The Fundamental
Injustice of Social Institutions

1. A Genealogy of “Oppression”

In the 1950s if you asked the average (white) American about oppression they
would likely have talked about Hitler, Fascism, Communism, Stalin, North Korea,
and, possibly, Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
What these regimes of oppression have in common is that they are governmental
regimes that deprive people of at least some of their human rights. Fifty years later
these names are no less connected to oppression, yet the kinds of terrible op-
pression that the average American witnesses on TV or reads about in the news-
papers and magazines have changed to guerillas in Peru, warlords and the Taliban in
Afghanistan, child labor in Pakistan, forcibly veiled women in Iran, the destruction
of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army, and sexual slaves in Thailand. Many of
these cases of oppression are not new, but they are now being recognized by more of
the world, and they are more salient than in the past. The end of the Cold War has
changed the way we think of oppression from a state-imposed circumstance to one
that is brought about by any great disparity in wealth and power, whether that
comes from the legitimate or illegitimate governmental monopoly on the use of
force, or from some other illegitimate but effective dominion. This changing per-
ception, however, raises the issue of what oppression is and opens the possibility
that legitimate uses of force or power will be mischaracterized as oppression.
Indeed, some readers may disagree with the second list, arguing that the Israeli
destruction of Palestinian homes is a legitimate response to terrorism. Yet other
readers will charge that conspicuous cases of oppression are missing, such as racism
and sexism in America. To answer these charges rationally, a theory of oppression is
needed.
How shall we go about characterizing and explaining the phenomenon of op-
pression? Analytic philosophers often begin by looking at how the concept has
been used, and then checking those uses against the implications for categorizing
various cases when the concept is consistently applied. In this chapter I begin to
4 A Framework for Analysis

clarify the concept by examining critically its uses in political and philosophical
discussions, and theories that attempt to explain it. From an investigation of the
history of the use of the word, we can glean several important things for our
investigation of oppression. For the history of the concept of oppression parallels the
development of ideas about freedom, equality, and justice, yet unlike those positive
notions, oppression has developed mainly, with a few important exceptions that I
will note, implicitly and in the shadows of the others. From the genealogy of the
concept itself I will formulate a general description of the harm of oppression and
a set of paradigm cases. From a survey of theories that attempt to explain oppres-
sion, I will formulate a set of questions that should be answered by a theory of
oppression, and a survey of possible methodologies to employ in answering those
questions.
Looking at how the concept has been applied is only the beginning of a proper
analysis of it, however. Conceptual analysis involves more than this. Sally Haslanger
(2004b) distinguishes three aspects of a concept that a deep analysis should in-
vestigate. The manifest concept is the concept as defined by its dominant meanings
in a culture; this concept is to be investigated by asking how the term is typically
used in a culture, but not necessarily by those who are doing analysis or theory on
the concept. The manifest concept is accessible to us upon reflection on typical use.
The operative concept is the role that the concept actually plays in what Haslanger
calls the matrix of social practices, and this may be a different concept from the
manifest one. She uses the concept of “tardy” as used in the public schools her
children attend. While there is an official school district definition of the term, the
classroom definition varies considerably from that abstract ideal. It is implicit and
guided by ideas about whether and how a particular child should be punished for
being late to school on a particular day. Understanding the operative concept
requires attention to how the concept’s use in a society affects and is affected by the
social institutions that it relates to. Although both the manifest and the operative
concepts can be gleaned through genealogical research, the operative concept is
more subterranean. To see the implicit meanings one has to be willing to see the
concept operating in ways that go against its official, explicit meanings. Reflection
on the interplay between the manifest and operative aspects of a concept lead us to
a third aspect of the concept, what Haslanger calls the normative concept. The
normative concept is informed by a social theory of what the concept does and what
it means for the society and recommends itself as the preferred use. I take the
normative concept to be the right sense of the term, the way that, on reflection, we
want to use it given a full assessment of how it is explicitly and implicitly defined
and used in the culture. To construct this normative concept we will need to ask
what roles the concept is to play in our analysis of society. The term “oppression”
plays a rich and complex role in defining a fundamental social wrong. Its complexity
will lead us to ask questions about the origin and maintenance of that wrong, as well
as how it might be overcome. In this chapter I will begin with a genealogical
discussion of the manifest and operative aspects of the concept of oppression and
proceed to offering a normative one. Filling out the normative concept of oppression
will constitute the major project of the book.
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 5

1.1. “Oppression” and Modem Liberalism

Ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle believed in a natural hierarchy of
ability among humans that would justify such treatment as enslavement and denial
of citizenship, fairness, or equal rights. Oppression did not, as such, become an im-
portant topic in political philosophy until the advent of liberalism and the idea that
humans are roughly morally equal. It is a distinctly modern notion that persons are in
some sense or other equal to each other. The equality thesis has been given various
theological, philosophical, and moral interpretations and justifications by different
thinkers. Perhaps the most astonishing of all, made by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan,
is the claim that persons are in some physical sense equals:

Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though
there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger of body, or of quicker mind
than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and
man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any
benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of
body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret mach-
ination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.
(Hobbes 1985, 183)

This claim, if true, seems to rule out the possibility of long-term oppression; for, if we
are equal in the sense that each has the strength and ability to kill the strongest, then
how can the strongest keep even the weakest in chains? Why do the oppressed seem
to accept or acquiesce to their oppression?
Modern political philosophers differed on the conditions under which persons
could be oppressed. For both Hobbes and Rousseau, the rough natural equality of
human beings makes the existence of oppression something of a puzzle: How, if we
are roughly equal in natural endowments, could one person allow herself to be
dominated or enslaved by another? Hobbes, for whom oppression connoted con-
ditions of violence and enslavement, argued that in the absence of a sovereign
power to keep the peace, a situation he termed the state of nature, the rough
equality of humans led to the war of all against all, and consequently a “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short” life. Thus, he argued, we must enter civilized society
in order to avoid oppression. “Fear of oppression, disposeth a man to anticipate, or
to seek aid by society: for there is no other way by which a man can secure his life
and liberty” (Hobbes 1985, 163). Rousseau, who thought of oppression as condi-
tions of enslavement and domination, specifically denies that oppression is possible
in the state of nature, however.

A man could well lay hold of the fruit another has gathered, the game he has killed,
the cave that served as his shelter. But how will he ever succeed in making himself
be obeyed? And what can be the chains of dependence among men who possess
nothing? If someone chases me from one tree, I am free to go to another; if
someone torments me in one place, who will prevent me from going elsewhere? Is
there a man with strength sufficiently superior to mine and who is, moreover,
sufficiently depraved, sufficiently lazy and sufficiently ferocious to force me to
6 A Framework for Analysis

provide for his subsistence while he remains idle? He must resolve not to take his
eyes off me for a single instant, to keep me carefully tied down while he sleeps, for
fear that I may escape or that I would kill him. (Rousseau 1987, 58)

For Rousseau, oppression requires the ability for one person to do the work of two
and the artifice of money, or a way to store wealth, and these require society. Also,
according to Rousseau, oppression could only exist when the oppressed is willing to
give up his freedom for some merely apparent reward, a reward that only so-called
civilized humans could see as better than freedom.

Citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind
ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more
dear to them than independence, and they consent to wear chains in order to be
able to give them in turn to others.... inequality spreads easily among ambitious
and cowardly souls always ready to run the risks of fortune and, almost indifferently,
to dominate or serve, according to whether it becomes favorable or unfavorable to
them. (Rousseau, 1987, 77)

Oppression then becomes stable and accepted by the institution of laws: “it derives
its force and growth from the development of our faculties and the progress of the
human mind, and eventually becomes stable and legitimate through the establish-
ment of property and laws” (Rousseau 1987, 81).
John Locke opposed Hobbes’s view of sovereign power as a political panacea by
arguing that unlimited sovereign power is the cause of political oppression. Locke also
opposed Rousseau in thinking that properly limited government and the institution of
property rights need not cause oppression (Locke 1980, sec. 93). Thus, Locke argued
that a government instituted by the consent of the governed and limited by liberal
human rights would maintain its legitimate authority and avoid oppression.
The Enlightenment brought forward the idea that legitimate authority requires
the consent (in some sense) of those who are asked to submit to it. Thus, in the modern
period (i.e., the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries), in which liberal political
theory was initially developed and liberalism took root in many European nations,
“oppression” was used by political philosophers to refer primarily to political repression
and domination. Less commonly, it was used to talk about a particular person feeling
stifled, or to talk of a particular person being overtaxed by the ruler. Hume, for
instance, can be seen using “oppression” in these two ways in his Essays. I shall not be
concerned with this personal sense of “oppression,” which I think is a derivative sense
of the term. More commonly, “oppression” was used to talk about general sorts of bad
treatment by a ruler of his subjects collectively. Locke often used it together with the
terms “tyranny” and “violence,” though he occasionally uses it to speak of any use of
power beyond the bounds of legitimate authority (Locke 1980), and in particular of the
imposition of state religion on persons of other religions (Locke 1983).
Particularly beginning in the eighteenth century, “oppression” often referred
specifically to economic exploitation of a people by its ruler, either in the form of
overtaxation or unequal taxation. Hume, for instance, writes:

the laborious poor pay a considerable part of the taxes by their annual consump-
tions, though they could not advance, at once, a proportional part of the sum
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 7

required. Not to mention, that property in money and stock in trade might easily be
concealed or disguised; and that visible property in lands and houses would really at
last answer for the whole: An inequality and oppression, which never would be
submitted to. (Hume 1964, 370)

Most generally, “oppression” in the modern period referred to arbitrary or unjust

laws imposed on citizens illegitimately that cause material (economic or physical)
deprivation. Perhaps the most inclusive list of such “oppressions” in the modern
period comes in the Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson named as forms of
oppression the kinds of bad treatment that King George had subjected the American
colonists to: making bad or unjust laws, interference with elected representatives
and their attempts to make law, corrupting the judiciary, overtaxation and over-
bureaucratization, trying individuals without due process, the imposition of a brutal,
corrupt, standing army, and general brutality and violence against the colonists.
The early liberal political theorists raised important questions about oppression
that remain for us to answer today, including: How does oppression originate, and
how does it endure over time in spite of humans’ rough natural equality of ability?
Is oppression an inevitable feature of civil society? Their early uses of the term
“oppression” can be summarized by saying that classical modern liberal theorists
thought of “domination,” “tyranny,” and “oppression” as synonyms, connoting rule
by an arbitrary or opposing will, and resulting in abrogation of liberal political rights,
economic deprivations, and physical brutality. These early liberals limited the scope
of human rights to narrow issues and a minority of the existing humans, and hence
their understanding of the causes and effects of oppression was correspondingly
limited. Cases they considered include those who are ruled by illegitimate gov-
ernments and persons whose religion is not tolerated by the state. The methodology
for understanding oppression was informal empirical observation coupled with
philosophical analysis, particularly in the form of state of nature thought experi-
ments.

1.2. Nineteenth-Century Conceptions of Oppression:

Four Conceptual Shifts
In the nineteenth century the scope of liberal political rights broadened, and liber-
alism itself was challenged by the influence of German idealism, especially in the
work of Hegel, by liberal works on women’s rights, and by the historical materialism
of Marx. These movements in political philosophy brought with them new con-
ceptions of oppression. First, we see a shift from a purely political conception of
oppression, where the oppressor is the ruler and the oppressed the ruled, to a more
social conception of oppression, where oppressor and oppressed are social groups that
may be related in a less politically formalized way. We can see a conceptual shift
beginning to take place already in the late eighteenth century. In the Federalist Papers,
written as a series of newspaper columns in 1788 by James Madison, Alexander
Hamilton, and John Jay, we see the first explicit use of “oppression” to speak of the
political domination and abuse of one collective part of a nation by another collective
part of that nation. This was a natural extension of the use of the term to mean the
8 A Framework for Analysis

mistreatment of the ruled by the ruler, since what was meant was the mistreatment of
the minority by the majority in a democracy. I take this to be a kind of transitional
document in the discussion of oppression, as it retains the link between ruler vs. ruled
and still uses “oppression” sometimes to refer specifically to illegitimate taxation, but
also opens the possibility for oppression to refer to a conflict between social groups.
In a related (though limited) sense, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revo-
lution in France of 1790 also is surprisingly progressive. He speaks of the state being
oppressed by commoners if they are allowed to rule, as well as of the problem of the
majority oppressing the minority. However, Burke also expressed a startlingly fa-
miliar threat-cum-warning for those of us who look to recognize, name, and erad-
icate oppressions:

The atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to animate the populace to

plunder... find themselves obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which
they have ransacked with a malignant and profligate industry) for every instance of
oppression and persecution which has been made by that body or in its favour, in
order to justify, upon very iniquitous, because very illogical principles of retaliation,
their own persecutions, and their own cruelties. (Burke 2001, para. 240)

Burke’s warning reminds us that not everything that has been or will be called
oppression really is oppression. In order to avoid using the term incorrectly, we need
to have a good account of what oppression is, and here Burke moves us toward a
different conception of the harm of oppression:

After destroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they invent a sort of
pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to chastise men for the offences of their
natural ancestors; but to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a
ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names and
general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy
of this enlightened age. (Burke 2001, para. 240)

While I will disagree sharply with Burke’s view, since I think that there are condi-
tions under which we should “chastise men for the offences of their natural ances-
tors,”’ this passage is worth looking at closely. It suggests a new sense of the harm of
oppression, a “refinement in injustice,” as Burke calls it: what we might term “cul-
tural domination,” a kind of psychological harm that distorts and destroys the tra-
ditional culture. Burke was arguing that it is oppressive to have one’s history
reinterpreted and “genealogy and family distinctions” destroyed by a hostile social
group, and then to be blamed for acts that have now been reinterpreted as crimes,
even though one could not have committed them because one was not then alive. As
we shall see, Burke’s reference to enforced cultural reinterpretation as oppression will
be mirrored by contemporary social theorists.
A second conceptual shift in understanding oppression in the nineteenth
century came with the idea that social mores or conventions, and not just the
formal dictates of the political ruler, could be oppressive to certain groups. Antic-
ipating this shift near the turn of the (eighteenth to nineteenth) century, Mary
Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), uses the term
“oppression” to refer to the denial of equal education and equal freedoms to
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 9

women. Wollstonecraft examines how not only laws, but also traditions, uncon-
sidered but widely shared prejudices, and social expectations led to these inequal-
ities.? Later, in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859)
similarly writes of oppression of the minority by the dominant social mores of
society.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates
instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle,
it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppres-
sion, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer
means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and en-
slaving the soul itself. (Mill 1978, 219)

In The Subjection of Women, Mill writes at length on the “oppression” of women by

men, that is, of a social group by another social group that is not necessarily a political
minority vs. majority issue. Sometimes this oppression seems to have a particularly
legal and economic cast to it, other times it refers to general mistreatment or
brutality.
The third conceptual shift of the nineteenth century in the understanding of
oppression was brought about by Hegel and consists in seeing oppression as a failure
to recognize the equal moral worth and dignity of another. Although Hegel himself
did not focus on oppression as such, in attempting to explain the possibility of
human slavery for beings capable of absolute freedom, he introduced the idea of
psychological domination for future thinkers. In chapter 3 I will return to a fuller
discussion of Hegel’s influence on ideas about psychological domination.
Marx made the fourth conceptual shift in the nineteenth-century under-
standing of oppression: to see oppression as causally based in the economic system.
Marx wrote about how capitalism systematically and materially disadvantages the
working class. The oppression of the working class is not political oppression, since
they may well have equal legal rights, including the abstract right to own property,
even though they do not have political power. In seeing oppression as fundamen-
tally caused by economics rather than psychology, Marx turns Hegel on his head, or,
if you will, puts the theory of oppression back on his feet where it belongs. For Marx,
oppression begins with division of labor, and thus with the ability of one group of
people to coercively appropriate the product of another’s labor. This coercive ap-
propriation was not limited to economic class conflict, though. In The German
Ideology he writes that “the first division of labor was originally nothing but the
division of labor in the sexual act” (Marx and Engels 1978, 158). Engels, in his 1877
essay, “The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State,” adds that “the first
class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the
antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class
oppression with that of the female sex by the male” (Marx and Engels 1978, 739).
Thus, Marx and Engels, at least at times, saw the oppression of women as the
earliest and longest lasting form of oppression.
To summarize this section, we have seen four conceptual shifts that were made
in the nineteenth century in the conception of oppression: first, to see oppression as
pervading the social world beyond the strictly political or governmental sphere;
10 A Framework for Analysis

second and closely related to the first, to see oppression as a condition imposed not
only by political rulers but also by social convention and tradition; third, to see
psychological domination, in addition to physical and political domination, as one of
the important causes and effects of oppression; and fourth, to see that an entire
economic system of production can be the ultimate origin of oppression. Although
the third and fourth conflict to the extent that they propose an ultimate or primary
cause of oppression, we can see all four shifts to be represented in most current
discussions of oppression.

1.3. Recognition, Distribution, and Three Seminal

Nineteenth-Century Theories of Oppression
Three of these theories from the nineteenth century have proved seminal for
twentieth-century discussions of oppression, namely those of Hegel, Marx, and Mill.
Their particularly contemporary influence has been to reveal the systematic nature of
oppression, by showing how oppression that begins in one sphere, such as the po-
litical, economic, or legal sphere, can then come to permeate the consciousness of
people, both oppressed and oppressors.
Nancy Fraser (1995) draws a useful distinction in theories of injustice, which
illuminates the differences among those theories of oppression that are most in-
fluential for us today. She distinguishes between two kinds of theories of justice
according to their demands for solutions to injustice: the demand for recognition
and the demand for redistribution. According to those who primarily demand
recognition, injustice is rooted in culture and manifested in a lack of respect for or
recognition of minority or subjugated cultures. Those who primarily demand re-
distribution argue that injustice is rooted in economic structures and manifested as
inequality in economic goods, either commodities or capabilities (Sen 1999), and I
would also add inequalities in the distribution of legal rights. While Hegel founded
the recognition theory, Marx and Mill are the seminal distribution theorists. Since
these three theories have been so influential in contemporary thought about op-
pression, | shall briefly critically discuss each in turn before offering my own ac-
count. My purpose here is not, of course, to offer a definitive interpretation of these
thinkers, and there will no doubt be points at which my interpretations seem
lacking in depth or nuance to scholars of these theorists. My purpose is rather to
carve out a role for a contemporary theory of oppression informed by contemporary
social science from a broad brush description of what I see as the major achieve-
ments and failures of these classic theories.

1.3.1. HEGEL’S MASTER/SLAVE DIALECTIC

Although it does not specifically discuss “oppression,” many contemporary social
theorists regard the master/slave dialectic that paragraphs 178-196 of Hegel’s Phe-
nomenology of Spirit (entitled “Of Lordship and Bondage”) outlines as the canonical
classical reading on oppression because it implies an explanation for oppression that
appeals to alleged human psychological needs that resonate with some contemporary
social movements (Willett 1995; Gauthier 1997). Hegel’s idealist view of human
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 11

motivation differs markedly from that of the liberals 1 have alluded to in discussing
the use of the term “oppression” in the modern period. Hegel’s view is that the
highest good is not happiness but freedom of a particularly ideal sort. Humans, who
are uniquely capable of self-consciousness, attain freedom by mutual recognition of
and with other self-conscious beings. But humans do not realize their need for
mutual recognition all at once. Rather, we must move dialectically from our primitive
origins as a barely conscious being to our ultimate destiny as fully self-conscious
beings in mutual recognition of our humanity. In the dialectical historical moment
that he writes of in paragraphs 178-196, humans are at the stage where they un-
derstand their own need for recognition from others, but fail to understand that such
recognition is unsatisfying without their recognizing the other as well. Thus, humans
at this stage are led to engage in a life and death struggle for recognition by the other.
When one party to the struggle is vanquished he gives up his struggle, trades his
(one-way) recognition of the victor for his life, and becomes the victor’s slave. But
this proves ultimately unsatisfying to the master, since the one who recognizes him is
no longer his equal, a fully self-conscious being. At the same time, the slave learns
self-discipline and to set aside bodily or material desires, and this frees him from
external needs. In the end it is the slave who is freer than the master, though neither
can come to complete freedom until they come to see their need for mutual recog-
nition of each other as abstractly equal, self-conscious beings.
For some contemporary social theorists, Hegel’s master/slave dialectic describes
the conditions of oppression and of its solution. They interpret many contemporary
social movements as a struggle for recognition, and the hegemony of the Western,
the white, the male as attempts to deny recognition to others and to subjugate
them. Consider the image of the sanitation workers marching in Memphis in 1968
holding signs “I AM A MAN,” that demand recognition of their equality with white
men from the society. Yet, these social theorists see in the social movements of
oppressed peoples a hypersensitive slave consciousness that understands the true
needs and abilities of both the oppressors and the oppressed. The social condition of
oppression is but a dialectical moment in human history, to be overcome by mutual
recognition. Hegel thus adds an important psychological account of the causes and
effects of oppression, and his methodological contributions are psychological and
dialectical analyses.
Useful as this theory may be as a psychological explanation scheme (and I will
question that usefulness in chapter 3), Hegel does not provide us with a systematic
or unambiguous account of oppression. First, it is not clear what recognition consists
in, or how it is related to the basic necessities of life, such as food and shelter. Nor
does it seem particularly plausible that persons are more highly motivated by their
need for recognition, than for the satisfaction of their basic physical needs. Second,
the idea of a life and death struggle is either metaphorical, and so rather vague, or it
does not describe some clear cases of oppression. Oppression often seems to flourish
when it is kept in place not by armed struggle but by willing, or at least grudging,
compliance by the oppressed, including individuals who have never engaged in any
kind of life and death struggle, a point that Rousseau appreciated, as we have seen.
Hegel might be interpreted as suggesting that we look to the collective struggle
and recapitulation of the group. But what such collective struggle or collective
12 A Framework for Analysis

recapitulation amounts to is unclear. Furthermore, Hegel provides no plausible

answer to the question: Why does the slave capitulate completely and forever? If it
is merely to save her life, then why does she not escape when the master turns his
back? Third, mutual recognition is also vague. It may seem that contemporary
Western democracies epitomize the formal mutual recognition required by Hegel to
overcome the master/slave dialectic, yet oppression still exists in them.
More importantly, howevet, the Hegelian account of oppression is too ideal and
not firmly rooted in the material facts of everyday existence. Yet, this is where we
live everyday. Most instances of oppression are not merely cases of psychological
harms, as significant as those may also be. Torture, beatings, killings, malnourish-
ment, unemployment, enforced servitude—these are the material effects of op-
pression that must first be addressed. And for this reason, in addition to the
theoretical problems of vagueness and ambiguity, I think we cannot be content to
rest on Hegelian theories.

1.3.2. MARX’S THEORY OF ECONOMIC ALIENATION

Marx accepted the idea of the historical dialectic from Hegel but insisted on a
materialist revision that begins to correct the overly abstract and ideal conception of
Hegel. As I noted above, Marx introduced into the discussion of oppression the idea
that oppression was fundamentally located in class struggles. In “Manifesto of the
Communist Party” (1872) Marx and Engels claimed that economic class delimits
social interaction, and the struggles between and within economic classes determine
the future of the society. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles” (Marx and Engels 1978, 473). They then explained in this mainly
polemical work how all class struggle can be overcome with the communist revo-
lution. Marx’s insistence on the systematic material, particularly economic, origin of
oppression constitutes his fundamental insight into the nature of oppression.
In “Estranged Labor” (1844) Marx outlines his theory of alienation (which I
take to be his theory of oppression) under capitalism. Alienation is, in the first
instance, a material harm for Marx and becomes a psychological harm only as a
consequence of the material one.’ The workers are alienated, or separated, from
something essential to them in four ways. First, they are alienated from the product
of labor, in the sense that their labor product is literally taken away from them.
Although the worker exchanges her labor power for wages, she does so under
coercion, having death as the only other option. In “Wage Labor and Capital”
(1847), Marx explained how the wages of the working class must fall to mere
subsistence, which means that some of them will starve. Surplus value is created by
labor and then turned into capital, which enriches the capitalist and further
strengthens him in his struggle against the worker. In this way there is a double
alienation of the worker from her product. As Marx put it, the product confronts
the worker “as an alien object exercising power over h[er]” (Marx 1964, 111), and
by enriching the capitalist it strengthens his ability to coerce her into laboring for
him. Second, they are alienated from the labor process, in the sense that they do not
choose how or when to work, or what to produce. Again, because the capitalist sets
the terms for the worker’s survival, the worker cannot assure that the hours and
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 13

conditions are physically tolerable or that the product is beneficial to her. These two
forms of alienation, which might in themselves be acceptable were the exchanges
equitable or uncoerced, lead inevitably under capitalism to two other forms of
alienation. The third form of alienation is that workers especially, but also capi-
talists, are alienated from their species being. “Species being” is Marx’s term for the
essential nature of a species, which in the case of humans is to be socially coop-
erative and creative producers. Uniquely, humans are capable of subjecting their
“life activity” to their will or consciousness. But when the worker is alienated from
the labor process, her life activity becomes a mere means to her existence, as the life
activity for an animal is merely a means to its existence. Thus alienation from
species being constitutes a kind of psychic harm. Finally, the alienation of the
worker from the product, under capitalism, causes poverty and intense competition
within and between classes. Since profit and wages are inversely related, the worker
and capitalist must be antagonists. Marx explained how progress throws businesses
out of existence, and “compels capital to intensify the productive forces of labor”
(Marx and Engels 1978, 213). This causes the working class to be much larger than
the number of workers that capitalism can support, so the workers are constantly
competing with each other for jobs, that is, for their survival. Thus, Marx derived
the fourth form of alienation: Under capitalism the workers (and the capitalists) are
alienated “man from man,” in the sense that they come to see each other as rivals
for their individual survival rather than as fellow human beings engaged in mutual
cooperation for their collective human fulfillment.
Both Marx and Hegel raised an important question about who, if anyone,
benefits from oppression. Hegel’s answer seems to be that while the master initially
benefits materially, the slave ultimately benefits psychologically, in that the slave
comes closer to attaining absolute freedom. Marx’s answer is somewhat different.
The capitalist benefits materially, and since the alternative is to be a worker and
face a continual struggle for survival that is sometimes unsuccessful, this is an
enormous benefit. But both the workers and the capitalists suffer psychologically
from social conditions of continual competition rather than social cooperation, and
fear of starvation and death should the competition be lost.
Marx’s great methodological contribution to the study of oppression was to apply
economic analysis to reveal the sources and extent of exploitation. However, Marx
was handicapped by the state of economic analysis at his time. His economic theory
was classical economic theory, in which the labor theory of value plays the central
role in the determination of production and exchange. The labor theory of value
allowed Marx to highlight the role of labor power in the production process, and this
cohered with his philosophical view of the moral primacy of labor in production.
Marx also attempts to link his micro analysis of the determination of wages and prices
with a macro theory of class struggles and economic crises. However, the labor theory
of value has been shown to be empirically untenable (Elster 1985, 127-141), and the
twentieth-century economic and political struggles of capitalist and communist
economies have not corroborated his macro theories either.
For Marx, the state of technological and economic development of a society
determines the nature and extent of all oppression. However, Marx’s understanding
of oppression is not entirely material. First, alienation from species being is a kind of
14 A Framework for Analysis

psychic harm, as I argued. Second, in “On the Jewish Question” (1843) he wrote of
how bourgeois civil society, that is, a society economically structured by capitalism,
alienates human beings from their true human interests. In that essay Marx argued
that arguments for the religious emancipation of the Jews in Germany miss the point
that no one in Germany is emancipated, in the sense of being free from alienation or
oppression by the structure of bourgeois society itself. He argued that there are two
contradictions to religious freedom in the German state. First, there is the matter of
divided loyalties: either one is a citizen or a Jew (or Christian, or whatever) first;
since religion claims a deeper loyalty, there may come a time when one has to oppose
one’s citizenly duties to fulfill one’s religious ones; hence one cannot have religious
freedom within a modern civil state. The second contradiction is that civil society of
the modern state requires a separation between political or public interest and
private interest (e.g., private property ownership). But the two interests can also
motivate individuals in opposing ways. Hence one cannot be a free citizen, since
carrying out one’s duties as citizens will sometimes require one to violate one’s
private rights. Once religion is placed in the sphere of the private, the first con-
tradiction folds into the second (Marx 1978, 35). Although this early essay is rather
vague about what real emancipation is supposed to be, the communitarian vision of
the later Marx suggested a melting of the public/private distinction, combined with
overcoming all religion.
A third psychological harm of oppression that Marx highlighted is false con-
sciousness. Although false consciousness has come to connote the general phe-
nomenon of mistaking the contingent, social construction of oppressive conditions
for objectively necessary, natural (and so justifiable) conditions, Marx’s most de-
tailed discussion of the phenomenon centers on the case of “commodity fetishism.”
Under capitalism, according to Marx, people are confused about the nature of
commodities and commodity exchange, and they come to see the commodity as a
fetish, or an object of unreasonable attraction. First, people miss the social and
coercive aspect of the production relationship in capitalism, seeing it as an objective
fact about the human condition. The market is supposed to be free from govern-
ment intervention, and hence what happens within it, including the formation of an
underclass, is the result of unfettered competition, in which the most able win out.
Second, people come to confuse the social relations among them as residing in the
commodities themselves. Under capitalism commodities are produced by inde-
pendent producers whose actions are coordinated by the market, that is, the ex-
change of commodities. The value of one’s labor power, and hence one’s social
position in capitalism, is determined by the value of the commodities one produces.
Thus, social relations between persons are determined by the commodities, or by
the invisible hand of the market. As Marx put it, capitalism makes for “material
telations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 1978, 321),
which is backwards.
Our understanding of commodities constitutes a fetish because the commodity
itself appears to be a being apart from its producers. This mistake arises from the
use value/exchange value separation: “whenever, by an exchange, we equate as
values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labor, the
different kinds of labor expended on them” (Marx and Engels 1978, 322). So the
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 15

only value of one’s labor is what it can fetch in the market, and this is determined by
the almighty commodity, or rather the “money-form.”
False consciousness under capitalism masks the oppressive exploitation in
capitalist production relations. Previous forms of economic organization, for ex-
ample, slavery and serfdom, laid bare their exploitative relations. If you were a slave
you were a thing exchanged, you understood very well that you were being
exploited. Under serfdom, the basic economic relationship was bondage of the serf
to the feudal lord. You gave him some of your labor hours, or else you paid him in
kind. Under capitalism, however, everyone is free to dispose of their property and
labor power as they see fit. All markets are supposed to be free. However, Marx
showed that in reality the labor market is a source of exploitation. Workers produce
surplus value that they cannot realize, since they do not own the means of pro-
duction. Because they do not own the means, they must go to the capitalist and sell
their labor, and this fact perpetuates the class system of capitalism. But in fact the
freedom of the market is not complete. There must also be an element of coercion
in order to explain why surplus value does not disappear as more firms enter the
market and bid for the workers to realize some of their surplus value. Certain kinds
of coercion are permitted, and other kinds prohibited. For example, the govern-
mental control of unions and strikes, and restriction of credit, what counts as theft,
anti-trust, insider information, all are rigged to maintain the capitalist class system.
Under capitalism, what are actually contingent bourgeois economic categories
such as price, supply and demand, free market, and private property appear to be
necessary elements of any economy. Furthermore, rationality, to a bourgeois econ-
omist, has only to do with maximizing expected utility subject to one’s budget
constraints. But rationality might easily be thought to include morality, community,
or something other than the race for more commodity consumption. Thus, under
capitalism we are confused about what is necessary and what is contingent, and about
what constitutes valuable ways to consider the world and its possibilities for us as
rational, social beings. Marx thus recognized several psychological harms perpe-
trated by the capitalist economic system. As Marx wrote about them, they are mainly
cognitive harms, or confusions, rather than affective ones, or emotional agitations.
However, it is not too much of a stretch to argue that to confuse social problems for
one’s own personal failings leads to low self-esteem, hopelessness, and despair.
Although Marx moves us in the right direction from Hegel toward seeing
material oppression as fundamental to oppression, his theory of alienation is also
limited. First, it addresses only economic class issues. Although subsequent Marxists
have attempted to argue that other forms of oppression, such as racial and gender
oppression, are reducible to class oppression, these reductions are unpersuasive
(Hartmann 1979). Marx and Engels themselves, as we noted above, at times rec-
ognized that the oppression of women pre-dated class oppression.* Second, Marx’s
theory has been shown in practical application to be insufficiently appreciative of
the need for liberal human rights. Although it is surely unfair to judge much of
Marx’s theory by the failures of the Communist states of the twentieth century, it is
I think right to suggest that his inattention to liberal rights, such as freedom of
expression and assembly and the need for democratic government, is partly re-
sponsible for the horrible abuses of those failed systems.
16 A Framework for Analysis

At root the problem with both the Hegelian and Marxist approaches to op-
pression is that they fail to take individuals seriously. This flaw is both a moral and a
theoretical one. Theoretically both are concerned with the collective struggles and
movements of social groups, but they fail to show how individuals are motivated to
make the small motions that add up to the collective ones. This might be an ac-
ceptable kind of social theory if it we did not take individuals to be morally primary,
and so consider the outcomes’ for groups to be of greater moral significance than
outcomes for individuals. I can see no good argument for such a claim. Rather, the
fact that it is individuals who feel pain and pleasure, who triumph and suffer, who die
and give birth gives us reason to hold them primary to the groups of which they are
members. This claim, that individuals are morally primary, is the liberal view.

1.3.3. MILL’S LIBERAL THEORY OF THE OPPRESSION

OF WOMEN

While Marx founded the economic inequality strain of distributive theories of op-
pression, Mill’s analysis of oppression founded the legal and social inequality strain
of the distributive theory of oppression. While Marx took oppression to follow on
unequal distribution of the means of production, Mill took unequal distribution of
legal rights to be the root cause of oppression. Mill’s theory of oppression is naturally
closely related to his theory of freedom or liberty, and in turn, his theory of the good.
Oppression is fundamentally a denial of equal liberty, which for Mill is the denial of
the opportunity to develop one’s higher capacities for progressive thought and ac-
tion. In Mill’s view, we are all naturally motivated to seek our own happiness, but
happiness is best sought by seeking to cultivate higher pleasures, the pleasures of the
intellect. If we were fully informed, then we would want to do those things that
cultivate the intellect, no matter what we may think we want or appear to want.
Hence, for Mill, oppression cannot be truly voluntarily submitted to. If it appears that
someone is voluntarily submitting to oppression, then either the coercion is not
apparent to the observer, or the victim voluntarily submits out of enforced ignorance
to the harmfulness or the wrongness of her treatment, or she is not truly being
wronged, but is seeking to fulfill herself in the best way she can. Distinguishing which
case we have in any particular situation is, of course, very difficult. In the case of
slavery, Mill argued that the state ought to prevent individuals from voluntarily
submitting. The case of women’s inequality is less clear, however. Although he
argues for equal political rights, Mill believed that the maintenance of separate
spheres for women and men, where women run the household and men the public
world, ate appropriate and, we can infer, not oppressive. I shall argue in chapter 5
that this is not the case—such separate spheres are inevitably unequal.
Mill, in The Subjection of Women ({1869] 1988), provided the first contemporary
liberal account of a case of oppression. He concentrated on answering the question,
why do women appear to voluntarily submit to oppression? First, Mill showed how
oppressors create (actual and alleged) shortcomings and faults in their victims
through a combination of force, terror, and unequal opportunity to develop their
talents (Mill 1988, esp. ch. 2). Then he discussed how oppressors manufacture and
use these perceived faults or shortcomings of the oppressed to justify inequalities
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 17

(Mill 1988, esp. ch. 3). Their inferiority makes their subsequent unequal treatment
appear justified, even protective. Second, he showed how law creates social condi-
tions of inequality that belie their origin in the law.

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find
already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact
into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the sub-
stitution of public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights,
instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength. (Mill 1988, 5)

Mill focuses on marriage and property laws that reduce women’s abilities to leave or
to negotiate greater freedom. He then shows how women and men have adapted to
these conditions in ways that seem to justify the laws: Women become specialists in
private domestic affairs and cultivate a moral sensibility appropriate to that realm,
while men learn to compete in public life and to cultivate their sense of justice. Then,
because men’s moral sensibilities are more appropriately suited to guiding public
political affairs, laws restricting women’s participation in public affairs appear to be
justified.

all the education which women receive from society inculcates on them the feeling
that the individuals connected with them are the only ones to whom they owe any
duty—the only ones whose interest they are called upon to care for; while, as far as
education is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary ideas which
are presupposed in any intelligent regard for the larger interests or higher moral
objects. The complaint against them resolves itself merely into this, that they fulfil
only too faithfully the sole duty which they are taught, and almost the only one
which they are permitted to practise. (Mill 1988, 83)

Third, Mill showed how the attitudes and desires of the oppressed are manipulated
by the conditions of their oppression so that they appear voluntarily to accept their
own oppression. People raise their daughters to be as content as possible with the
given conditions. They believe in the naturalness of the inferiority and consequent
subordination of women to men. Thus, like Marx, Mill explained how false con-
sciousness (though this is not his term) can take hold on the oppressed. While for
Marx the naturalness of the economic system convinces (most) workers that their
oppression is also natural (and so justified), for Mill the naturalness of the gender
system likewise convinces (most) women to acquiesce in their (apparent) fate.
Mill’s theory of oppression as presented in the Subjection of Women makes a
powerful case for the claim that women have suffered systematic injustice. How-
ever, as a general theory of oppression, it has some limitations. First, and most
obviously, it is limited to the case of women. There are several reasons for thinking
that this limitation is not simply nominal. Mill himself claimed that the case of
women is different from all other cases of political oppression because of its uni-
versality and because it is exercised over intimates. His work focuses on family
relations, divorce and inheritance laws, and gender norms, and these are specifically
relevant to women’s oppression. A general theory of oppression will have to explain
how institutions more generally create unjust harms for groups of people. Second,
Mill placed the emphasis on legal inequality and its consequences, not fully
18 A Framework for Analysis

recognizing less subtle barriers to liberation. Mill upholds the traditional division of
sex roles in the family, believing that women will freely choose the domestic life of
housewife and mother. Although he argues that women should have the right to
own property, he fails to see that the separation of public and private spheres and
women’s confinement to the private, even if freely chosen, will inevitably lead to
great economic inequality between men and women. Again because his case is the
case of women, he underplayed (although he did not entirely ignore) the explicit
use of force for a general theory of oppression. But even in the case of women, Mill
also failed to appreciate the degree to which social norms are entrenched outside
the legal structure.’ In the succeeding century we have had the opportunity to
observe how difficult it is to end women’s oppression through mainly legal means. A
general theory of oppression will need to address the extra-legal material and social
psychological forces that reinforce and maintain oppression.

1.3.4. FREUD’S INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY

THEORIES OF OPPRESSION

As a final note on the influences of nineteenth-century theories on twentieth-

century theories of oppression, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory must be mentioned.
Psychoanalysis has been used to attempt to explain the origin and nature of op-
pression as a psychological phenomenon. However, Freud himself cannot be seen as
offering a theory of oppression because in his view the psychosexual developments
that lead to the kinds of harms that we might term “oppression” are biologically
determined. This is especially true in the case of women. Hence, they are not unjust
but at worst unfortunate facts of nature. Women’s inequality simply reflects their
psychological and physical inferiority. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Freud’s psy-
choanalytic approach and the idea of the unconscious have been enormously in-
fluential for twentieth-century social theorists.
Let us summarize the contributions of nineteenth-century thinkers on the
conceptualization of oppression. To the description of oppression, the idea of psy-
chological harms was added. Among the most important of these are disrespect
(Hegel) and false consciousness (Marx and Mill). Additional possible victims were
identified, especially genders and economic classes. New questions were explored:
Who benefits from oppression? How do institutional structures of oppression form?
And new methodologies for examining oppression were employed, including clas-
sical economic theory, psychoanalysis, and utilitarian moral theory.

1.4. Further Conceptual Developments

in the Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century we see the concept of oppression further broadened in terms
of the specification of its victims and its effects. Following Marx’s emphasis on the
economic system and Mill’s emphasis on unequal rights for men and women, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, in Women and Economics, echoing Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote of the
“sexuo-economic” system that oppresses women by constraining their economic op-
tions to the sexual servitude of men and thereby over-exaggerating and over-exciting
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 19

their sexual natures (Gilman 1966). Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, offered
the most comprehensive analysis of a single case of oppression. She analyzed the
oppression of women as a comprehensive economic, political, psychological, and sexual
domination of women by men, through an examination of possible explanations of its
origins, and its manifestations and effects through history. Frantz Fanon applied psy-
choanalytic theory to his analysis of colonial imperialism, which he considered the
paradigmatic form of oppression. Oppression, he argued, always involves violence,
either direct or indirect, where by indirect violence he meant severe material depri-
vation, such as controlling the economy and paying only subsistence wages. Because of
the psychological consequences of that violence, Fanon argued, only violent response
can free the victims from their psychological oppression.
Since the 1970s social theorists and political philosophers have focused on a
number of cases of oppression and have provided limited accounts of those phe-
nomena. The women’s movement and the rise of feminist theory have resulted in
theories of women’s oppression that trace their methodological and conceptual roots
to Hegel, Marx, and Mill, as well as psychoanalytic explanations. In the Hegelian
tradition of oppression as a failure of recognition, there are Cynthia Willett, Iris
Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, and Nancy Fraser. In the Marxist tradition of op-
pression as a failure of economic equality, we find Ann Ferguson, Heidi Hartmann,
and Nancy Hartsock. More recently, Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum
follow the Millian tradition of seeing oppression as primarily a failure of legal equality,
but with a more nuanced understanding of how the entrenchment of social norms
prevents women from attaining real, material equality. And finally, Nancy Chodorow
and Dorothy Dinnerstein offer psychoanalytic theories of women’s oppression.
Several other cases of oppression are the focus of contemporary social concern.
Oppression of racial and ethnic minorities has inspired a large literature, particularly
the treatment of African slaves and their descendants, dating back to the nine-
teenth century. The Holocaust made the oppression of Jews highly salient. Op-
pression of sexual minorities, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals, is
now a topic of broad concern. Finally, the treatment of the disabled by the able-
bodied, the elderly by the middle-aged, and children by adults have each been
called cases of oppression.
Following Hegel, this century has developed and emphasized the notion that
oppression can have significant psychological effects both on individuals and on the
oppressed groups to which they belong. Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of
hegemony to analyze the domination of the consciousness of others. And numerous
contemporary thinkers theorize oppression as a problem of misrecognition, dehu-
manization, or a failure of cultural respect (Friere 1970; Clatterbaugh 1996; Willett
1995; Young 1990). Other radical theories are more concerned about the eco-
nomic distributive aspects of oppression. Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of women’s
oppression likewise is a distributive theory that follows on both Marx and Mill.
Oppression in these theories is both an economic constraint and a psychologically
degrading and distorting force on women as a group. Finally, liberal political theorists,
insofar as they treat aspects of oppression at all, tend to give distributive accounts.
The concept of oppression thus began its life denoting the arbitrary and unjust
material harms by a ruler on his or her subjects. As liberalism and democracy
20 A Framework for Analysis

advanced to enfranchise more social categories of persons, the concept came to

connote a wider range of harms by a wider range of persons. In the nineteenth
century, oppression was used more often to refer to harms of one social group by
another, including psychological harms, such as failures to recognize or respect
persons, and material harms consequent on unequal distribution of social resources
and legal rights. As political philosophers began to take note of the injustices of
sexism, colonialism, and capitalism, and the oppressed to demand their rights,
oppression took on the connotation of cultural domination. By the late twentieth
century, we had come to use “oppression” to refer to unjust violence, and economic,
social, political, and psychological injustices suffered by a wide variety of social
groups. These cases include: colonial natives, racial and ethnic minorities, religious
minorities, gays and lesbians, and the disabled. To the questions posed by previous
thinkers, the twentieth-century work adds this: Who really is oppressed? Are we all
oppressed? Is cultural domination a kind of oppression? And to the methodologies
employed, it adds deconstruction or cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and neo-
classical economic theory.
Amidst the competing theories, examples, and explanations of oppression, a
consensus has been forged on the idea that oppression comes out of unjust social and
political institutions.®° “Institution” refers to formal and informal social structures
and constraints, such as law, convention, norms, practices, and the like. As we saw,
in the early period of liberal thought, illegitimate or unauthorized government was
seen as the primary vehicle of oppression. Later, in the nineteenth century, other
cultural institutions such as religion, economic structures, and social mores were also
seen as potential (or even inevitable) causes of oppression. In this century we have
seen how social groups, with the explicit purpose of imposing their cultural values or
expectations on minority cultures, oppress the members of those minority cultures
through domination of such social institutions as the media and popular or high
culture. In each case, these are seen by social theorists who write about oppression as
injustices that act through our social institutions. The basic flaw in oppressive in-
stitutions is that they fail to treat individuals as moral equals; they harm some by
allowing others systematic, unfair power and advantage. While social institutions
may have other flaws, such as inefficiency or instability, and some may even be
matters of injustice, oppression overshadows these in moral terms. Furthermore, it is
often the oppressiveness of an institution that causes either its instability or its
inefficiency, making oppression also causally primary. Oppression, we can now say, is
the fundamental injustice of social institutions.

2. Analyzing Oppression

The task of this book is to provide a comprehensive analysis of oppression conceived

as the fundamental injustice of social institutions. In order to begin a systematic
analysis of any concept, the theorist must consider the criteria of adequacy that any
such an analysis ought to meet. First, an adequate analysis of oppression provides a
clear and coherent definition of oppression and conditions to pick out the right cases
of oppression. Second, a general analysis of oppression has to answer the general
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 21

questions and give some guidance for answering questions about specific cases. The
main questions that a comprehensive, general theory of oppression must answer are
these:
* Who really is oppressed? Who benefits from oppression, if anyone?
* How does oppression originate?
* How does oppression endure over time (in spite of human’s rough natural
equality)?
* How do institutional structures of oppression form?
* Is oppression an inevitable feature of civil society?
* How can oppression be overcome?
Of these, I take the most difficult and interesting of these questions to be what I will
call the endurance question: How does oppression endure over time in spite of human's
rough natural equality? Our answer to this question will inform our answers to the
others. To answer this question theorists have always had to show how the oppressed
are induced to participate in their own oppression rather than resist it. So, for
instance, Rousseau claimed that vanity perverts persons’ desires, so that they prefer
material goods to freedom. Hegel claimed that it is capitulation in the face of death.
Marx wrote about how the oppressed come under the sway of “false consciousness”
and are motivated to participate in the economy out of fear of starvation. And Mill
claimed that it is the force of social mores that indoctrinate us into our society’s
traditions from childhood. I believe that none of these are adequate answers, though
each contains a grain of truth.
The third criterion of adequacy for a theory of oppression is that it must point
in the direction of a resolution or a reduction of oppression. I take this to be a
necessary criterion because oppression is, by my definition, an injustice caused by
(at least in part) social institutions. If the theory cannot provide a means by which
oppression can be reduced, then either the theory must deny that it is unjust
(perhaps locating the harm in a natural and inevitable feature of humans) or fail to
give an adequate causal account of its maintenance. Such a theory would be
pointless to pursue.’
These classical theories of oppression fail to provide theoretically sound or
practically useful theories. Both Marx and Hegel make the classic mistakes of col-
lectivist and functionalist theories. Hegel, as I have argued, posits a vague and
ambiguous “collective Spirit,” which is not only ontologically weird, but fails to
provide us with a practical direction for resolving oppression. What, exactly, are we
supposed to do to move in the direction of absolute Spirit? What practical steps can
we take to advance mutual recognition? Both Hegel and Marx claim that some
future, less oppressive social form is inevitable. But what can the individual do to
help bring it about? Rousseau and Mill, on the other hand, make classic individ-
ualist mistakes. Their individualist theories fail to explain at a social level what has
gone wrong and tend to lay blame too much on the individual. But it is implausible
to suppose that oppression can be overcome by an act of will on the part of a few
individuals.® What is needed is an explanatory framework that can explain the
social phenomenon of oppression and yet posits mechanisms through which the
social phenomena work at the individual level. We need a theory that seeks to
22 A Framework for Analysis

explain how the social supervenes on the individual, without reducing the social to
the individual. This would give us a theory that is both more theoretically plausible
and satisfying, and more politically useful.
In the remainder of this book I aim to present a theory of oppression that
explains how it can be fundamentally a social phenomenon, yet does not deny that
the social forces that create oppression work through individual persons. In partic-
ular, I shall argue that the oppressed are co-opted through their own short-run
rational choices to reinforce the long-run oppression of their social group. I will
present what I call a social force analysis of oppression, wherein the forces are the
motivational factors leading the oppressed to acquiesce to their condition. I will argue
that there are two main kinds of forces: material, acting through violence and eco-
nomic need, and psychological, acting through cognitive and affective mechanisms.
Some questions, such as, what is the origin of oppression, may not admit of
general answers. But an adequate analysis of oppression will suggest some natural
places to look for an explanation in particular cases. Yet this question is less crucial
to answer than the question of how it is currently maintained, if what we are after is
a theory that helps us to eradicate current oppression.
As oppression is a social phenomenon, an adequate, scientific analysis of op-
pression appeals to the best social science available, and not to intuitive or em-
pirically inadequate methods. Because of this criterion, many of the twentieth-
century theories of oppression have to be discarded. As I shall argue in chapter 3,
psychoanalytic theory and the Hegelian recognition theory are inadequate psy-
chological theories for explaining anything, and there exists an empirically adequate
and theoretically coherent alternative explanatory methodology, namely social
cognition theory. In employing this psychological theory, my account of oppression
is, I think, unique. Likewise, this criterion tells against classical or Marxist economic
theories, except as the latter have been reinterpreted and remodeled on the basis of
modern economic and game theory. My analysis of the material forces of oppression
in chapter 5 will employ game theory, especially bargaining theory, and other
concepts from neoclassical economic theory and institutional economics.
The psychological and economic theories must be fully consistent with each
other, and they have to be able to explain all the psychological and economic
manifestations of various cases of oppression. In this context I shall distinguish
between psychological and material forces of oppression, where the psychological
forces primarily affect the cognitive and affective functioning of individuals, and
only secondarily through these affect the material well-being of individuals, while
material forces affect primarily material well-being and only secondarily psycho-
logical well-being.
Finally, the psychological and economic theories must provide both a macro
analysis at the social level, and a micro analysis at the individual level that shows
how the aggregate individual effects cause the macro phenomena. This criterion
requires the theory to pay attention to the way that the causal chain links up at
different levels. If it appeals to a social force, then how does that force come about?
The theory must tell us how individual thoughts and actions come together to
create those forces, though, and it does not require that the individuals must intend
to cooperate to form those forces.
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 23

3. Toward a Definition: Conceptual Distinctions

As I will use the term, “oppression” names a harm through which groups of persons
are systematically and unfairly or unjustly constrained, burdened, or reduced by any
of several forces. Oppression is a normative concept that names a social injustice.
Oppression is always wrong; one cannot coherently speak of justified oppression,
though some forces that characteristically comprise oppression may in some in-
stances be justifiable. For instance, one might be degraded and humiliated by one’s
own actions while on a drinking binge, but such harms would be entirely consequent
on one’s own actions and hence not in any sense unjustified. In this way, oppression
is different from some of the harms I named at the outset, such as punishing or
exploiting, which are not always wrong. Further, oppression cannot be just any denial
of freedom (Bay 1981), since some constraints on one’s freedom are natural or social
but not unjust. Thus, to make a claim of oppression is to show that the harms
involved are unjustified, or correlatively, to show that some harms are justified is to
show that they are not oppressive.
To say that oppression is a social injustice is to say that it is perpetrated through
social institutions, practices, and norms on social groups by social groups. In this way
oppression differs from many kinds of injustices that can be done to individuals as
well as to social groups. One can be enslaved as an individual or as a member of a
social group, as one can be unjustly exploited as an individual or as a member of a
social group. Since oppression is a kind of social injustice, an injustice suffered by
whole groups of persons, it often wrongs widely and deeply.
Although oppression afflicts whole groups of persons, it is fundamentally the
individuals in those groups who suffer. I do not claim that groups are suprapersonal
entities that can suffer harm, although that would be a natural misinterpretation of
what I have said so far. In chapter 2 I present my theory of social groups, and there it
will be clear that social groups are aggregates of individuals, though of a special, non-
accidental, sort. Thus, I will argue that it is individuals who suffer the injustices of
oppression, though they can do so only as members of social groups. It is because
humans sort themselves into social groups and find it nearly impossible as well as
undesirable to extract themselves from social groups that they can oppress each
other.
To avoid another misunderstanding, I must next distinguish between subjec-
tive and objective oppression. Subjective oppression concerns the judgment or
feeling by a person or persons that he or she or they are oppressed, that is, sys-
tematically and unjustly harmed as a member of a group. To feel oppressed one need
not even be able to name the source of suffering as “oppression”; one could simply
feel a burden and feel it as unjust. Objective oppression concerns the fact of op-
pression. Objective and subjective oppression are analytically separable: One can be
objectively oppressed and not know it or feel it (thus not be subjectively oppressed),
and one can judge wrongly or misperceive that one is oppressed, thus being sub-
jectively but not objectively oppressed. In this book | am concerned mainly with
objective oppression, and with subjective oppression only as it follows upon ob-
jective oppression. Thus, when I refer to oppression simpliciter I will mean objective
24 A Framework for Analysis

oppression that may or may not be accompanied by subjective oppression for the
victims.
Another distinction that I will draw that should not be confused for the
subjective/objective one is the distinction between psychological oppression and
material oppression. Psychological oppression occurs when one is oppressed through
one’s mental states, emotionally or by manipulation of one’s belief states, so that
one is psychologically stressed, reduced in one’s own self-image, or otherwise psy-
chically harmed. Material oppression occurs when one’s physical being is harmed by
oppression, or one’s material resources, including wealth, income, access to health
care, or rights to inhabit physical space, are reduced by oppression. Either form of
oppression may be subjectively recognized or not by its victims. And, as I shall argue
in this book, psychological and material oppression mutually cause and exacerbate
the effects of each other.
Contemporary accounts of oppression sometimes attempt to define oppression
by the harms that the oppressed suffer. Kenneth Clatterbaugh (1996) usefully dis-
tinguishes among four kinds of theories of oppression according to the harm suffered
by the oppressed. Psychological theories postulate that oppression is mainly an in-
ternal state or feeling. Clatterbaugh rightly rejects this theory because it suggests that
the proper solution to the problem is individual therapy rather than social revolution.
I would add that it does not allow us to distinguish subjective from objective op-
pression, or the mere feeling of being oppressed from actual oppression. Inequality
theories hold that oppression consists in a group’s being denied access to some scarce
and valued resources. Clatterbaugh rejects this kind of theory on the ground that it
does not allow us to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate inequalities. Similarly,
limitation theories hold that oppression consists in some limitation of opportunities,
and it suffers from the similar drawback that some limitations are justifiable. Finally
Clatterbaugh defends a dehumanization theory of oppression. According to this kind
of theory, “oppression is the systematic dehumanization of an identifiable target
human group. To dehumanize a group is to deny that the members of that group
possess the complete range of human abilities, needs, and wants that are valued at
that time as important to a human being” (Clatterbaugh 1996, 295). However, he
goes on to qualify “a group is not oppressed if there are qualities included in being a
human being that are denied them and that they in fact lack” (Clatterbaugh 1996,
295). This qualification is necessary in order to avoid the analogous problem to the
ones he identified in the limitation and inequality theories: Some kinds of “dehu-
manization” may in fact be justified. But the qualification contains an admission that
leaves this theory vulnerable to another kind of criticism. Many abilities that we
consider important human abilities, a sense of justice or of compassion, an ability to
reason, for instance, are socially learned. But if they are socially learned, then the
social teaching can be denied. If an ability is considered an essential one to full
human status, then it is likely to be denied to the oppressed. Thus, the oppressed
might in fact lack some ability, the lack of which objectively degrades them. It was
widely held in Mill’s time, and he admitted as much, that women lacked a sense of
public justice, and thus were not well suited for public life. But Mill was also quick to
point out that women were denied the opportunity to develop their sense of public
justice, and this denial constituted their oppression (Mill 1988, 83, go).
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 25

What we can learn from Clatterbaugh’s work is that oppression cannot be

characterized by the harms consequent on it alone. These harms must also be un-
justly inflicted. But to see whether harms are unjust, one needs to examine the causal
mechanisms by which the oppressed come to suffer them. A comprehensive account
of oppression has to characterize not only the harms of oppression, but also the causes
of those harms. Thus, my account of oppression will concentrate on how the op-
pressed come to suffer inequality, limitation, and dehumanization, among many
other harms.
In the view of oppression that I will present, for every social group that is op-
pressed there are correlative social groups whose members benefit, materially or psy-
chologically, from this oppression. I will call the groups whose members gain from the
increased prestige and social privileges that their membership confers on them
“privileged groups,” but this is not to assert that a majority of persons in those groups
perpetrate oppression intending to gain unjustly from their actions (or omissions).
Even if one is a member of a privileged group, one need not oneself be an oppressor, in
my view. One could, for instance, struggle against the social system from which one
gains through one’s group membership, even if one is powerless to renounce that
membership. When John Stuart Mill married Harriet Taylor, for example, he asserted
that he renounced his privileges as husband, but in fact he could not do so legally.
Were their marriage to have broken down, his legal rights including those he had
attempted to renounce would have been upheld by the society. To be an oppressor,
according to the view that I will elaborate and defend in chapter 7, one needs to be a
member of a privileged group, to gain from oppression of another social group, to
intend to so gain, and to act to realize that intention by contributing to the oppression
of the oppressed group from whose oppression one gains.
Summarizing these remarks gives us the following definition. Oppression names
a circumstance in which four conditions are satisfied:
1. The harm condition: There is a harm that comes out of an institutional
practice.
2. The social group condition: The harm is perpetrated through a social
institution or practice on a social group whose identity exists apart from
the oppressive harm in (1).
3. The privilege condition: There is another social group that benefits from
the institutional practice in (1).
4. The coercion condition: There is unjustified coercion or force that brings
about the harm.
These conditions, I claim, are jointly necessary and sufficient for oppression. My
definition resembles Marilyn Frye’s (1983) analysis in her classic piece “Oppression” in
several respects. In particular, Frye recognizes the first three conditions. The fourth
condition, however, is left implicit in her analysis. Rather than looking for coercion,
she asks us to investigate who benefits from the social limiting practice. To avoid the
objections to Clatterbaugh’s limitation theory, we must look not for harm but for
unjustly inflicted harm, and it is important, therefore, to make this condition explicit.
Iris Marion Young (1990) has argued that “oppression” cannot be seen as a
single, unified phenomenon because attempting to do so inevitably leads to either a
26 A Framework for Analysis

reduction of all cases to oppression to a single kind of oppression (e.g., the Marxist
reduction of oppression of women to class oppression) or exclusion of some cases that
ought to be termed oppression. I intend to do neither: I want to maintain that there
are irreducible forms of oppression, and I want to provide criteria that pick out all and
only the oppressed groups. Can oppression be treated as a univocal concept? Is the
oppression of women the same kind of phenomenon as the oppression of blacks or
the oppression of Jews or the oppression of homosexuals? I will argue there is a
univocal concept: Although there are great differences in the origins of oppression of
and its effects on different groups, each of these oppressions shares a set of features.
Such an account will allow us to judge in new cases whether oppression is going on,
or some other sort of injustice or justifiable harm. In addition to that theoretical
reason, a reason for pursuing a univocal theory of oppression is to provide a common
ground for persons of many different oppressed groups.
The main thesis of the book is that oppression is an institutionally structured
harm perpetrated on groups by other groups using direct and indirect material and
psychological forces that violate justice. 1 shall argue that material forces, by which I
mean physical violence and economic domination, initiate a vicious cycle of harm that
subjugates the oppressed to one or more privileged groups. These forces work in part by
coercing the oppressed to act in ways that further their own oppression. Direct forces
externally affect the choices of individuals, while indirect forces shape the background
social beliefs and desires with which we perceive and behave toward others. The most
important and insidious of these indirect forces is an economic force that acts by means
of the oppressed persons’ own preferences and rational choices. Psychological forces,
both direct and indirect, reinforce and secure oppressive institutions.
Just as important as the content of my theory is the argumentative method-
ology that it employs and tradition of political philosophy from which it derives.
While current philosophical analyses of oppression use psychoanalytic, Marxist, and
Hegelian arguments and traditions, this book uses current social science, in the
form of cognitive psychology and modern economic theory, and situates itself in the
Anglo-American tradition of liberal political philosophy. The book attempts to
demonstrate that liberal political philosophy and social scientific methodologies that
have been assumed to be purely individualistic can not only countenance oppres-
sion but can give us the tools to understand it and to combat it.

4. Plan of the Book

Since in my view oppression is the fundamental injustice of social institutions, in

chapter 2 I present my account of social institutions. The central challenge of this
chapter is to set out a conception of social groups that takes both individuals, their
moral rights as well as their epistemic and axiological primacy, and social groups,
especially their profound influence on individuals’ beliefs and actions, seriously.
Chapter 3 presents the cognitive psychological theory that explains how humans
form and maintain social groups. Part II of the book discusses the three social forces
of oppression. I argue that there are two main types of material forces of oppression,
violence and economic deprivation, and that oppression cannot survive without
 Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions 27

being enforced by at least one of these material ways of harming persons. I then
separate violence from economic deprivation in order to illustrate how different cases
of oppression involve different kinds of reinforcements and argue that they will
require different strategies of resistance. Chapter 4 develops a definition of violence
and examines cases in the world of oppression enforced by violence. Chapter 5 argues
that economic oppression is central to all forms of oppression and to the answer to
the fundamental questions I have set out in this introductory chapter. I discuss both
direct and indirect forms of economic oppression and argue that indirect economic
oppression helps explain how the oppressed can be co-opted into participating in
their own oppression. In chapter 6 I discuss and illustrate the psychological harms
and consequent reinforcement of oppression. Part III takes up the challenge of
overcoming oppression. In chapter 7 I discuss resistance strategies that have been or
might be employed by the oppressed and argue that while the main responsibility for
fighting oppression rests with the privileged, there is some moral obligation on the
part of the oppressed to resist oppression. I also discuss how legal theory might take a
greater account of oppression within a liberal legal system. In chapter 8 I argue that
overcoming oppression in many cases, especially in the cases that are long-standing
and reinforced mainly through the actions of the oppressed—what | will call the
indirect forces of oppression—requires re-envisioning social groups and the nature of
freedom and equality. 1 end the book with my own vision of how securing freedom
from oppression for women would change the social world.
 Social Groups and
Institutional Constraints

he previous chapter sharpened the concept of oppression. Oppression, I claimed,

ale an institutionally structured, unjust harm perpetrated on groups by other
groups through direct and indirect material and psychological forces. This chapter
sets the stage for the explanation of oppression that will come in the following
chapters, which use economic and psychological models, by analyzing the notion of
a social group that can be an oppressed or an oppressor group, and the notion of an
institutionally structured constraint on action. These two theoretical entities, social
groups and institutionally structured constraints, play essential roles in my analysis of
oppression. Yet positing their existence may seem to some, particularly to adher-
ents of methodological individualism, to be a fatal flaw in any theory of human
behavior. Liberals may also view my apparent appeal to collectivism as a betrayal of
individual morality. In this chapter I characterize social groups and institutions in a
way that meets the plausible objections of individualists, yet allows me to give a social
explanation of oppression.

1. Explaining Human Behavior

Social science or social theory aims to make sense of human behavior. The first
requirement of a scientific theory is that it be able coherently to fit the facts to the
theory, in other words, that it be empirically adequate. But what that means for a
particular theory depends on the question it is supposed to help us answer, the bit of
behavior it is supposed to help us understand. In analyzing oppression, we begin with
the understanding, developed in chapter 1, that we want to explain a social rather
than a purely individual, biological, or physical phenomenon. That is, we want an
explanation that helps us understand unjust group-based hierarchies. What we want
to understand can be captured, as I argued in the previous chapter, by the following
set of questions: How does oppression originate? How does oppression endure over
time (in spite of human’s rough natural equality)? How do institutional structures of

28
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 29

oppression form? And how can oppression be overcome? That is, we want to know
why some forms of social organization give rise to and then maintain oppression, and
what would make that oppression end.
The framing of these questions and the purpose for which information is
sought are important elements in judging the adequacy of the explanations offered.
This point has been made by many philosophers of science in the past thirty
years.’ It can be made clear by comparing a few ways that the question of the
origin of oppression could be answered. We could answer it by constructing a story
of the evolution of a species capable of formulating concepts of justice and of
violating them. Or we could answer it by constructing a story of how a particular
society's forms of social organization give rise to an unjust domination of one group
by another, where those particular forms of social organization do not exist in a
different society in which the same pattern of unjust domination does not exist.
The first of these proposed explanations does not meet our purposes, but might
be otherwise scientifically adequate and true. That is, it might explain something,
but not what we seek to explain. The point is that the explanation has to be
relevant.
We want to answer these questions in ways that are not only relevant but also
useful to us, in that the answers provide workable solutions to current social prob-
lems. The questions and the kinds of answers that I seek concerning oppression lead
me to seek particular kinds of explanations. Not only must those explanations
accord with observation (better than competing theories), and be relevant, they
must also offer practical solutions. To draw an analogy with studying the physical
world, suppose that what I want to understand is how this system of pilings, towers,
wires, and roadway supports the traffic over this bridge span. This question might be
answered at many levels of analysis, but if I want answers that help me make a
better bridge, it is unlikely that answers that refer to quarks or gravitational forces
exerted by distant stars will help me much.” Rather, I would need to refer to the
forces exerted by cars, wind, and cable tension. Similarly, if I want to solve the
problem of oppression, then theories that postulate as the fundamental units of
analysis social groups, social institutions, and the relations among individuals that
result from them are likely to be the right level to explore. As in engineering,
however, it is often the case that going one level below the phenomenon that one is
primarily interested in is an effective way to understand and manipulate it. Al-
though engineers want to build good bridges and roadways, they often need to
appeal to theories about the chemical and mechanical properties of asphalt, cement,
steel, and so on to do so. So in a social theory of oppression, it is likely that appeal to
a level of analysis just under that for which social groups and their members are the
primary units will be useful.°
Social science or social theory offers three kinds of explanatory strategies:
intentional explanations, subintentional explanations (including sociobiological or
genetic explanations, subconscious cognitive, and psychoanalytic explanations),
and supraintentional explanations.‘ I shall argue for an intentional explanation of
oppression and supporting subintentional and supraintentional explanations that
explain how the relevant intentions are formed and how persons’ intentional ac-
tions collectively constrain the formation of subsequent intentions.
30 A Framework for Analysis

A supraintentional explanation posits forces working at the level of groups or

collectives of persons that determine the course of human history. Dialectical
theories such as Marx’s or Hegel’s theories of history are the prime examples of
supraintentional social theories, but contemporary social sciences often make some
appeals to some supraintentional forces as well.” I reject this as my explanatory strat-
egy for a theory of oppression, given my purposes here, because it will not help us to
understand human behavior in a way that is practical or useful. On a dialectical
theory, historical events are inevitable in spite of individual action. Hence, it will be
difficult to prescribe individual actions that might be useful in eradicating oppres-
sion. Furthermore, if we want to be able to assign moral responsibility for actions, we
need an intentional account. However, I shall argue that we cannot come to any
understanding of oppression as a socially structured phenomenon without making
appeal to supraintentional social forces, either. Some philosophers argue that there
are good ontological reasons to reject such forces (Elster 1983a). But recent debates
in metaphysics and philosophy of science convince me that one’s ontological beliefs
should follow from the explanatory theories one accepts rather than the reverse
(Quine 1969; Churchland 1982). If the best explanatory theory appeals to some
theoretical entity, that gives us the best reasons we can have for positing the
existence of that entity. Nonetheless, I think that there are good explanatory rea-
sons to reject supraintentional explanations.
] shall not pursue a sociobiological or genetic explanation of human behavior,
though I think that there is a place for them in the explanation of the origin of
oppression. My reason for declining to pursue a sociobiological account of oppres-
sion is that I doubt that sociobiology can give us precise enough explanations of any
contemporary case of a social hierarchy for those explanations to point to a cure.°
Sociobiology attempts to explain social regularities by showing that they are ge-
netically adaptive. Cases of oppression are, for the most part, relative to a social
context. One society condemns homosexuality, another does not. In one society
persons with dark skin are oppressed, in another they are not. For such cases, the
most that sociobiology could offer us is an explanation of the tendency to form of
social hierarchies, not of any particular social hierarchy. While such an explanation
could be interesting and useful for certain contexts, it would not offer us any
assistance in either deciding whether a social hierarchy is unjust or eradicating it.
There are two plausible exceptions to the cultural relativity of social hierar-
chies, namely the subordinate status of women and disabled persons. Is it likely that
sociobiology would give us useful explanations of (contemporary) oppression in
either case? Since the theory cannot be expected to make normative judgments
about justice, we can only ask that it explain the differential and objectively more
onerous conditions for women or the disabled. First take the case of the arguably
ubiquitous lower status and lesser life conditions of women.’ Let us assume that the
lower status and lesser life conditions are a result of or consist in the greater
investment that women almost universally make in caring and other altruistic
activities. A sociobiologist cannot explain this based on the male/female sex dif-
ferentiation generally, since there are plenty of animal species in which the females
devote less of their time to altruistic species duties such as rearing the young.
Sociobiology or evolutionary psychology explains sex differences by the differential
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 31

investment in gamete (egg and sperm) production in females and males. But this
cannot explain differences in rearing practices if in some species males rear young,
in some females do, and in some both do. So the explanation will have to refer to
features that are unique to the human species, or at least shared only by species
whose female members live (on average) similarly lesser individual lives. First, the
sociobiologist must determine the actual biological differences between human males
and females, separating out the culturally imposed ones. Then, given these pre-
sumed facts, the sociobiologist has to show why it is adaptive for humans to organize
in such a way that males dominate over females. Sociobiologists cannot appeal to
some merely average biological difference between men and women, if there is a
great overlap in that attribute in the two sexes, since that would predict a hierarchy
that cuts across sex. If the swiftest are needed for hunting, for example, then it
should be the swiftest, not the men, who hunt. While men are on average swifter
than women, plenty of women are swifter than plenty of men. Furthermore, since
the domination of human males over human females is most immediately caused
by the sharp division of labor by sex found in every society, the sociobiologist must
show that division of labor by sex is adaptive. Suppose that this can be shown
(which, given the efficiency of some sort of division of labor, is not unlikely). This is
still not sufficient to explain the constancy of the hierarchy, since it then has to
explain why the male sex roles always receive higher status, no matter what the role
is. Sociobiologists cannot appeal to some objective value of the work done by each
sex, since what counts as women’s work or men’s work differs greatly from society to
society. In sum, sociobiology might (or might not) be able to explain the existence
of a sexual division of labor, but it is unlikely that it can explain the constancy of
the hierarchy of men over women. Yet it is precisely the hierarchy, that is, the
existence of domination relations between the groups, which a theory of oppression
has to account for.
Now consider the case of the disabled. The first problem to note is that what
counts as disabled varies across societies. Dyslexia, for example, is not a disability in
a culture without a written language. However, we could come up with a core set of
disabilities that are universally counted as disability, such as mental retardation or
limb paralysis. Some disabilities cut across the whole range of genetic endowments,
since disability can as easily come from non-genetic causes (e.g., accident, non-
heritable disease) as from genetic factors. Given this, it seems to me that the best
explanation for their disadvantage relative to others in their society is economic—it
costs more to care for or even accommodate them than to let them linger on the
fringe or die. Of course, once a society has scruples about letting people with
disabilities languish or die, then it often costs less to accommodate them. Either
way, the best explanation of the treatment of the disabled is surely economic and
moral, not sociobiological.
I also reject psychoanalytic explanations of human action, but I shall leave the
argument for that rejection to chapter 3, where I compare it to the subintentional
level explanatory theory that I accept, namely cognitive psychology. My main ex-
planatory strategy is intentional, via rational choice theory. For my purposes, if an
intentional explanation is theoretically and empirically satisfactory, then it is to
be preferred to any other explanatory strategy on practical grounds. Intentional
32 A Framework for Analysis

explanations follow roughly this form: A person (P) has a set of desires (D) and
beliefs (B), which included the belief that an action (A) was the best (or a good
enough) means to achieve all or some of D. Hence, P did A in order to bring about
D. For the intentional explanation to be the right explanation there cannot be any
intervening cause of the action, such as an involuntary twitch or unconscious desire
that gives rise to the same behavior.® We are rarely able to look into the workings of
the minds of agents to see if there are such intervening causes, however. Rational
choice explanations add the assumption that the beliefs are substantively rational,
that the desire set is not inconsistent, and that the action was optimal for achieving
the agent’s desires. These assumptions are clearly stronger than what is required for
intentional explanation (Elster 1984, ch. 3).
Intentional explanations are commonplace in everyday life. Indeed, under-
standing each other in this way might even be said to be required in order to engage
in everyday human conversation (Davidson 1984; Pettit and Smith 1996). We have
lots of practice examining our own and each others’ beliefs and desires; we have no
trouble at all accepting that we are moved by them. And if we are convinced that we
have our beliefs or desires wrong, we will, for the most part, attempt to change them.
One reason, then, to prefer intentional explanations of behavior is because they
are relatively straightforward and simple. They are the stuff of everyday folk psy-
chological explanations. The reason for preferring intentional explanations of op-
pressive behavior in particular is this. Suppose that we explain some aspect of social
life as oppression that comes about as a result of actions m,,..., m,. Now we see that
m,,.--,M, are in fact the means to some state s,. But suppose that we can show with
our moral and political theories that s, is unjust, and thus undesirable. So we have an
argument for not doing m,,..., m,. Of course, I do not believe that this will im-
mediately result in our not doing m,,..., m,, for there may be many who are
unpersuaded by the claim of injustice, or on the whole not motivated to relieve the
injustices, since the cost of doing so would be, in their judgment, too high. Fur-
thermore, while the sequence m,,..., m,, results in oppression, that does not entail
that each of m,,..., m, are separately oppressive. But the point is that an intentional
explanation gives us a place to start to resolve oppression. The same cannot be said
for subintentional or supraintentional explanations, as they do not explain oppres-
sion by reference to individual human actions. But this is what we can most readily
consciously manipulate (with some exceptions that I note later in this chapter in the
section on institutional constraints on action). In order to resolve oppression that has
been explained by either of these means, we must first translate the explanations
somehow into individual action sequences to pursue. Then we still face the problem
of motivating individuals to actually pursue these actions sequences, as in the in-
tentional case. Hence the most immediate route to resolving oppression would be
through an intentional explanation of it, if a valid one is available.
Although intentional explanations are most appealing for these theoretical and
practical reasons, it is also crucial that our explanatory theory recognize the con-
straints within which individuals act. We act within constraints set by and respond
to consequences of biological, psychological, and collectively socially generated
(some intentionally and some unintentionally) facts about us and our future op-
tions. Contingent biological facts about us, features of our environment and our past
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 33

histories, social norms for beliefs and desires that are common in our society and
that we are taught to share from childhood, combine to form collective social facts
within which we must act. But these constraints do not disable intentional expla-
nations. They determine much of the content of our beliefs and desires within more
or less narrow boundaries.
Biological facts, for instance, place only very broad constraints on beliefs and
desires. For example, humans need about 2,000 calories per day, but there are
indefinitely many different ways to achieve that. And the biological facts become
less constraining as we make technological progress in manipulating our environ-
ment and our bodies, or social progress in conceiving a greater range of solutions.
Social factors place much more narrow constraints on our actions generally.
Consider the diet example again. Although one way to achieve 2,000 calories would
be to include pork in the diet, there are many cultures in which that is socially
forbidden. Since social facts constrain actions so narrowly, social facts will be crucial
variables in our explanatory theory of oppression. Among these constraining social
facts are social institutions and social groups. But to a much greater degree than
biological constraints, social constraints change over time. This suggests that our
theory of oppression has to incorporate social facts as both endogenous and exog-
enous variables in the theory. Such a requirement may sound difficult if not im-
possible to satisfy. However, economic theory provides us with a model to follow in
this regard. For it models short-run and long-run markets differently in just this way.
While the number and productive technologies of firms are held to be exogenous in
the short run, they are endogenous in the long-run model.
An objection to my proposal to include social groups among the variables in my
explanatory theory comes from methodological individualists, who argue that since
social groups are “nothing more” than groups of individuals, we ought not to
construct theories that explain using social groups. | have two responses to this
claim, the second of which I shall elaborate later in the chapter, once the concept of
social group I am using is clear. First Iwant to point out that though I agree with the
individualist who claims that social groups are nothing more than individuals and
their interactions, the claim that we therefore must not posit social groups in our
social theory does not follow. Even if we accept the possibility of ontological re-
duction of social groups to individuals and their actions, this does not imply that
there can be no useful explanations at higher levels. To see this, consider an analogy
from macroeconomics. There are many unreduced aggregate social facts that the
economist makes use of in explaining and predicting the overall behavior of the
economy, such as gross national product, inflation, unemployment, and the like.
These quantities are clearly aggregates of individual goods bought and sold, prices
for individual goods, persons employed and seeking jobs, etc. Yet, with them
economists explain behavior such as the actions of the Federal Reserve Board
chairman, the actions of individual investors in the stock market, or presidential
election outcomes. What is more, these things cannot be explained by referring to
the individual actions, prices, and so on because of the referential opacity, or in-
tensionality, of those facts. That is, the Federal Reserve Board chairman and in-
dividual investors, and probably many voters as well, consider the inflation rate,
GNP, and the unemployment rate, in deciding what to do, they do not consider the
34 A Framework for Analysis

actions of individual buyers, sellers, employers, and job seekers. It would take a
professional economist who is privy to some specialized government accounting
procedures as well as an incredible amount of data to reconstruct the aggregate
numbers from data on individuals. Macroeconomics cannot explain without making
use of unreduced aggregate social facts, despite their ontological reducibility. Sec-
ond, I will argue that without positing social groups as causally efficacious entities,
we cannot explain oppression or many other aspects of human behavior. That I hold
this view is already apparent from my definition of oppression as a fundamentally
group-based phenomenon. The conception of social group that I offer here will
make that aspect of the definition clearer. However, my argument does not rest
merely on a definition. Rather I shall show that certain behaviors that most would
classify as oppressive can be explained only if we use the concept of a social group in
the explanation. As I have argued, and will further clarify, social groups play an
essential role in oppression, in the sense that individuals are oppressed only as
members of social groups. Therefore, in order to understand oppression we need to
acknowledge and theorize social groups. To this task I now turn.

2. Social Groups

We are individuals who belong to social groups, some of which we choose to belong
to and some of which we belong to whether or not we would choose to belong if we
could. Yet social scientists, philosophers, and theorists have often clouded this
picture of social life by ignoring, reducing, or denying one or both kinds of social
groups. A wide array of literatures with varying approaches and interests use the
concept of the social group, sometimes to deny that there is any real extension to the
concept, sometimes to try to explain social groups in individualistic terms, sometimes
to demonstrate the irreducible causal role of social groups, and sometimes to argue
for the political significance of a particular social group. Among those theorists who
think that “social group” is a useful concept, there is wide disagreement about what
the conditions are for a collection of objects to constitute a social group and what its
attributes may be. My strategy in this chapter will be to set out a conception of social
groups that is plausible, ontologically conservative, and that preserves the possibility
of individual human choice. Most importantly for the project of this book, though,
my conception must sustain the analysis of oppression that I will give in subsequent
chapters. I shall argue here that competing conceptions of social groups cannot
sustain a group-based account of oppression.
There are three ways that collections of socially significant objects might be
formed: naturally (as in sets of humans of the same sex or age), socially (as in the set
of all corporations in the United States, or all persons who are of the same tribe or
ethnicity), or accidentally (as in the set of persons in either Los Angeles or Sydney
at 8 AM. GMT on August 25, 2004). 1 am interested mainly in social groups because
these are the groups that humans have some control over and because they matter
greatly to individual human beings. Of course, sometimes a collection that originally
arises naturally or accidentally comes to be a social group, so my account of social
groups will include these as well. Accidental groups are groups of persons whose
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 35

connection (other than sharing the property of personhood itself) to all of the other
members of the group is fully specified by the terms of group membership. For
example, the passengers of TWA flight 800 form an accidental group because they
have no more in common with all of the others than that they were passengers on
that ill-fated flight. Social groups, broadly speaking, are non-accidental groups that
are formed by or maintained by some social fact or action, either intentionally or as
an unintended consequence of some social fact or action. What makes a fact or
action social for humans is that some intentional human action played an essential
tole in bringing it about. In stating things this way I am committing myself to the
view that intentions are themselves social, which aligns me with one side of a
controversy,” though I am comforted there by the company of the likes of such phi-
losophers as Wittgenstein (1953), Sellars (1963), Dummett (1978), Burge (1986),
Hurley (1989), and Pettit (1993) whose arguments for this claim I refer to and
endorse, broadly speaking, but will not here rehearse.
Among those who take social groups to be real, and this is itself a large and
widely divergent group, there is disagreement about a fundamental point about
what social groups are and how they are formed and maintained. Historically, there
are two broad categories of approaches. One approach, the intentionalist approach,
claims that social groups are formed and maintained by individuals who inten-
tionally enter into them and maintain them through rules and norms, explicit or
implicit. The paradigm kinds of social groups for the intentionalists are the social
club, the modern state, or the conversational pair. With this approach we can as-
sociate names such as Max Weber, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raimo Tuomela, and Margaret
Gilbert. The other approach, the structuralist approach, claims that social groups
are structural features of the social environment, formed by rules, norms, and
practices, explicit and implicit, and include individuals who may never consider or
even see that they are a part of them, even though membership in the group has
some effect on their lives. The kinds of groups that structuralists focus on include
social classes, races, genders, and cultures. Among the important structuralists we
would include: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Nancy Folbre.
The intentionalists generally attempt to occupy the ontological high ground to
deny the existence of social groups of the structuralist sort, while the structuralists
defend the political high ground, claiming that the intentionalists focus on the
weak force of interpersonal relations while forces of history move with structural
social groups. Both camps claim that they have found the uniquely “basic” social
group. I believe that there is something to be said for each side. These two ap-
proaches highlight two ends of the spectrum of social groups. On one end there are
social groups that consist of persons who have voluntarily entered into them, the
other of primarily non-voluntarily socially determined members. Ignoring or de-
nying one and focusing entirely on the other leads us to make bad normative
prescriptions or insignificant social theory. Given a particular interest, for example,
questions concerning rights of assembly and speech or questions concerning
technological change, one might be wise to focus on one or the other kind of social
groups.
Intentionalists and structuralists see their positions as diametrically opposed be-
cause they share the mistaken notion that intentionalist psychology is incompatible
36 A Framework for Analysis

with the existence of irreducible social forces. I shall be arguing here for a com-
patibilist position, holding that while all action is intentionally guided, many of the
constraints within which we act are socially determined and beyond the control of
the currently acting individual; to put a slogan on it, intentions dynamically interact
within social structures. On my view, individuals, whose actions are intentionally
guided, though perhaps not toward the ends they achieve, exercise social control of
the social constraints. But at the same time individuals act within socially deter-
mined constraints that guide and shape their intentions, and so on. The in-
tentionalist is correct to see that action begins with the beliefs, desires, and
capacities (both psychological and material) of the individual acting agent, but
wrong to suppose that that rules out social forces beyond the control of that agent,
forces that affect her beliefs, desires, and capacities. The structuralist is correct to
see that from the point of view of the acting individual, there are groups to which
she can choose to belong and those unchosen groups to which she either belongs or
does not, but which she cannot choose to enter or leave. But the structuralist
mistakenly attributes these to immutable forces of history located beyond the in-
fluence and responsibility of individual human beings. Thus, I will argue for a theory
of social groups that is intentionalist in method and ontology, but preserves some of
the structuralist content. My theory recognizes social groups postulated by both
camps; to avoid the confusion that would be generated by calling them intentional
and structural groups, I shall adopt the terms “voluntary” and “nonvoluntary” social
groups, which more aptly capture the distinction.!©
Other compatibilist positions have been proposed by Carol Gould (1978, 31-39;
1988, ch. 2), Richard DeGeorge (1983), and Larry May (1987). On their (separate
and somewhat different) views, social groups are constituted by “individuals-in-
relations,” where the relations are socially enabled or constructed but then adopted
by the individuals as their own. For example, two persons married to each other
constitute a social group by virtue of the relation of marriage, a relation that is in the
first instance socially constructed, in that it depends for its existence on laws and
customs that define the relation, but that comes to be constitutive of their identity as
persons in that they begin to think of themselves as a social unit who take on joint
projects and actions. This is a compatibilist view in the sense that it preserves the
intentionalist notion that individual intentions are primary in the explanation of
action, yet it also preserves the structuralist notion that social structures cannot be
reduced to individual actions alone. It differs from my view, though, because it is an
internalist account of social groups, in that the social relations in part constitute the
self-identity of the persons related through them. While I find this internalist view
appealing for some purposes, it cannot account for what | am calling nonvoluntary
social groups precisely because those groups, assuming they exist, consist of persons
who do not necessarily self-identify with the group.!!
The theory of social groups I offer is an externalist account: What makes a
person a member of a social group is not determined by any internal states of that
person, but rather by objective facts about the world, including how others perceive
and behave toward that person.'? This is not to deny that such facts tend to cause
particular patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions on the part of the persons who
are subject to them, or that these thoughts, feelings, and actions can give rise to
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 37

objective facts that reinforce group membership. The externalist account of social
groups asserts that externally imposed constraints are necessary, and can be suffi-
cient, for social group membership. The externalist account denies that all groups
are voluntary, while allowing that voluntary actions by the members themselves can
create the external constraints that compose social groups.
My theory of nonvoluntary social groups fits the description of what Philip
Pettit calls “holistic individualism,” which means that the social regularities asso-
ciated with nonvoluntary social groups supervene on intentional states, and at the
same time, group membership in these and voluntary social groups partly constitutes
the intentional states of individuals. The theory I will offer is designed to fit what
has been called a structural rational choice theory by Debra Satz and John Ferejohn
(1994), which means that I will model human action as (basically instrumentally
rational) individual choice constrained within socially structured payoffs. These
socially structured payoffs are themselves the products of intentional states, of in-
dividuals making choices constrained by socially structured payoffs, which are the
products of intentional states, and so on.
Because we are individuals with separate plans, intentions, and reasons, whose
plans, intentions, and reasons are constrained by social facts about us that we did
not choose, a comprehensive theory of social groups must account for both vol-
untary and nonvoluntary social groups. To argue for this claim, I will examine what
I take to be the best theory of voluntary social groups available and show that the
phenomena that it accounts for are significant features of social life that neither
encompass nor are encompassed by the nonvoluntary social groups. The theory of
voluntary social groups that would best fit with a rational choice theory has recently
been proposed by Margaret Gilbert in her book On Social Facts. This section has
three parts. In the first part I set out Gilbert’s theory of (voluntary) social groups. In
the second I show that her theory cannot account for nonvoluntary social groups.
In the third I give an account of nonvoluntary social groups, which I argue is com-
plementary to, but cannot completely replace, Gilbert’s theory.

2.1. Voluntary Social Groups: Common Commitments

In On Social Facts, Gilbert presents an intentionalist account of social groups that is
inspired by Georg Simmel’s view that to be a social unit is just to be conscious of
constituting a social unity. Gilbert presents a subtle technical account of the se-
mantics of “we” as used in the “full-blooded” sense of standing for and including
oneself in a plural subject. On her account, appropriately using “we” requires that
the persons who are included by the demonstrative are “jointly ready” to share in
some action in the relevant circumstances, and that they all recognize this fact.
Appropriate uses of “we” in this full-blooded sense indicate that the referent of the
demonstrative is a plural subject, and being a plural subject, is both necessary and
sufficient for constituting a social group. Gilbert’s account makes heavy epistemic
demands on the individuals in a social group. They must share some goal or belief,
they must be ready to act together on this belief or for this goal, and they must
express this to each other and recognize their expression so that there is common
knowledge of their joint readiness. By the term “common knowledge,” Gilbert
38 A Framework for Analysis

generally refers to what she also calls “a paradigm case of common knowledge,”
which implies conditions that go farther than the account found in David Lewis’s
(1969) seminal work on common knowledge. Lewis’s definition of common
knowledge is the following: F is common knowledge in a population P iff everyone in
P knows that f and everyone in P knows that everyone in P knows that f, and so on,
for all the infinite levels of mutual knowledge. Additionally, Gilbert requires for her
definition of a paradigm case of common knowledge that the persons in P recognize
that they are in a situation of common knowledge of f (that is, f is “open*”) and they
have common knowledge of what it is to recognize this openness*.'? For Gilbert,
then, only small collections of individuals who are close to each other in proximity
and understanding can constitute social groups. Indeed the primary social group for
her is the conversational pair, two persons out for a walk together, or a couple making
love or dancing.
Gilbert’s analysis of the semantics of “we” rests on an analysis of cases in which
it is or is not appropriate to use “we.” In her restaurant example, Bernard and
Sylvia, who have no previous social connection, are having lunch with an engaged
couple when the man says to his fiancée “Shall we share dessert?” Bernard then
turns to Sylvia and says, “Shall we share dessert?” Sylvia finds this use of “we”
inappropriate, not Gilbert says, because she thinks that it is inappropriate to share a
dessert with a near-stranger, nor because it suggests romantic intent after the
engaged couple has agreed to share a dessert, nor does Gilbert think that “we”
always connotes intimacy. Rather, Gilbert claims that Sylvia should find this use of
“we” inappropriate because Sylvia has never in the past indicated to Bernard a
willingness to do things of the relevant sort with him and this use of “we” implies
that she has or that in some way she has made it plain to him that she would be so
willing, that is, Sylvia finds this use of “we” to be “semantically irresponsible.” A
proper use of “we” never surprises a member of a plural subject because using “we”
properly implies that the members of the plural subject are ready to share together
in the action, and this fact is public.
The condition on plural subjects that readiness to share something be public is
as important as the readiness itself for avoiding surprise. The publicity of the
readiness makes the joint readiness of all common knowledge among them, and so
makes it unsurprising when anyone then uses “we,” assuming the readiness of the
others as well, to express the joint readiness. How do we go, then, from the con-
dition of each of us being ready to share in a joint project to actual joint readiness?
The answer is that the readiness of each has to be made public, for example, by
being expressed by each one in turn, or by being tentatively suggested by someone
and not rejected by anyone, and in either case it has to be in a situation where all
can gain common knowledge of the expression or of the fact that no one has
rejected the suggestion. That is, the public expression of readiness has to be a
paradigm situation of common knowledge. When readiness is so jointly expressed
and that expression becomes common knowledge, Gilbert argues that there arises a
“presupposition-licensing or surprise-avoiding” (Gilbert 1989, 194) normative situ-
ation, that is, a situation in which none of the group may be surprised by anyone’s
use of “we” or reference to the jointly shared project. From the fact of readiness
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 39

together with the expression of it under the proper circumstances, a set of norms
arises governing the group members’ uses of the fact.
Gilbert’s (1989, 222-223) account of social groups may be summarized as
follows. A social group is a set of individuals who meet the following three condi-
tions:
1. Willed-unity condition: Each person must volunteer to share in some
action, belief, or attitude.
2. Expression condition: Each person must express his willingness for unity
in a situation that they each recognize will lead to common knowledge
of that willingness.
3. Common knowledge condition: The fulfillment of the expression con-
dition must be a paradigm case of common knowledge.
The expression condition guarantees that members of social groups not only rec-
ognize but also will their unity, that is, their willingness to share a belief, action, or
attitude. And the common knowledge condition guarantees that they recognize that
each so wills the unity. Thus, to be a social group the members must know that they
are a social group, they must pool their wills toward some belief, action, or attitude,
and it must be commonly known that they know of this pooling. Now each may refer
to acommon project or belief, or make a proposal to the group that they share some
new project or belief, without anyone being rightfully surprised by their inclusion in
the proposal.
Gilbert’s concept of social group describes a common and important kind of
phenomenon. Not only do many social groups meet these conditions, as she illus-
trates, but the social groups that do are clearly important in our lives: school groups,
teams, clubs, religious communities, friendships, conversational groups, and many,
many more. Most of the time we act as a part of one or another of these groups.
These groups are governed by tacit norms, which constrain and guide our actions.
In deciding how to act or think we are constantly considering the right or appro-
priate or acceptable way to act or think. In some situations we are guided by natural
facts and scientific laws, or even moral facts and moral laws, but much of our lives
concerns social issues of rightness or appropriateness. Gilbert’s account of social
groups explains the origin and force of these tacit norms (Gilbert, 1996).
Gilbert’s social groups are not reducible to any set of facts about the individuals
alone. Persons in social groups of this sort cannot by themselves become members of
social groups, act as part of the group, or share a group belief. This can be seen most
clearly by considering the willed-unity condition. It requires the group to be willing
to jointly share in some activity, belief, or attitude. To jointly share is more than for
each to have the end as a goal. Each must also will that they jointly share it. The
test that such joint sharing is going on is that if anyone fails to do their part, or
attempts to withdraw their endorsement, that person may appropriately be blamed
for doing so. To use Gilbert’s paradigmatic example, if you and I are going for a walk
together and thus constitute a social group, we will jointly share the goal of walking
together, and if I suddenly start walking faster than you can readily walk, you could
appropriately rebuke me, and we will both see that you are within your (social)
40 A Framework for Analysis

rights to do so. The social fact that there are now norms governing our behavior by
virtue of our so joining our wills is irreducible to non-normative facts about each of
us as individuals, our beliefs, or our intentions.
The social groups that Gilbert describes all have in common that they recognize
themselves as a social group. Gilbert calls this fact the “recognition corollary: all the
members will recognize that the group exists, when it does” (Gilbert 1989, 223). In
addition, Gilbert’s groups contain only voluntary members, for in order to meet the
willed-unity condition one has to, minimally, will that one become part of the unity.
Thus, if there exist nonvoluntary social groups, groups whose members do not will
themselves to be joined with each other, they are not Gilbert groups.!*

2.2. The Existence of Non-voluntary Social Groups

Of course Gilbert recognizes that there are some other entities that people call social
groups that do not count as such on her account. The counterexample she discusses
at some length is economic classes. She gives four reasons to think that economic
classes are not social groups. First, most social scientists that Gilbert has read (except
Marxist social scientists) do not count classes as social groups. But this does not show
that Marxists are wrong to count classes as social groups, so we may ignore this
response. Further, I think that economic classes, while not a straw man exactly, are
surely not the strongest or most common counterexample among social theorists
now—what about race or gender? Second, she notes that in the Communist Manifesto
Marx was calling for the proletariat to become conscious of itself and adopt a joint
commitment, that is, to become a social group in Gilbert’s sense. While this shows
that Marx thought that there are important differences between a Klasse fiir sich and
a Klasse an sich, it does not show that he thought that one would constitute a social
group and the other would not. Besides, what Marx thought constituted the set
of social groups is of little more importance to the argument that there are non-
voluntary social groups than what Gilbert’s social scientists think form social groups.
Third, Gilbert lists four other conceptions of social groups that she thinks are in-
adequate to pick out the set of social groups, including “population credited with
importance by some major social theorist,” and “population of a kind with an im-
portant effect on societies” (Tuomela 1995, 228). But these, she argues, “clearly run
the risk of not cutting nature at the joints, of lumping together phenomena which are
quite significantly different, and not very significantly the same” (Tuomela 1995,
228). This list does not, however, include viable alternatives such as the one I
present below.!? Finally, Gilbert argues that her use of the term “social group” for the
phenomena she describes is particularly apt given the Latin root of socius or ally.
Allies share a common purpose and act on a joint commitment. But equally one
might argue that they share merely a common interest and not necessarily a common
goal or purpose, or even that the common interest is more common than the
common purpose, and that this can be seen by the fact that many of the groups that
we normally call social—including some allies—do not always act cooperatively or
coordinately. Gilbert has not given us reason enough to think that economic classes
are not social groups. More to the point, though, she has not given us reason to think
that she has picked out the only things that could be social groups. It is now my task
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 41

to propose a set of groups that we ought to take to be social and give an account
of them.

2.3. Nonvoluntary Social Groups:

Common Social Constraints
Social theorists (especially non-liberal ones) commonly talk about collections of per-
sons who suffer various forms of oppression. A short list of such collections in the
context of contemporary U.S. culture would include women, African Americans,
Native Americans, Asian Americans, the poor, the working class, Jews, gays and
lesbians, and the disabled. Likewise there are their correlatives, the dominant col-
lections: men, white Americans, Christians, the middle class, straight people, able-
bodied persons. There can be no doubt that we can cut the world up this way, since we
do so all the time; the question I want to pursue is whether it is an explanatorily useful
way to do so, and whether these categories are forced on us by the social facts of our
world. I take it that if the answers to these questions are affirmative, then we will have
reason to call such collections social groups. But they are clearly not social groups in
the sense of Gilbert’s social groups; these are large and anonymous collections of
persons, for whom neither the willed-unity condition nor the common knowledge
condition could be satisfied except under rare circumstances (perhaps during revo-
lution, for example). So if these collections are social groups, then there is a second
kind of social group to recognize.
Social groups, whether voluntary or nonvoluntary, are collections of persons
who share something that is socially significant. As Gilbert shows, members of
voluntary social groups share joint commitments or joint projects. The members of a
nonvoluntary social group share social penalties and rewards consequent on their
being so grouped. They need not intend to share this, but it is in some sense
inescapable; other agents and the social structures agents put in place assign them
these penalties and rewards because they are seen as belonging to these social
groups. This fact may not lead to group consciousness or even self-consciousness.
But it has serious consequences for social justice.
There are many social constraints on individual actions. By constraints I mean
facts that one does or ought to rationally consider in deciding how to act or how to
plan one’s life, or facts that shape beliefs and attitudes about other persons. They
are the factors that must be modeled in rational choice explanations of actions, as
the preferences, choices, common beliefs, strategies, and payoffs that agents con-
sider in making decisions or as the default assumptions that agents use when they
act on intentions that are not fully or rationally considered. Not all constraints on
action are social in origin, some are biological (humans are mortal; I am slower than
Marion Jones) or psychological (humans have limited cognitive capacities; I am less
mathematically gifted than Andrew Wiles), some are physical (humans cannot
survive a free fall from space). Constraints are social when they come about as a
result of social actions. These constraints include: legal rights, obligations and bur-
dens, stereotypical expectations, wealth, income, social status, conventions, norms,
and practices. As with other kinds of constraints, some social constraints affect
the entire species (all human societies need some method of preparing food for
42 A Framework for Analysis

consumption), some affect smaller groups than that (Muslims do not eat pork), and
some affect me individually (I am a vegetarian by moral conviction). Many of these
constraints are the result of intended collective action, such as laws that prohibit ©
social funding of abortions, judicial practices that normally assign child custody to
mothers, tax structures that favor the middle class. But many of them are the
unintended consequences of other intentional actions: stereotypes of Jews as overly
concerned with money, of women as overly emotional, or of Asians as especially
good at mathematics; the relatively high incidence of single African American
mothers; and the conventional marriage proposal that has men doing the asking and
women the responding. Some social constraints might be partly intentionally and
partly unintentionally caused: Racial segregation in the cities comes about not
because all the people want to live in segregated cities, but because a few want total
racial segregation, some others want to be in the racial majority, others want not to
be the only ones of their race on their blocks, and still others want to sell before
their property values are completely depleted.'® Some social constraints might also
have partly natural causes: deaf persons are rarely born in a culture where they can
share the native language. Social constraints are not unchangeable facts; they are
purely exogenous variables in a social theory only in the short run. But as John
Maynard Keynes pointed out, we all live in the short run; social constraints are
among the facts we have to face in planning our lives.
Social constraints affect actions through the penalties and rewards that one can
reasonably expect from them. Individuals are motivated to act in their interest and
the interest of others whom they care about. If it is a social fact that in a certain area
of town women are likely to be harassed or assaulted, then individual women will be
motivated to avoid it. That does not mean that all women will avoid going there
(indeed, some feisty women might even take it as an inviting challenge to do so),
but just that for any woman there will be a cost to going there that she ought
(rationally) consider in making a decision about where to go and by what route.
Social constraints help to explain individual actions by revealing the incentives that
individuals have by virtue of their membership in nonvoluntary social groups.'?
It may be objected that rewards or incentives cannot be said to constrain
actions; constraints must narrow the range of possibilities of action, while rewards or
incentives merely guide rational persons in choosing.!® First, I do not mean to
suggest that all constraints are negative. I intend the word “constraint” to be
normatively neutrally, more in the sense of “frame” or “guide.” Whether a con-
straint is negative or positive, just or unjust ate separate judgments that depend on
factors that I will discuss at greater length in chapter 7. Second, rewards can reframe
a situation in a way that is negative for an individual actor. An example of Larry
May’s illustrates: Suppose a professor offers a marginal graduate student a fellowship
on condition that the graduate student sleep with the professor.!? The offer is a new
opportunity that the graduate student could not have expected, and thus one might
object that because the offer constitutes an additional choice not a restriction of
choices, it must be advantageous. However, as May argues, the offer changes the
situation for the student in a way that she might well not have chosen: She must
now live in an academic environment in which she knows that her professor con-
siders her as a sexual object and not simply as a student, and in which her sexuality
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 43

makes a difference to her academic success. Thus, the reward offered has changed
the situation arguably for the worse for this student. Likewise, examples can be
concocted in which a social penalty reframes a situation positively for an individual;
consider the constraint on men not to cry in public (Frye 1983, 14).
Some social constraints form default assumptions that affect individuals’ beliefs
and attitudes. According to cognitive scientists, we make implicit assumptions all the
time in our thinking about what holds true in normal circumstances, and apply these
assumptions until and unless some feature of our situation forces us to reassess things.
These implicit assumptions are called “default assumptions” (Hofstadter 1985).
Without the ability to make lots of assumptions without thinking about them first, we
would be hopelessly mired in the frame problem, unable to find the relevance of any
situation for our own needs and desires in time to act effectively. Of course, sometimes
these assumptions are false, but given our finite cognitive capacities, the complexity of
facts we would need to think everything through, and the need to act relatively quickly
in many situations, default assumptions are an evolutionary advantage.
Among the kinds of default assumptions we make are stereotypes about indi-
viduals based on visible features that they share with others: Women are relatively
small and weak, Asians are good mathematicians, African Americans are from the
South or the inner city, gay men are effeminate, women and minority professors got
their jobs to fill affirmative action quotas. Stereotypes originate in naturally, socially,
and accidentally formed collections of persons, and they become social facts when
they become the default assumptions that we make when we first meet someone or
when we hear someone described to us or see someone on the street. Stereotypes
guide us to form beliefs about an individual before we have the kind of evidence for
those beliefs that we would require if that individual did not share some other
attribute with the collection to which that stereotype attaches. We see a black man
and assume that he is from a city, even if in the same context we would not make
that assumption about a white. We have an Asian student in our class and ask her to
do the class report on game theory rather than the one on hermeneutics. Default
assumptions not only make false beliefs easier to form when they do not hold, but
they make it more difficult to form the correct belief that would otherwise be quite
plain to see. We see a woman and assume that she could not lift the box in front of
her, even if, were it a man of approximately the same build and size, we would think
that he could. And we make that assumption even when we see that she is wearing
the brown uniform of a UPS driver.”° Finally, stereotypical default assumptions cause
us to have attitudes towards the groups to which we attach stereotypes. Assuming
that women are weak and small, many men form a superior and protective attitude
toward women in contexts where there are physical challenges. Assuming that
Asians are good at mathematics, many whites form a resentful attitude toward Asians
in math and science classes. Other conceivable collections of persons may have no
stereotypes attached to them: Is there any belief or image you form upon hearing that
some otherwise anonymous individual has attached ear lobes?
Social rewards and penalties are often distributed to individuals based on the
default assumptions that others make about them. This means that individuals
themselves have no control over those rewards and penalties unless they can make
it clear in the relevant situations that the default assumption is false. Of course, if
44 A Framework for Analysis

one is getting a reward that one does not merit, it is tempting to try to look like an
average normal member of the collection to which the stereotype attaches and to —
make it look like the stereotype is true in a great percentage of cases of members of
that collection. Where one wants to show that a stereotype does not apply to one, it
can be difficult. Counterexamples are often honestly construed as misperceptions
rather than as true counterexamples in social life as well as in science.”!
The account of social groups I propose, then, is this: A social group is a collection
of persons who share (or would share under similar circumstances) a set of social con-
straints on action. The account fits both voluntary and nonvoluntary social groups,
since it does not refer to the cause or reason for the existence of similar social
constraints on the persons who share them. This definition is similar in some
respects to the concept of group as a seriality, a concept that Iris Marion Young
borrows from Sartre to understand groups. Like my own view of groups, she un-
derstands groups as structural conditions on persons, but conditions that “condition
the dispositions and affinities of people without constituting their identities” (Young
2000, 101).22 No group membership constitutes one’s identity, since identity is
individual and determined by how one negotiates the many group-based constraints
on one’s actions, in addition to other, more individually determined constraints.
While Young is concerned to show that groups do not determine identities, it seems
worth pointing out that one could embrace some group membership (particularly
voluntary ones) as identity creating, and many persons in fact do so (Copp 2002).
Membership in a nonvoluntary social group is socially and not individually
determined. The patterns of distribution of social rewards and penalties according
to stereotypes generate and help to define social groups. Social groups are formed
not by the intentions of the individuals in them to join together and share in a
particular project, but by the actions, beliefs, and attitudes of others, both in the
group and out, that constrain their choices in patterned and socially significant
ways. Members of nonvoluntary social groups share the same social constraints as a
result of others’ decisions, while voluntary group members share constraints that
result from their decisions and actions to join together, against a background of
social constraints consequent on others’ decisions. The voluntariness of social groups
admits of degrees: A social group defined by a common religion, for example, is
more voluntary if there are more choices (with decent expected outcomes) for
people to leave and join other religions or reject religion entirely. Members of
nonvoluntary social groups experience constrained or enhanced choices by com-
parison with others who are similarly situated in every respect except membership in
that group. One implication of this theory is that blacks and whites form two
separate social groups. To see why, consider how a black middle-class man in
America compared with a white middle-class man in America faces different con-
straints on their choices due to their respective races. The black person can expect
to be treated differently and judged differently because of his blackness even when
outwardly behaving in the same way as the white man who appears to be of the
same social class. In stores the middle-class black is likely to be followed by store
workers, he is likely to be harassed by police in white neighborhoods or if seen
driving an expensive car, women cross the street when they see him coming down
the sidewalk, people expect that he likes sports and plays them well. Equally, though
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 45

he may not notice his privileges, the middle-class white man is treated differently
from the black—he is not followed, he is given the benefit of the doubt by police, he
is approached by colleagues as an expert on things other than sports, and so on.
These social constraints affect the actions one considers and the choices one makes
in clear and predictable ways: The black man does not expect to be left alone, so he
acts as one would when being watched; he expects police harassment in certain
situations, so he either avoids those situations or adopts an attitude of innocence,
deference, or defiance to cope, and so on.
One of the important differences between voluntary and nonvoluntary social
groups is that one need not recognize that one is a member of a particular non-
voluntary social group to be a member. One simply needs objectively to face the
constraints that other members face, whether or not one recognizes them as pat-
terned constraints that one shares.”? I take this to be a good feature of my account
because it is common for people in oppressed groups not to recognize their op-
pression, not because they do not recognize that they face constraints, but because
they tend to see the constraints as their own individual problems or idiosyncrasies.”*
My account of nonvoluntary social groups includes groups whose members are
conscious of themselves as forming a social group, groups whose members are not so
conscious, as well as nonvoluntary social groups with members who mistakenly
think that they are not members. Nonvoluntary social groups come in and go out
of existence when beliefs, attitudes, and actions change. Sometimes nonvoluntary
social groups lose their nonvoluntary character but some members choose to form
voluntary social groups. For example, Irish Americans used to be a significant social
group—being labeled an Irish American would have many consequences for one’s
possible actions. But now there are not very many such consequences, unless one
chooses to name oneself Irish and participates in voluntary activities with other Irish
Americans, making it difficult to argue that it is a nonvoluntary social group.”°
Although one need not be conscious of oneself as a member of a nonvoluntary
social group, social awareness of a particular social group has significant conse-
quences for the group members. Membership in some nonvoluntary social groups
may give one a sense of identity, group solidarity, or self-worth. These psychological
benefits come only when one becomes aware of oneself as a member of this social
group. (Likewise, there can be psychological costs to becoming aware of oneself as a
member of a social group: I painfully remember the day that I realized that I could
not hope to be a football player because I was a girl.) Awareness of oneself as a
member of a social group does not make the group into a voluntary group, though,
as that requires also that there be some shared project and the common knowledge
of that sharing. Still, groups that have become self-conscious are closer on the
continuum to voluntary social groups.
How does one come to be grouped into a nonvoluntary social group? There are
different signs for group membership depending on the social group, but in each
case membership is assigned by others through default assumptions that go into
effect when they recognize or think they recognize some typical trait or behavior
that is very salient in the culture for grouping. So, for instance, skin color, hair
length, dress, voice pitch, word choice, size, walking or sitting style are all well
known signals of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Some of these are more
46 A Framework for Analysis

or less matters of choice up to the individual doing the choosing, and nearly all
them are, given enough (sometimes drastic) intervention, somewhat changeable. In
that sense one could say that there is a voluntary aspect even to nonvoluntary
social groups. But this sense of choice is not the same that is in play with voluntary
social groups. These choices are not negotiable or malleable by the individual—in
choosing to be in this nonvoluntary social group or that there is no room for a
pooling of wills or joint choice. In the marketplace of social group norms, the
individual is a norm-taker, not a norm-setter.
Although there certainly exist social groups that meet Gilbert’s description and
are thus voluntary, and although their voluntariness is significant in many contexts,
my externalist account of social groups easily extends to include the entire range of
social groups from the most voluntary to the most involuntary. Gilbert’s paradigm
examples of social groups, the conversational pair, two people out for a walk to-
gether, or a couple making love or dancing, form the most voluntary end of the
continuum. They are social groups on my account because their actions and ex-
pressions create norms that constrain their subsequent actions, as Gilbert described.
Somewhere in the middle of the continuum come the nonvoluntary social groups
that have become self-conscious and pro-active. They began as groups formed en-
tirely by the intentions and actions of others. As they became aware of themselves
as a group able to establish their own, internally recognized norms, their constraints
are more internally generated. Close-knit families may lie closer to the voluntary
side of the nonvoluntary groups; large diverse, political groups close to the non-
voluntary side of voluntary groups.

2.4. Some Objections

Recall that the individualist objects that since social groups are nothing more than
collections of individuals and their interactions, we ought not to employ the concept
of social group in our explanations of human behavior. Early in the chapter I argued
that the ontological reducibility of social groups to individuals and their interactions
does not entail that social groups cannot be an explanatorily useful concept. Now we
are in a position to complete the argument against methodological individualism by
showing that social groups are explanatorily useful. I claim that in order to explain
some features of social life, it is essential to recognize nonvoluntary social groups. If
this is so, then methodological individualism is doomed as an explanatory dictum for
the social sciences. I take methodological individualism to be the claim that all
explanations of social phenomena must in principle be reducible to statements about
individuals, including their beliefs, desires, goals, and so on. In order to make the
point, one traditionally offers an example that the methodological individualists can
then try to attack. Traditional structuralists use examples like the well-known check
cashing example of Maurice Mandelbaum (1955). This example works, like the
macroeconomics example that I gave above, because of the intensionality of the facts
that explain the actions of bank tellers and patrons. We cannot replace standard
holistic explanations of why the teller cashed the check for the patron that refer
to monetary and banking rules and practices with statements that refer only to
actions of individuals and their interactions. I argue that another example that the
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 47

individualist cannot escape would come from examining a social fact that is a con-
sequence of socially constructed default assumptions rather than explicit inferences.
For instance, how do we explain the door opening ritual, as it is called by feminists, in
a case where a small man with packages rushes to open the door for a large able-
bodied woman (Frye 1983, 5)? It does not make sense unless we include in the
explanans reference to default assumptions about social groups, namely the stereo-
type of women as weak and small. For the man cannot infer that the woman actually
needs help here, or that he is in a good position to offer it, unless he draws that
inference based on social groupings of persons rather than on the visible individual
traits in the actual situation. If one objects that it is custom or habit that explains
why the man always opens doors for women, then one must explain the origin of the
custom or habit, and this explanation will rely on references to social groups. Fur-
thermore, this example involves social groupings that the persons did not voluntarily
enter, so that one cannot reduce the group to the kinds of intentional states that
Gilbert refers to.’° It is precisely where the social constraints that compose non-
voluntary social groups are involved that we need to refer to irreducibly social facts to
explain human behavior.”’ Thus, we cannot do without the concept of nonvoluntary
social groups.
Another kind of objection to my account of nonvoluntary social groups argues
that because there are interacting sets of social constraints that each individual faces,
there is no way to individuate a set of them that picks out a unique social group. This
objection takes two different forms: one to the existence of the social group itself and
one to our ability to discern accurately the consequences of belonging to the social
group. I take it that the first is the more crucial objection for me to block, since if it is
correct, there are no social groups at all. But the second is also important to block,
since I claim that my theory is valid only if it is practically useful. So I shall discuss
both forms.
An instance of the first form of this objection to social groups comes from work
in feminism that claims that there is no way to separate out the “woman part” from
a woman, that is, to separate her membership in the group “women” from her other
social group memberships, such as race, class, and sexual orientation. Thus, any
account of social groups that tries to set aside one of these categories to name a
group will be unable to come up with clear identity conditions for group mem-
bership. Elizabeth Spelman, who holds this view, writes: “One’s gender identity is
not related to one’s racial identity as the parts of pop-bead necklaces are related,
separable and insertable in other ‘strands’ with different racial and class ‘parts’”
(Spelman 1988, 15). One way to interpret this objection is to say that what we
cannot do is locate in the individual the identities that match up with social groups.
First, note that my account is not trying to do that; my account is an externalist
account that is trying to locate in the world the social constraints that compose
social grouphood. Spelman’s objection may be reinterpreted against my account as
follows. My account supposes that in the world there are constraints that apply to all
women, others to all men, others to all African Americans, and so forth. It is what
one might term a “vector force” model to suggest the analogy with mechanics. With
mechanics, it is an empirical matter whether objects on earth or in space, moving in
a straight line or a curve, in the presence of friction or on a frictionless surface would
48 A Framework for Analysis

all behave the same way in the presence of two different sources of inertial force.
But they do; the vector force model works. Does the vector force model work,
modulo the imprecision of social facts, in the social world as well? As with multiple
forces in mechanics, multiple group memberships will affect the direction and in-
tensity of the overall social constraints for an individual. Translated into the lan-
guage of vector addition, Spelman’s objection amounts to the claim that the
individual vector forces change’ in the presence of different other forces. For in-
stance, she argues that being a man positively contributes to one’s overall life
choices if one is white, but negatively if one is black.”®
On one point we agree: It is an empirical question whether the vector force
approach works. However, I disagree with the analysis of this example. Over a wide
range of measures of social outcomes, being a man and black leads to more and better
choices than being a woman and black. Black men out-earn black women,”? they
have a wider range of professions open to them, black men (like men of all races) are
physically dominant over black women, more black women are relegated to the
servant jobs of society, and most black political, religious, military, and social leaders
are men. Although black men are treated more harshly by police than black women
(except for the fact that the latter are subject to rape by police), the same can be said
for white men as compared with white women. Objections of the form, “black women
face different and more severe problems than white women’ or ‘white women think of
themselves as superior to black men” are red herrings to the question of whether the
vector force model works. To compare the constraints that form the social groups of
men and women one must compare within race, class, and other significant social
groupings (groupings whose significance can be determined only empirically).*°
While it may be difficult to measure with precision the effect of constraints, or worse,
to weigh different sources of value like psychological well-being vs. life expectancy,
these difficulties do not tell against the existence of the patterns of differences in
social constraints, and so the existence of nonvoluntary social groups.
However, as Nancy Folbre (1994, 67-68, 271 n. 4) suggests, it may be that we
need a much more complex theory of the interaction of various constraints than the
vector force model represents. She suggests that there may be important ways that
the constraints interact, causing there to be important interactive terms. For ex-
ample, although there is a male/female wage gap for both blacks and whites that
favors men, the wage gap is larger for whites than for blacks, and although there is a
black/white wage gap for men and women, it is larger, though in the same direction,
for men than for women.?! This suggests that with respect to the wage rate con-
straint, at least, there are interactive effects between race and gender, but these
effects do not reverse the direction of the constraint. Since we are unlikely to be
able to precisely measure the relative strengths of constraint anyway, direction is all
the precision we should require of the model.
The second form of the objection is raised against our ability to accurately
locate such nonvoluntary social groups amidst the tangle of social facts that char-
acterize individual lives. One obvious way to locate nonvoluntary social groups is
to begin with statistics by looking at various collections of persons to see whether
they have different outcomes, for example, levels of income, life expectancies, fre-
quency of imprisonment, from other identifiable collections. It is then necessary to
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 49

determine whether there is reason to believe that some systematic social constraint
is in operation (Thurow 1979). Against statistical identification of social groups,
however, Anthony Flew (1985) contends that it is a fallacy to argue:

that because members of one social set are not represented in some occupation or
organization in the same proportion as in the population as a whole, therefore
members of that social set must be being, whether intentionally or unintentionally,
discriminated against, and cannot have enjoyed equal opportunities to pursue that
occupation or to enter that organization. (Flew 1985, 10)

Flew is correct to worry about the indiscriminate use of statistics to infer discrimi-
nation, but surely statistics can give us a lead on what collections to investigate. He
argues further that the conclusion from statistical differences that there is discrim-
ination “can go through only on the assumption that abilities, inclinations and the
senses of actual choices fall into the exactly the same distribution pattern in the
social set in question as in the population as a whole” (Flew 1985, 10). But this does
not follow, for the “inclinations and the senses of actual choices” are endogenous
variables in the equation that relates a social “‘set’s” treatment to the outcomes of its
individuals; that is, how one is treated surely helps to determine what one believes
one can reasonably choose, and so one’s desires as well. To suggest that women do
the low- or unpaid work of society because they have some natural, maternal urge is
to add insult to injury.
I think that in fact Flew is more concerned about the implication that statistical
patterns of discrimination against a “social set” would show that there are non-
voluntary social groups at all, that is, the first form of this objection. Flew uses the
term “social set” explicitly to avoid having to postulate that there are any social
groups. He writes, “we employ the expression “social set,” rather than “social class”
or “social group,” in order to disown any undesired implications that the social sets
in question must be either social classes or else other social or racial groups which
may either be seen by others, or see themselves, or be organized, as such” (Flew
1985, 10). If it is Flew’s concern to suggest that persons do not suffer discrimination
as members of social groups, however, showing that statistics about outcomes
cannot alone reveal such discrimination does not show that there are no nonvol-
untary social groups.
Another kind of objection is that this account of social groups makes our
ontology unacceptably large. Again there are two forms of this kind of objection.
One form objects that adding social groups to the list of things in the world is
unnecessary. I take it that I answered this objection in my discussion of the failure of
methodological individualism; social groups are necessary for social explanations.
But my conception of social groups is also ontologically rather conservative. I do not
postulate anything like a collective mind, or absolute spirit. Social groups are ter-
minological devices to discuss the clusters of constraints that certain collections of
persons face. We need some such device since these clusters of constraints and the
persons who face them are socially significant. But they are something more than
mere terminological devices because they are intensional concepts, concepts that
have meaning as such for individuals. That is, being classified (by oneself or others)
as a member of a particular social group often has real implications for one’s other
50 A Framework for Analysis

beliefs and desires, implications that do not arise from merely extensionally
equivalent descriptions.
The other form of the objection is that there are indefinitely many trivial
nonvoluntary social groups that meet my definition. For example, the group of
beautiful women turns out to be a social group because they share certain con-
straints (or enhanced choices) throughout the world; they are more likely to be
courted by rich men, for instance.*” Then there is the correlative, the non-beautiful
women. And what about short people, bald men, and so on? It is indeed a con-
sequence of my view that these groups I have named are social groups. However, I
disagree that this list goes on indefinitely, or that the groups are trivial. For the test
of social grouphood is exactly whether the constraints that the members face have
some social consequences. If they do, then they are not trivial, by definition, though
surely some social consequences are not very deep. But not all features that persons
share have social consequences; the collection of persons with attached ear lobes
does not constitute a social group precisely because there are no constraints with
any social consequences that such persons face. Whether a collection of persons
comprises a social group is an empirical question that depends on whether they face
common social constraints. Not all possible collections do, but any collections that
face common social constraints hold some interest for social scientists.

3. Institutionally Structured Constraints

As I defined them above, social constraints are facts that one does or ought to
rationally consider in deciding how to act or how to plan one’s life, or facts that shape
beliefs and attitudes about other persons, that come about as a result of social actions.
Among social constraints I include: legal rights, obligations and burdens, stereotyp-
ical expectations, wealth, income, social status, conventions, norms, and practices.
These particular social constraints all have in common that they are institutionally
structured, and they are thus all crucially important in the definition of oppression.
The term “social institution” encompasses a very broad list of social entities.
Included among any sociologists’ list of social institutions would be government,
legal systems, schools, banks, gender rules and norms, rules of etiquette, media
outlets, stereotypical beliefs, class, caste systems, racial, or ethnic classification sys-
tems. What all of these have in common are that they specify behaviors in specific
situations for persons who fit particular roles regardless of their individual charac-
teristics, and the specified behaviors are in some sense required under threat of
some penalty for noncompliance. Andrew Schotter defines social institutions as
follows: “A social institution is a regularity in social behavior that is agreed to by all
members of society, specifies behavior in specific recurrent situations, and is either
self-policed or policed by some external authority” (Schotter 1981, 11). While this
definition concisely captures much of what I mean by a social institution, it is too
voluntaristic; it requires some kind of agreement by all members of society. I dis-
agree with two aspects of this definition: the agreement condition (that there must
be some agreement among individuals concerning the behaviors specified) and the
inclusivity condition (the requirement that all members of society must so agree).
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 51

First, we can weaken the agreement condition to require only tacit knowledge, so
that instead of there being a socially recognized agreement there can be merely tacit
knowledge on the part of the individuals. Second, we can weaken the inclusivity
condition to require only some subset (that includes more than one member) of the
population of a society. The amended definition reads as follows: A social institution
sets constraints that specify behavior in specific recurrent situations, that are tacitly known
by some nontrivial subset of society, and that are either self-policed or policed by some
external authority.
We can now define social groups in terms of social institutions. Social groups
are collections of individuals who face common constraints that are structured by
social institutions. It may be objected that the phrase “structured by” is too vague.
But I would argue that it is general, not vague. Explicit rewards set by groups whose
criteria of eligibility are common knowledge, for example, the starting salary for the
typical MBA graduate of Harvard Business School would be one kind of constraint
structured by a social institution. Another kind would be the tacitly known con-
sequences of wearing a tongue stud in a job interview. Here the social institution is
norms for appropriate dress and jewelry, which change fairly rapidly, but are cer-
tainly understood by most persons to whom they apply. In both cases these are
consequences to actions based on knowledge or inferences made from social facts,
which guide behavior in advance through the reward or punishment those conse-
quences represent.

4. Oppression and Social Groups

Recall the account of oppression we have been developing: an institutionally

structured, unjust harm perpetrated on groups by other groups using direct and
indirect material and psychological forces. Now that we have a definition of social
groups in terms of the social constraints that persons face as a result of them, we can
give a more precise definition of oppression. First, however, I need to examine the
ways in which social constraints can fall unequally and unjustly on social groups. 1
shall say that social constraints are unequal when they differentially affect the life
outcomes of the individuals subjected to the constraints. Take an example of a social
constraint that is different, say, segregated public restrooms. They are unequal if they
are on average worse for one group than for the other. If, for example, there is no
average difference in cleanliness, waiting time, or convenience for the segregated
groups, then there is no inequality. If, on the other hand, the segregation leads to
greater waiting times for one group than the other (as gender segregated restrooms
typically do) or to lesser cleanliness for one group than the other (as racially segre-
gated restrooms often did), then there is an inequality in the social constraint. To say
that social constraints are unjust is to say that in addition to falling unequally on
different groups, they ate unjustifiedly unequal. Inequalities may be justified in
special cases by the behavior or special needs of the social groups at issue. For
example, it is often argued that gender segregated restrooms are justified by the need
to protect men and women from humiliation. However, such attempts at justifying
unequal social constraints can easily be manipulated to rationalize injustice.
52 A Framework for Analysis
We can now define oppression in terms of institutionally structured constraints.
Oppression consists in the existence of unequal and unjust institutional constraints.
I claim that these injustices harm through direct and indirect material and psy-
chological forces. The next four chapters discuss these forces. Recall that a direct
force externally affects the choices of individuals, while indirect forces shape the
background social beliefs and desires with which we perceive and behave toward
others. Direct forces of oppression include unjust laws that prescribe or proscribe
behaviors by members of social groups, unjustified terrorist, police, or military ac-
tions by some groups on other groups, or unjust norms that deny equal opportunities
to members of some social groups. Indirect forces of oppression work through the
choices of the individuals in the social groups. These include choices that oppressed
persons make to accommodate their oppression and stereotypical beliefs that allow
them and others to rationalize and accept it. While indirect forces of oppression
work through the affective and cognitive psychological processes that form beliefs,
desires, and ultimately, actions of the individuals, direct forces are necessarily ex-
ternal and concrete.

5. Groups and Group Harms

In order to forestall a certain kind of objection to my account, I need to distinguish

between two concepts of group harm. One is a kind of harm that is easily reconciled
with individualistic social science or with the concept of harm that Mill and other
liberals recognize as legitimate bases for limiting the liberty of individuals, and the
other is not so easily reconciled with either. The former include those harms that are
suffered by the individual members of a group because of their membership in that
group; I shall call this “group harm qua individuals harmed” or just “group harm,.”
The latter is the harm to the group qua group itself, not necessarily to any particular
member of the group; I will call this “group harm qua group” or just “group harm,.”
Group harm, is harm done to non-accidental groupings where the harm is a harm to
the group itself, not just to the individuals that constitute it.?? To see that these two
senses of group harm are different, consider a group which is obliterated not by any
harm done to any of the members but rather by the withering away of shared
purpose. We might see this as a kind of group harm,, since the groupness is oblit-
erated, but not a kind of group harm,, since no individuals are harmed. Nonvol-
untary groups cannot suffer group harm, if group harm, is considered to be
something over and above—not reducible to—the harms to individuals consequent
on their group membership.
Group harm, poses no particular problems for an individualist ontology or liberal
political theory to recognize and allow remedy for because these group harms can be
parsed as the harms of individuals consequent on their group membership. First, note
that we have been discussing harm in the moralized, Millian sense that requires a
legitimate right not to be harmed in that way. Particularly in the case of nonvol-
untary group harms, there is a matter of injustice, as it is clear that the harm is
undeserved and unavoidable for the group member. If a voluntary group suffers group
harm,, then what needs to be asked is whether the individuals have the right to their
 Social Groups and Institutional Constraints 53

voluntary participation in the group. To the degree that the right to voluntarily
participate in the group is a justified right, that group harm is an injustice.
Recognition of group harm, is more difficult to justify on an individualist
ontology, since there are not any groups over and above individuals, or on liberal
grounds because liberalism rejects the view that groups have the same moral standing
as individuals. Liberals hold individual persons to be of ultimate moral value, and
this seems to rule out the possibility that groups could also be of this highest moral
value. Acknowledging group rights allows the possibility for groups to supersede
individuals in disputes. Hence, it would seem that recognition of group harm, is in-
compatible with liberalism. Either the harm has to be reconceived as harm of the
individual members, that is, group harm,, or it has to be accepted that the harm is
not of sufficient moral weight to override individual rights or claims of harm, or the
liberal conception of the primacy of the individual has to be given up. On my view
the harm of oppression is, in part, of the group harm, variety; that is, groups can be
said to be harmed only in the sense that the individuals of the group are harmed.

6. Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that any account of oppression that distinguishes it
from other harms that can come to individuals and locates it as a social injustice
requires an account of social groups. Further, harms that accrue to members of
voluntary and nonvoluntary groups must be treated separately in moral arguments.
For voluntary social groups, oppression is a harm that comes from choosing to be a
member of the group. The question raised for justice by such harm would be: Does
the individual have a right to exercise the sort of assembly or speech that mem-
bership in this social group entails? The issue for victims of oppression as a result of
their nonvoluntary social group membership is somewhat different: Does a just
society allow harm to persons who could not choose to avoid their membership?
Oppression of either sort of social group may be quite severe and justice may require
us urgently to address it. Oppression of nonvoluntary social groups is especially
egregious from the point of view of the construction of just social institutions because
society at the same time constructs nonvoluntary social groups as objects of op-
pression.
As I shall argue more fully in chapter 7, the theory of social groups I proposed in
this chapter helps us to dissolve the dichotomy of individual and social responsi-
bility. There are social theorists and philosophers who claim that persons should
only be held responsible for their intentional actions, and so if some group of
individuals is harmed by the unintended consequences of many individuals’ actions,
there is no responsibility on anyone to correct the harm or to compensate the
victims. On the other hand, there are other social theorists and philosophers who
suggest that individuals are to be excused for their actions when they are members
of oppressed classes, and that to blame them for self-destructive actions is to “blame
the victim.” The choice between holding only individuals responsible for their
intended actions and holding only society responsible for the actions of individuals
acting under constraint is a false choice.
54 A Framework for Analysis

As I argued above, the oppression of nonvoluntary social groups is a matter of

social injustice that requires rectification by society. The just society should come to
see this as a collective responsibility, to be taken on as a plural subject, because it is a
consequence of their intentional actions to create social institutions. But not all
individuals in society are equally well placed to alleviate such oppression. The op-
pressed themselves are surely to be held responsible for not acting self-destructively,
at least when there is an alternative to self-destruction, but the non-oppressed must
be held responsible for loosening the social constraints caused by their actions, even
though the harms may have been unintended. For we are to be held responsible for
the unintended but foreseeable consequences of our actions. To talk of moral re-
sponsibility for the consequences of our actions, however, is to get ahead of ourselves.
First, we need a theory of oppression that explains how group-based social oppression
of the sort I have been discussing is possible. To this task I now turn.
 Psychological Mechanisms
of Oppression

1. The Need fora (New) Psychological Theory of Oppression

One of the questions a theory of oppression seeks to answer is: Why is this group
(rather than that group) oppressed? Why, for instance, are men dominant over
women, rather than strong ones over weak ones in others, or intelligent ones over
stupid ones in others? However, the explanatorily prior question is why are there
men and women at all, rather than simply tall and short persons, lactating and non-
lactating ones, and so on, or simply individual persons with their unique combina-
tions of characteristics? Why do long-standing social groups form at all? What is the
cause or motivation for humans to segregate themselves and others in groups? I take
these questions to require scientific explanation, beginning with our individual
human cognitive abilities and propensities.
Once we see how oppressed and oppressor groups form, I shall argue that a
material analysis can show how oppression is maintained, and how the economic
efforts of the oppressed are often co-opted into maintaining their oppression. Then
a second set of psychological questions vex even the casual social observer, namely:
why do the groups endure? How do the oppressed come to be psychologically
subdued to acquiesce or even participate in their own oppression? Marx, who also
concentrated on the material causes and effects of oppression, was likewise afflicted
by this puzzle. He answered it, notoriously, by invoking false consciousness, the idea
that the oppressed working class comes to believe in the rightness of the social
institutions that structure their oppression, which they see as their own personal
failings and problems. False consciousness does not adequately answer the ques-
tions, however, because it is merely a name for a set of psychological phenomena
that themselves require description and explanation. In other words, it is a black
box. To get inside this black box we need a psychological analysis.
Of course, I am not the first philosopher to notice the need for a psychological
account of oppression. Indeed, there exist many such accounts. Hegel proposed the
first one in the form of the Master/Slave dialectic, which so inspired Marx that he

55
56 A Framework for Analysis
focused his life’s work on oppression. As Marx found with Hegel’s, the existing psy-
chological accounts of oppression are still inadequate, however. As I shall argue, they
are all inadequate as social scientific accounts of psychological phenomena, first be-
cause they are not scientific at all. Some of them have the added flaw that they are not
social accounts, and hence not suited to explaining the essentially social phenomenon
of oppression. Most importantly for my overall account of oppression, the existing
psychologies of oppression are not compatible with the best existing account of eco-
nomic or material oppression. In this chapter, after showing why the existing psy-
chological theories of oppression are inadequate, I draw on the work of social and
cognitive psychologists in order to provide an adequate psychological theory of op-
pression. The idea is to provide a theory that is scientifically grounded and that helps
explain social structures of oppression. Additionally, the theory of oppression I propose
that takes as explanatory variables the material facts of oppression provided by an
adequate economic theory of oppression, and in turn provides explanatory variables, in
the form of belief and desire-generating mechanisms, for that theory.
In this chapter I am primarily concerned with explaining how our cognitive
psychology equips us for oppression, that is, what psychological mechanisms we
have that allow and motivate us to oppress or suffer oppression. Since oppression is
fundamentally a social-group—based phenomenon, one part of the question, the part
I shall concentrate on in this chapter, is: What psychological mechanisms account
for our tendency to form social groups and to invidiously discriminate among those
groups! My general thesis in this chapter, then, is this: Originating in the cognitive
process of stereotyping, oppression materially and psychologically harms its victims.
In the following two chapters I take up the issue of material harms. In chapter 6 I
shall attempt to explain how these harms are magnified by psychological harm, and
how they strengthen the oppressor and further weaken the oppressed, making
escape difficult or impossible.

2. Using Psychological Theory to Explain Oppression

In the literature on the psychology of oppression, two kinds of theories have com-
peted: (1) psychoanalytic theories, deriving from Freud and represented by, among
other versions, the object relations theory of Nancy Chodorow; and (2) the recog-
nition theory that is directly derived from the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and
most significantly advanced in the twentieth century by Frantz Fanon (also a psy-
choanalyst himself) and recently propounded by Cynthia Willett. In this section I
will illustrate each and show how each is inadequate as a part of a general theory of
oppression, or even as an account of all the main features of psychological oppression.
I will then offer an alternative psychological theory on which to ground our un-
derstanding of oppression in the next section.

2.1. Psychoanalytic Theories of Oppression

Psychoanalysis purports to explain behavior by invoking the psychic connections and
mechanisms of the unconscious that are inevitably formed through the innately
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 57

preprogrammed psychosexual development of the young child. All psychoanalytic

schools thus attempt to explain the puzzling, apparently irrational, so-called pa-
thological, features of our behavior by showing that repressed unconscious urges are
being satisfied or unconscious fantasies are being played out through the behavior in
question. Since oppression, if it is not rooted in clear hierarchies of ability, seems to
involve social pathology on the part of both oppressed and oppressor, a natural
application of psychoanalytic theory is to attempt to explain oppression.
Nancy Chodorow’s pioneering work, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho-
analysis and the Sociology of Gender, attempts to explain the pathologies of gender.
Why do women mother and men do not, that is, why (and how) do females
(typically) become the mothering, caring, nurturing, intimacy-building gender and
males become the gender whose psychology and social style (typically) is more
suited to the distant relationships of the market, the court, and the battlefield? Not
only was this a surprising question when she asked it, she also had a very surprising
answer. Women are not by nature mothers, she argued, they are made into mothers
by their mothers (and, through physical absence and emotional distance, their
fathers). How do they do this? The answer Chodorow gives is psychoanalytic, it has
to do with various childhood sexual intrigues and the resulting complexes that have
been theorized by psychoanalysts since Freud, but with a special emphasis on the
“object-relational experiences” of individuals as they mature. Chodorow’s theory is
a theory of oppression if one sees gender roles as they are constituted as oppressive.
Hence, I view this as a psychological theory of oppression, at least of women in
cultures where child-rearing practices are relevantly similar. While Chodorow’s
general explanation of why women mother seems quite right, we shall see that the
explanatory theory adduced is not adequate as a psychological theory of oppression
of women, let alone as the foundation for a more general theory of oppression.
Chodorow argues that since women raise children and children identify with
the same-sex parent and not with the other-sex parent, girls and boys go through
different kinds of phases of the development of their ability to have close, sexual
and other intimate, relationships with others. The old Freudian Oedipus complex
plays a central role in this theory. There is for each sex an oedipal goal, and that is
some sort of normal heterosexual orientation and role development.’ The way that
the Oedipus complex is resolved for boys makes them distant and unable to closely
connect with others, and makes them not want or need the same sort of close,
almost internal connection that a mother has with a child. Girls’ resolution of their
Oedipus complex, though, makes them need this sort of connection, and thus they
are led to want the kind of exclusive relationships to children that exclusive
mothering involves. There is a continued importance of the girl’s internal and
external relation to her mother, and this lengthens the pre-oedipal phase. This
makes girls more relationally complex, while boys’ capacities for relations are cut off
by the masculine Oedipus complex.
Girls, since they identify with their mothers and, more importantly perhaps,
their mothers with them, go through a longer period of symbiosis. Mothers, on
Chodorow’s theory, tend to feel the separateness of their daughters less because
they were also once girls. Both genders of children tend to “live out their mother’s
preoccupations or fantasies,” but girls do so with more empathy. For the boy it is
58 A Framework for Analysis

very important that “the mother is as much in need of a husband as the son is
of a father” (Chodorow 1978, 104, quoting Bibring 1953), and since the father is
often absent (at work) the mother has a tendency to “turn her affection and in-
terest to the next obvious male—her son—and become particularly seductive to-
ward him” (Chodorow 1978, 104). This gets the Oedipus complex going when the
father then threatens the son (or so the son thinks) with castration. The kind of
evidence that Chodorow refers to concerns child development milestones. For in-
stance, she claims that evidence suggests that children become aware of their
genitals around age two, and boys often get more concerned with them because of
the difference between them and mother, though girls can develop penis envy at
this time, as well.” But the links that Chodorow forges between this evidence and
her theory are merely to show consistency; nothing in the child development evi-
dence itself could either verify or falsify psychoanalytic theory.
Chodorow does not question the psychoanalytic perspective, nor does she de-
fend it. In fact it is assumed that the reader will simply accept that there is an
Oedipus complex, and that our personalities are determined largely by the age of five
through the stimulation of sexual drives in us. Chodorow defends her lack of defense
of psychoanalysis as follows: “Psychoanalytic theory remains the most coherent,
convincing theory of personality development available for an understanding of
fundamental aspects of the psychology of women in our society, in spite of its biases”
(Chodorow 1978, 142). But given that she presents no defense of or direct evidence?
for her brand of psychoanalysis, the critical reader is left to judge this claim by
examining the evidence for psychoanalysis more generally. Here the picture is not
too good for psychoanalysis. In the most sweeping analysis of the empirical evidence
for the theory of psychoanalysis to date, Adolf Griinbaum argues that the only
empirical test offered by Freud is clinical, and consists of a two-step process: (1) does
the specific theory for a patient tally with what the patient thinks is real; and (2) does
it lead to therapeutic success? Griinbaum concludes, “Insofar as the evidence for the
major causal hypotheses of the psychoanalytic corpus is held to derive from the
productions of patients in analysis, this warrant is remarkably weak” (Griinbaum
1984, 278).
Psychoanalysis has received so little positive empirical corroboration that most
philosophical defenders of the theory concede defeat here and now claim that it is a
hermeneutic, not a scientific, enterprise. As Jane Flax puts it, the goal of the therapist
and patient “is not ‘truth’ in the empiricist sense of what ‘really’ happened to the
patient, but rather understanding which includes a powerful affective and experi-
ential component” (Flax 1981, 566). But on these grounds the theory is also in
trouble. First, as Griinbaum meticulously and convincingly argues (Griinbaum 1984,
1993), Freud himself did not intend the theory to be merely an a priori narrative of
meaning but a scientifically grounded psychological theory. Of course, we may simply
want to say that Freud was mistaken on this. Second, to take psychoanalysis seriously
as a hermeneutic theory, we need to ask what criteria of adequacy it would offer as a
defense of the claim that it is the best theory of behavior of its kind. I can see two such
criteria being (implicitly) offered: first, the resonance test: Does the story that is offered
to the patient resonate with her experience or does the theory offered explain some
cultural feature that resonates with those who live in the culture (or its descendant
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 59

culture)? And second, the coherence test: Does the theory cohere with the facts as it
describes them, that is, can it weave together the facts in a plausible connected
narrative? These tests are certainly necessary tests of the initial plausibility of a
theory, but they are hardly sufficient to give us good reason to believe them. The
resonance test applied by individuals to their own experience is quite subjective, as it
asks one to introspect about intersubjectively non-verifiable aspects of one’s personal
experience. Hence, it is hardly a reliable scientific test, though possibly a starting
point to test for initial plausibility. At the level of social theory, a psychoanalytic
narrative seems to be open to intersubjective test, since there are so many persons in
the culture who could pass judgment on it. But this turns out not to be the case if the
theory is postulating some sort of general psyche of the culture, since in that case no
one person is the subject, the culture is the subject. The coherence test is a more
reliable test, however. Granting for the sake of argument that the narrative is co-
herent, that is, that it posits a narrative that plausibly ties the facts of psychological
development together, the issue that one must address in assessing the theory is
whether it is the best theory. Are there other coherent narratives that plausibly
explain the same facts? And if there are, do these theories have anything else going
for them that Chodorow’s theory does not offer? Are they empirically testable, co-
herent with well-tested or otherwise more acceptable theories of neighboring phe-
nomena, more fruitful scientifically or for progressive politics? Do they rely on less
dubious assumptions?
Chodorow has very interesting things to say about the sociology of gender and
of mothering, but the entire psychoanalytic account that forms the core of her
theory is to my mind unwarranted because there are better theories that are equally
(at least) coherent, and that resonate better with my (admittedly subjective) un-
derstanding of my life. Chodorow’s theory and psychoanalytic theory fails to reso-
nate for me at all. Since many of the events that are supposed to form us happen
before we are five years old, and they are now subject to repression by the un-
conscious, it is difficult to see how we would gather reliable evidence about them
anyway. But granting that we can for the sake of argument, almost nothing that she
says seems to resonate with any of my experiences in life, nor those of my family and
friends. Indeed one woman friend I asked about this remarked that she had never
even seen her father’s penis, so how could she have so early envied it, or even been
aware of penises when she was so young? This account relies heavily on the se-
duction of girls by their fathers and boys by their mothers, but it seems totally
implausible that there is this cross-generational sexual interest (that is, parents for
children and children for parents) going on in nearly every family, as would have to
be the case for the reproduction of mothering as a general phenomenon to happen
in the way that Chodorow supposes. It seems to me that aside from a relatively small
proportion of the people I know (all of whom are literary intellectuals with very
fertile imaginations), psychoanalytic theory is met with complete and utter disbelief,
and even horror. Now I am relying on personal, not statistical data here. But
Chodorow gives us no other evidence to appeal to other than our own subjective
experiences, and on this test her theory fails miserably.
On the other hand, as I have already mentioned, her conclusion seems entirely
right to me. To quote Chodorow:
60 A Framework for Analysis

As a result of having been parented by a woman, women are more likely than men
to seek to be mothers, that is, to relocate themselves in a primary mother-child
relationship, to get gratification from the mothering relationship, and to have psy-
chological and relational capacities for mothering. (Chodorow 1978, 206)

But a wide variety of psychological theories, from social-learning theory to cognitive

development theory would also conclude as much, for all she is really saying, when
we abstract from the psychoanalysis, is that women are mothers because they learn to
be mothers from their mothers (and men learn not to be mothers from their
mothers). Later in this chapter I will argue that one could come to this conclusion
without the psychoanalytic account, by means of a theory that offers empirical tests
and greater initial plausibility of its assumptions.
Another theoretical problem for Chodorow’s theory as a psychological theory of
oppression is that it is hard to see how it might be extended to analyze forms of
oppression other than gender oppression. Thus, if there is a psychological theory
that can account for other forms of oppression as well, it will be superior to this
psychoanalytic account on what is sometimes called by philosophers of science the
“fruitfulness” criterion.
Aside from these theoretical problems, Chodorow’s theory, appealing to such
early life experiences as determinative of all future (mothering) behavior, offers us
no escape from gender oppression. In the end of the book she suggests that her
narrative shows how much both sexes should want to change from women-only
mothering. But it seems to me that if her argument were right she would have
shown what incentives both men and women have to keep things the same. Men
get to remain dominant, and women get to charge themselves up with these in-
tensely personal, symbiotic relationships, and given the way that their early training
has determined their desires, they have no desire to change this arrangement.
Furthermore, psychoanalytic theories generally locate pathologies, including the
social pathology of oppression, in personal failings. This also makes the prospects of
a solution bleak, for the, solution would have to be psychotherapeutic and thus
individual, rather than political and collective, unless we are willing to coerce a
generation of men and women to act counter to their deepest desires, a project that
would surely generate its own pathologies. Although my objections to psycho-
analysis as a foundation for a theory of oppression have focused on Chodorow’s
theory, the problems I have identified in her theory generalize, I believe, to other
psychoanalytic theories. First, they attempt to justify their claims by the same
dubious criteria of adequacy. Second, they focus on early psychosexual development
as explanatory for all future psychological development. Finally, they all focus on
individuals rather than institutional level processes. Thus, 1 find psychoanalytic
theory to be politically paralyzing as well as theoretically and empirically inadequate
as a theoryof oppression.

2.2. Recognition Theory

The recognition theory of oppression originated in the master-slave dialectic ad-
vanced by Hegel in a relatively short but well-known section of Phenomenology of
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 61

Spirit and was recast by Fanon to fit the situation of European colonial oppression in
the twentieth century. The basic assumption of the recognition theory is that all
persons most strongly desire recognition from others because only through recog-
nition can one become conscious of oneself, a goal that is taken to be universal and
overriding. Hegel puts this in his characteristically abstract way when he writes:
“Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for
another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (Hegel 1977, 111). Self-
consciousness in and for itself is the logical and developmental goal for humanity,
according to Hegel, and thus acknowledgment, specifically in the form of recognition
by other self-conscious beings, is humanity’s primary motivating force. At the begin-
ning of the master-slave dialectic, each individual is only a bare self-consciousness,
not yet “in and for itself,” and it must reach out to another being that is self-
conscious in order to become objectively real in and for itself, a phrase that might be
interpreted as “free and aware of itself as free.” Only other self-conscious beings can
make one’s own self-consciousness public and hence real. However, in the dialectical
order, this necessitates a competition for recognition between two beings who are as
yet bare self-consciousness, since in Hegel’s theory (for logical reasons, which I am
going to quickly pass over), there are only two choices at this point of an individual’s
development toward full and free self-consciousness: either become a being-for-itself
and make the other a slave who acts under the direction of one’s own will, or give up
that quest and accept the other as the one who is the master, the being-for-itself.
Thus, being recognized without recognizing in return makes one the master over the
other, the one who recognizes but is not recognized, who then becomes the slave. For
Hegel (and for Fanon as well but for somewhat different reasons), this struggle is a
mortal struggle, in which the vanquished submit only to avoid death. In demanding
and winning recognition from the slave, the master gains power over the slave and is
able to demand from the slave whatever the master desires. So the slave is made to
do the work that the master chooses not to do; the slave is made into a mere tool.
The master’s humanity initially seems to be reinforced by being able to direct the will
of another human being; the master seems to become in and for herself.
In the Hegelian version of the story, though, the slave learns to transform objects
into valuable things, and this transforms him into an “objectified” human being, that
is, a human being who is no longer merely a tool controlled by the will of the master,
but one who consciously manipulates nature and transforms ideas into objectively
real objects. Furthermore, the slave must learn to ignore his daily needs and desires in
order to serve the master, but this frees him from the dictates of sensuous nature.
Meanwhile, as the master becomes dependent on the slave, she loses her ability to
objectify nature and becomes dependent on the actions of and recognition by the
slave, who has been reduced to an animal, a mere tool. In the end (through a process
of stoic adjustment to physical deprivations), the slave becomes self-consciousness in
and for itself, while the master never is able to reach the in-itself stage because of her
dependence on the slave. The master’s stagnation, in turn, sets the stage for the
dialectical overcoming of the dependency on the master by the slave.
While he clearly appreciated the logic and the psychology of the theory, Fanon
criticized this story for its paternalism; it is after all, a very convenient ideology for
the powerful to rationalize their domination over the weak and to teach them to
62 A Framework for Analysis

obey. Hegel emphasizes that there are two essential stages on the way to true
freedom: absolute fear of death and servitude.’ It is the story of how the strict father
raises the magisterial son, how the tough Marine drill sergeant strips the raw recruit
of his dignity to make a tough and obedient soldier, or how the violent colonial
power teaches the natives to be civilized Christian workers. Fanon, the radical,
Afto-Caribbean psychiatrist working in colonial Algeria, rejected the paternalism
and ideology in Hegel’s theory of oppression while accepting the basic psychological
assumption that all persons are motivated by the desire for recognition.
Like Hegel, Fanon emphasizes the need for recognition, which he claimed is
necessary for one’s dignity, identity, and self-worth. But Fanon puts a psychoana-
lytic twist on the Hegelian recognition theory. He also thinks that there are two
complexes involved in colonial oppression: Whites have a superiority complex from
having killed people to assert their dominance, and blacks develop an inferiority
complex from having been slaves. Fanon as psychiatrist documents the psycho-
pathological effects of oppression on the oppressed: Confined by laws and regula-
tions, the oppressed learn to “think, dream, and act as a helpless minority of one.”
They complain of many somatic and psychosomatic afflictions. Oppressed persons
turn on themselves and on each other and so become their own “intropressors.”°
Like Hegel, Fanon holds that one must risk life for freedom, but unlike in
Hegel, there is nothing metaphorical in Fanon’s analysis. Violence takes on para-
mount importance in his last work, The Wretched of the Earth. Reflecting the cir-
cumstances of colonialism, he sees violence as the primary way that the oppressors
maintain oppression and the only means by which the oppressed can regain free-
dom. Oppression is essentially violence for Fanon, either outright violence or in-
stitutionalized or incipient violence, and all forms of oppression are seen as a kind of
violence: economic, psychological, and cultural violence. The only recourse is
counterviolence—violence in the usual sense—against the oppressor. Countervio-
lence not only chases away the colonial rulers but it also makes the oppressed into
an organized people who are self-conscious of themselves as a people, and of their
own dignity and freedom. Fanon writes:

Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and edu-
cated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths
and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the
practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of
trumpets. ... and down there at bottom an undivided mass, still living in the middle
ages, endlessly marking time. (Fanon 1963, 147)

In addition, on a personal psychological level, joining in and practicing organized

violence against the oppressor releases oppressed persons from their internalized
oppression, the inferiority complexes they suffer.®
From Hegel and Fanon I believe there is much to learn about the psychology of
oppression. In particular, both convince me that humans desire recognition by others,
and that this is not reducible to any purely materialistic desire. In addition, Fanon
makes a convincing case that psychology is fundamentally social psychology, that to
understand the individual and to understand the causes of psychopathology in hu-
man individuals, one must understand the social context in which recognition is
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 63

given or withheld. Furthermore, Fanon’s account of liberation is especially important

in cultures in which violence is the pervasive method of preserving dominance re-
lations. However, | also find that their theories are limited by an androcentric vision
of freedom, fear, and struggle, an androcentrism that limits the applicability of their
psychology of oppression to a majority of oppressed people. First, both Hegel and
Fanon emphasize violence and the physical aspects of resistance and staking one’s
claim to freedom. They do this for different reasons, however. Hegel's idealist goal for
humanity is to become pure self-consciousness, to be free by being released from
sensuous nature, to become a pure soul. If we stake our lives on the struggle for
freedom, then, we stake all of sensuous nature, we express our willingness to sacrifice
it for our spiritual freedom. This willingness itself, publicly expressed, shows us that
we are free, and that showing, for Hegel, makes us free. But, as many feminists and
others have argued, such freedom leaves us without any ability to value our freedom.
If we have no particularity, no desires, no bodies, what good is our freedom? Viewing
us as unembodied, rational souls is androcentric. This view is mistaken because it
takes desire and embodiment to be the obstacles to our freedom, rather than essential
elements of our selves.
Fanon, on the other hand, insists on the violent struggle to the death for a very
practical reason: It is the only way to show the colonial power that the colonized
are serious in their threats, and thus the only way to win physical freedom. As a
comprehensive theory of oppression and resistance to oppression, however, this
seems again to be very androcentric in view. Such an uncompromising view seems
plausible only to one who is accustomed to seeing himself as the only one for whom
he is ultimately responsible. But that is not true to the experience of caregivers, who
are typically women. A primary parent might, in the face of violence, ask herself: Is
freedom worth the life of my child? Many parents feel that they would gladly give
their lives for their children, and likewise that they would suffer oppression for the
sake of saving their children, or at least, to give them the chance to fight another
day. And this does not seem unreasonable; surely life is a necessary condition for a
good life. Nor does it seem cowardly or deserving of scorn,’ for such a person is
willing to face death or slavery for the sake of someone else—not one’s own free-
dom, but the life of a child. Since life is a precondition for freedom, one could see
this as quite a reasonable objection to engaging in the Hegelian or Fanonian
struggle or seeing it as the true expression of human freedom.
Cynthia Willett, in her book Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, presents
yet a different Hegelian-inspired conception of freedom and struggle that she de-
rives from “interrogating” Hegel’s master-slave dialectic with the slave narrative of
Frederick Douglass. While she rejects the Hegelian conception of freedom as gained
through the stoic rejection of bodily desires and the acceptance of the liberating
power of forced labor, she accepts Hegel’s claim that the fundamental motivating
force for humans is the desire for recognition and finds evidence for both of these
positions in Douglass’s writings. Willett turns to Hegel for understanding oppression
because she holds that Hegel is able to explain socio-psychological aspects of
domination that a materialist analysis cannot.
Willett’s interpretation of Hegel emphasizes the “ontogeny recapitulates phy-
logeny” interpretation of the Phenomenology, in other words, she takes it that the
64 A Framework for Analysis

book describes the development of both humanity in general and individual hu-
mans. As Willett interprets it, the master-slave dialectic posits that freedom re-
quires a test of one will over another will, not just of the will over desire or appetite.
This competition of wills leads to the near-death struggle that results in the ca-
pitulation and enslavement of one of the wills. But as we have seen, the master is
ironically prevented from achieving the freedom he seeks, while the slave tran-
scends his unfreedom, in the end, and becomes in and for itself by going through a
stoic phase that causes him to separate from his bodily desires. As Willett points
out, Hegel thus recognized that it is slave cultures not master cultures that pro-
gressively create new and transformative cultures, but he failed to recognize the
Eurocentrism of the stoic move. Hegel’s narrative of freedom replaces the warrior’s
concept of freedom with the worker’s as humanity progresses toward absolute spirit,
and this too proves to be Eurocentric upon Willett’s interrogation.
Willett rejects Hegel’s narrative of freedom, pointing out the ways that it is a
“masculinized” (i.e., androcentric) story because it privileges reason, literacy, and
public life. As she explains it, freedom for Hegel, and hence his concept of the moral
person, requires a radical break from nature, women, and African men. But in
addition to the diagnoses of Eurocentrism and androcentrism, she argues that it
conflicts with the phenomenological evidence of the struggle from slavery to free-
dom that we have from the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass.
Still, Willett finds Hegel to have made an advance over the “classical con-
ception of the slave as akin to the tool or other property” (Willett 1995, 123). I find
her argument for the claim that desire for recognition is at the root of slavery
unconvincing, however. She argues that Hegel shows how “the master needs the
slave not only for rituals of deference but also to play out the fantasies of his own
repressed self” (Willett 1995, 127), as opposed to seeing slaves as primarily desired
for economic wealth and income. Willett finds supporting evidence for her psy-
chological interpretation in slave narratives, which report that impudence, not
destruction of property, was the worst crime that a slave could commit. She reasons:
“impudence would threaten the master only if the master depends on the oppres-
sion of the slave not simply as property but for a sense of self” (Willett 1995, 123).
But surely this is not the case. Impudence, or in more neutral terms, disobedience,
threatens the master if he wants continued obedience, that is, if he wants to
continue the master-slave relationship for any reason. This holds true just as much
if slavery is primarily motivated by economic reasons as for any other motivation.
Good evidence for this claim can be gleaned from training manuals for animals,
where it is stressed that training is upset or derailed if disobedience is not met with
swift punishment.® Calling disobedience “impudence” allows the master to ratio-
nalize to himself the punishment of the slave. Furthermore, to say that honor is
being sought from animals as well would contradict the claim that honor cannot be
gotten from deference shown by animals, one of the recognition theory’s central
claims. But perhaps there is more evidence for the claim of the centrality of rec-
ognition from Douglass’s writings.
As Douglass portrays his experience of slavery and freedom, Hegel seems
correct in his understanding of the irony of slavery. While masters did seem to have
a social and psychological dependence on slaves, slaves did not feel freed or fulfilled
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 65

by work, and work was not an essential component of subjective freedom for
African-Americans. In her reading of Douglass, Willett focuses on a passage in which
Douglass recounts having first resisted when he was threatened with a whipping for
an offense he had not committed. In this instant he suddenly saw the injustice and
arbitrariness of what the master called “punishment” and reclaimed what he de-
scribes as his sense of manhood and of freedom. In seeing the arbitrariness of the
punishment and reacting to it violently, Douglass reveals both the master’s need for
recognition and his own, according to Willett. Where the master’s need for rec-
ognition is revealed is in the fact that Douglass was to be punished despite the fact
that he had not committed a wrong that needed to be corrected; thus, “punish-
ment” of the slave cannot be only for training or correction, but must be to satisfy
some other deep-seated psychological need of the master. But this does not follow,
either. In the story Douglass relates, Covey, the slavebreaker, threatens to whip
Douglass, who then appeals for justice from the master. The master refuses to
intervene. This refusal can be seen as simply a management policy on the part of the
master that is reasonable on the (of course, unreasonable and immoral) assumption
that the slave is a mere tool. Again, we can see the motivation to enforce arbitrary
punishment as supporting a purely instrumental attitude toward the slave, and not
necessarily as revealing some deep-seated need for recognition from the slave.
Willett offers two other pieces of evidence for the claim that the desire for
recognition, and not for material wealth, is the driving force of slavery. First, she
claims that it can explain at least in part a point of political history: “the South
refused offers from President Lincoln for compensated emancipation and the col-
onization of blacks” (Willett 1995, 123). The South’s refusal on this point, though,
was plausibly a demand for recognition from Northern politicians and the Federal
Government, not from black slaves. The point shows that the South wanted to
maintain slavery rather than sell out. Does it show that recognition was their
primary aim in the institution of slavery? It is important first to note that ending
slavery would require the South to entirely remake their economy, a proposal that
had deep long-term costs, and second that the economic winners and losers in this
compensation scheme might well not have been the same as the winners and losers
from slavery. Thus, the economic winners from slavery might have had an economic
incentive to maintaining slavery, even if overall the compensation would have been
adequate. In any case, this evidence does not show the “socio-psychological de-
pendence of white master on black slave” (Willett 1995, 123). At best it would
show the psychological dependence of Southern politicians on the institution of
slavery.
Finally, and most importantly for Willett’s overall project, her theory of the self
posits the desire for recognition at the very core. To evaluate this we need to
examine whether her theory of the self, which also depends on earlier sections of
the book, independently supports and necessitates the desire for recognition as a
universal and overriding desire. Willett’s project is not primarily to show that
recognition is the driving motivation of humanity; that is for her an assumption that
she minimally defends. Her defense is mainly indirect: She claims to show that her
interpretation of the development of the self leads to interesting, non-masculinist,
anti-colonial interpretations of freedom. I shall not argue against this notion of
66 A Framework for Analysis

freedom, but rather show that her evidence can be interpreted consistently with
alternative understandings of human motivation.
Willett presents a theory of the self that is essentially embodied, and she sees
Douglass’s views of freedom as consistent with her view. Although Douglass em-
bodies his struggle as his “manhood,” unlike Hegel, Douglass does not see freedom
as requiring the alienation of the body or of the victory of reason over embodied
desire. Willett finds evidence ‘in Douglass of a more embodied and, despite his
references to “manhood,” gender-inclusive conception of freedom. She argues that
Douglass had something like her notion of “tactile sociality” in his discussion of “the
veriest freedom.” I am less interested here in whether this is an accurate reading of
Douglass than whether this idea of freedom and its corresponding notion of the self
implicates recognition as a universal and overriding desire. By “tactile sociality”
Willett refers to her view that “sociality begins in the caress” (Willett 1995, 41),
that is, humans are made into beings who can interact socially through, initially, the
tactile interchange between mother and fetus, and later between caregiver and
infant. She cites evidence from child development literature that children’s affective
development, and the ability to socialize successfully with others, is crucially shaped
by these early social exchanges of touch, that happen before linguistic interchange is
possible.” In addition, the caregiver is transformed by these experiences (Willett
1995, 40). Thus, this tactile sociality forms a crucial ethical moment in human lives
(one that has been omitted from the dominant ethical theories of the West). The
crucial move in the argument from this point for recognition theory, then, is to
identify this ethical moment as an exchange of recognition. Thus, recognition be-
comes the first ethical moment and the defining motivation for humanity. Douglass
suggests to Willett that he has something of tactile sociality in mind when he recalls
the touch of his grandmother, who raised him, and his mother, whom he saw only at
night as she came in from the fields, in speaking of what true freedom would be like.
Willett cites Douglass as saying that these experiences, not the struggle with the
slavebreaker, provided for him the positive notion of “the veriest freedom” (Willett
1995, 170). Thus, she interprets Douglass’s notion of freedom as involving maternal
virtues: connection, not separation, and recognition, not negation of sociality. From
the child development literature, Willett cites facts such as the need that infants
have for human skin-to-skin contact for full affective development, the demands of
the infant for attention over and above food, warmth, and cleaning, and the pre-
verbal interchanges between child and caregiver that resemble dance more than
conversation.
These facts do not contradict Willett’s interpretation, but neither do they lend
strong support to her theory if there are interpretations of them that do not require
recognition as the universal human motivation. For instance, if we interpret skin-to-
skin contact and stimulating interchanges as simply pleasurable stimuli, desired by other
animals as well who would not require “recognition,” then we can fit these observations
into any of many other psychological theories. In other words, these observations do
not rule out other psychological theories. The issue then is whether it fits into the best
theory. I will argue shortly that there is a good theory of the psychology of oppression
that does not rely on recognition as the fundamental driving force and fits with our
materialist account of oppression better.
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 67

Recognition theory purports to be a descriptive theory, yet offers no clear cri-

terion of adequacy for determining if it is correct or not. Although a desire for
recognition seems vaguely plausible, none of these authors offer empirical tests of the
theory. Like hermeneutic psychoanalysts, they rely on the reader feeling that there is
some resonance with the story that they weave. They offer as little in the way of
empirical evidence, and for both it is merely coherence with the facts and not evi-
dence for the psychological mechanisms proposed. Hegel spins a story that is supposed
to correspond to both human ontogenesis and phylogenesis, but he never considers
competing stories (nor does he offer concrete tests of any hypotheses, though surely it
would be anachronistic to look for them in Hegel). Fanon also fails to offer competing
stories, though he does discuss clinical cases. Yet these clinical cases are only very
vaguely tied to the Hegelian-inspired narrative of freedom and oppression.
Willett provides more extensive evidence for her recognition theory, though not
enough to convince me that recognition is the fundamental driving motivation for
humans. I have argued that her evidence is ambiguous: the narrative of Douglass, a
few scattered remarks from other slave narratives, and one fact from political history
that is supposed to support the claim that recognition, not economic gain, drove the
slave trade. Each of these can be explained by an economic theory that takes slaves
to be instrumentally valuable. The child development evidence is ambiguous in that
it is about children’s desires for touch, play, and other tactile social interchange with
the mother and other adults—interactions that could as well be described as simply
pleasant stimuli rather than exchanges of recognition.
To take recognition theory seriously as a competing psychological theory, one
would need to subject it to serious experimental tests in a variety of test situations,
from surveys to artificial experiments to clinical tests of different therapies some of
which are based on recognition theory. Yet this evidence is almost entirely lacking.
Instead of being a well-worked out and thoroughly tested theory of psychology, it
seems to be a fantasy of philosophy. It is not entirely implausible to this philosopher,
but it remains to be tested, and thus is hardly the psychological theory on which to
rest a general theory of oppression—especially not if there is a viable competitor.
In addition to these empirical shortcomings, there is a common theoretical
critique of recognition theory, as well. The recognition theorists share the Hegelian
view that, as Bulhan puts it, “the question of oppression is primarily a problem of
psyches confronting each other in society” (Bulhan 1985, 118). This quote sum-
marizes what is fundamentally wrong with the recognition theory of oppression.
Recognition theorists hold that some groups in society have collective psyches that
are locked in a mortal combat with each other that mirrors the struggles of indi-
viduals. But this view is ontologically strange, and ultimately psychologically inco-
herent. It requires that there exist concrete collectives with psychologies, that there
are minds writ large, like some sort of Wizard of Oz, and the collectives act as
individual beings in response to the actions of other such collectives, as if they had
internal sensory and psychological mechanisms like human individuals. Yet col-
lectives do not appear to have those organs or mechanisms, and so psychological
theory, which purports to explain the behavior of individuals based on either in-
stinctual, biological, or otherwise constructed cognitive and affective mechanisms,
can have nothing to say, except metaphorically, about such entities.
68 A Framework for Analysis

While I am persuaded that humans desire recognition, I am not convinced that

the desire for recognition is more fundamental than all other desires, much less that
it is the psychological motor driving oppression.!° Nor does recognition theory even
attempt to answer the first question that we set before us in the introduction to this
chapter: Why does this group (rather than that collection of humans) come to be a
group and to have this or that position in a hierarchy of social dominance relations?
For an answer to that question:without the drawbacks of the psychological theories
of oppression that we have examined, we shall have to look at social cognitive
theory.

2.3. Social Cognitive Theories of Stereotype Formation

If we want to understand the psychology of oppression, I believe that we need to
begin at a point prior to the motivation question, that is, to understand how indi-
viduals think about, feel about, and decide to act toward others. By this I mean that
we need to understand why individual humans form groups and come to identify
with their group membership, when they do. On my view, oppression is funda-
mentally a group phenomenon. To study the psychology of oppression as a matter of
individual motivations to oppress, as psychoanalysis and recognition theory do, is to
approach oppression in the wrong way. Social psychology has always studied the right
sorts of phenomena to build an understanding of the psychology of oppression. In
particular, social psychologists have long been concerned with the formation of
stereotypes and attitudes about individuals and the groups that they belong to, and
ultimately, the causal efficacy of those stereotypes and attitudes in behavior. Since its
origins as an independent discipline at the turn of the century, social psychology has
been concerned with the formation of beliefs and attitudes toward other persons and
how these are manifested in behavior. In its early days, however, social psychology
was limited by some of the same theoretical and methodological defects that we
found with psychoanalytic theories and the recognition theories, namely, there was
little understanding of the causal mechanisms that underlay these thoughts and
feelings and actions. Social psychology, where it was useful or more than mere
speculation at all, was largely a descriptive enterprise; beautiful theory could be spun,
but justification for the theory was remote and basically limited to the resonance and
coherence tests.
The key development in making stereotype research a scientifically viable
endeavor was the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. The cognitive revolution has
enabled psychology to go beyond the level of description to empirically testable
causal explanations of psychological processes by examining the cognitive structures
in the brain that cause us to perceive data and draw inferences as we do. Psy-
chologists began to see thought as a string of information-processing and infor-
mation-generating processes, which could be experimentally studied in isolation and
then recombined in order to have a clearer analysis of the whole. Social cognitive
theory combines the interests in persons, their social interactions, and their for-
mation of self-concepts with the methods of cognitive psychology; it applies the
theories from cognitive psychology regarding general cognitive functions such as
perception, attribution, and categorization to understand persons and their inter-
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 69

action. The combination provides a scientific, causal theory of the social psychology
of humans. What the theory has to say about how we form groups and beliefs about
them is, therefore, crucial to an investigation of the psychology of oppression.
From its earliest days, social psychology has been keenly interested in the
formation and function of stereotypes in our thoughts about and actions toward
each other. Stereotypes are generalizations that we make about persons based on
characteristics that we believe they share with some identifiable group. Stereotypes
group us by, typically, visible characteristics and then carry with them a whole host
of inferences about us that go well beyond the immediately visible and, often, the
truth. For example, a white, middle-class, middle-age female perceiver from a rural
state sees a brown-skinned, short-haired, taller than average person walking across
campus and judges that it is a black man, then her stereotypes of black man cause
her to form the beliefs that he is heading toward the gym to play basketball,
probably listening to gangsta rap on the headphones he is wearing, and likely to be
from a large city. If it is dark out and there is no one else around, she might
entertain a more sinister belief about him, as well, and steer away from him. This
example illustrates the two levels involved in stereotyping: from the visible char-
acteristics (brown skin, short hair, tall) to the group (black man), and then from the
group to characteristics about individuals in the group (basketball, rap, etc.). Ste-
reotypes have, as this example shows, only a tenuous connection to the truth about
individuals; they require minimal evidence for the wide range of inferences that
they set in motion in our minds—from skin color, hair length, and height she
inferred musical tastes! Because these inferences are to characteristics that we
believe set groups of persons apart from other groups, stereotypes form the very
foundation of our beliefs about groups. But how do we formulate these beliefs, and
how good are they for our purposes?
There has long been a debate in social psychology research about the evidential
basis for stereotypical beliefs and about the functions that stereotypes serve. On the
one hand, it appears that stereotyping is a pervasive and unavoidable activity of
humans, and so the processes underlying it must be adaptive, or at least not mala-
daptive. On the other hand, much injustice can be done to the individual who is
grouped by a stereotype and whose choices or opportunities are limited by that
grouping, especially when the stereotype does not hold in the particular case. So
stereotyping seems very possibly to be an immoral activity. An early, precognitive
theory about stereotyping held that stereotypes harbor a “kernel of truth” in them
about individuals, that stereotypes come out of observations of individuals who
belong to groups, and that inferences are made about the groups’ characteristics, and
these characteristics in turn are applied to other individuals who share the feature
that causes others to group the members together. But it is just in the application of
the stereotype to a new individual member of the group that the hypothesis may fail;
the kernel of truth might be missing entirely in this individual case—this black man
might be listening to Bach on his way to orchestra practice.
The cognitive revolution brought with it the idea that stereotype formation is
a kind of categorization, like our categorization of all our perceptual data. Cognitive
psychologists hold that categorization is a fundamental process of thought that
is essential to efficient information processing.'! Individual thinkers are seen as cog-
70 A Framework for Analysis

nitive misers, whose goal is to simplify experience and frame it according to what is
relevant to our needs and interests. Since we often need split-second decisions to
act smoothly and efficiently in our environment, human cognitive processing has
evolved to provide quick and dirty generalizations that, in a great enough proportion
of our encounters, suffice to allow enough of us to survive and propagate. Greater
precision, it is theorized, would require more time and attention, and would too often
have cost the thinker its life in the primitive survival of the fittest. The cognitive
miser, thus, is an efficient but often wrong generalizer, who cannot be blamed for the
overgeneralizations that he sometimes develops that do not apply, though he could,
perhaps, be trained to generalize more carefully in crucial situations.
The cognitive model of categorization, of which stereotyping is one type, holds
that a category is represented by a prototype, from which there is extensive variation
within the same category, and where the distance from the prototype determines the
fit of the individual within the category. Categories are formed by accentuation of
the similarities within categories and of the differences between categories. Stereo-
types, as categories, are thus biased by this accentuation process. In what direction
are they biased? A pair of important concepts in this connection is the in-group and
the out-group. This distinction in social psychology pre-dates the cognitive revolu-
tion (Allport 1979), and is roughly this: the in-group refers to the group to which the
perceiver belongs and the out-group refers to any groups to which she does not
belong.’ Stereotypes typically favor the in-groups and disfavor the out-groups of
the person holding the stereotype. There are cognitive consequences of in- and
out-group membership well-documented in the psychology literature, in particular,
in-group heterogeneity (the belief that members of the in-group have varied and
individual characteristics), out-group homogeneity (the belief that members of the
out-group are essentially all the same), and out-group polarization (evaluation of
“good” out-groupers more positive than warranted by evidence, while evaluations of
“bad” ones more negative than warranted) (Fiske and Taylor 1991). But typically
also there are common stereotypes that favor majority populations and disfavor
minority ones. One theory closely associated with the cognitive miser model holds
that stereotypes form in response to salient or novel information, and this novel
information is then accentuated to make a group of persons who display this char-
acteristic even more different from other groups (Fiske and Taylor 1991). Such a
theory explains how stereotypes of minorities as very different from majority groups
would form from evidence of small but novel differences.
The cognitive miser model fails to explain some crucial data about stereotype
formation, however. First, it fails to explain the variety of stereotypes applied to the
same persons by the same thinker but in different circumstances. And second, it
fails to explain why the accentuation of differences leads to beliefs that tend to
benefit (materially and psychologically) dominant populations and disfavor domi-
nated ones; if this were a neutral cognitive process one would expect some ste-
reotypes of each group to be positive and some negative. That is, the cognitive miser
model fails to account for motivations that determine which stereotype will apply
under what circumstances.
In some experiments, called “the minimal group” experiments (Oakes et al.
1994), in the early 1970s, Henri Tajfel tried to determine the minimal conditions
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 71

for formation of in-group and out-group solidarity. In these experiments Tajfel and
his colleagues randomly assigned schoolboys into two groups, but led them to be-
lieve that the grouping was based on real (though rather meaningless and trivial)
criteria (e.g., their estimation of number of dots on a screen, their preference for
Klee or Kandinsky paintings). The subjects were allowed no social interaction and
they were not allowed to know even the identities of the others in the group.
Nevertheless, the subjects treated their group membership as an important and
salient fact. When asked to assign money to individuals they tended to assign more
to those in their “own group” even though they were making no assignment of
money to themselves and they knew this. These experiments were taken to show
several things. First, that it takes very little information or basis for identification for
people to establish an in-group/out-group distinction. Second, that discrimination
behavior can be motivated by this minimal in-group/out-group distinction. Third,
the experiments show that no actual facts about the groups (to be accentuated)
have to be involved for positive evaluations of in-groups. Tajfel argued that two
processes are at work here: first, group formation or categorization by social group,
and second, the distinction between in-group and out-group according to one’s
assignment. The first of these is explained by categorization theory applied to the
group. But the second was unique to social psychology, that is, cognitive psychology
could not suggest a process that applied outside the social realm, as well. In order to
explain these results, Tajfel came, over the course of the next decade, to develop a
theory now known as social identity theory (Tajfel 1981).
Categorization theory suggests that people categorize their perceptual data to
bring order to it, to give it meaning by relating it to other information and one’s
interests so that they can efficiently use it. Social categorization into in-group and
out-group is likewise an attempt to order information about other persons, by
connecting it to one’s prior information and one’s interests. How do we characterize
our own interests? Here Tajfel suggested that we categorize ourselves by the in-
groups and out-groups to which we belong, and so put a social ordering on our
world, including our place in it. Thus, he linked the notion of the self with social
categorization in the concept of a social identity, which he defined as “that part of
an individual’s self-concept which derives from his [sic] knowledge of his [sic]
membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional
significance attached to that membership” (Oakes et al. 1994, 82, quoting Tajfel).
Social identity theory postulates that individuals are motivated to develop a
positive social identity, and that this is done by establishing the “positive distinc-
tiveness” of one’s own in-group. People want to believe that they have positive
attributes, and because they identify themselves in part by the social groups that they
consider their in-groups, people want to see their own groups in a positive light. Since
not all groups can easily be seen positively when compared to other groups, people
sometimes have to manipulate their beliefs in order to maintain a positive self-image.
Even members of dominant groups can have self-image problems when they consider
their advantages unwarranted. Several studies have shown how humans create or
alter social stereotypes in order to manage their self-image; here I will discuss two
such studies. An influential study by Curt Hoffman and Nancy Hurst suggests that
stereotypes can be manipulated to rationalize social injustices. In particular, their
72 A Framework for Analysis

research shows that gender stereotypes could arise simply as “explanatory fictions
that rationalize and make sense of the sexual division of labor” (Hoffman and Hurst
1990, 199). The experiments involved telling subjects stories about a fictional planet
where there were two categories of beings, Orinthians and Ackmians, and where
there were two kinds of social roles, homemakers and city workers. The authors
described each of the beings with personality traits, occupations, and species. They
made it so that there was no correlation whatsoever between the personalities, social
roles, and category. In one experiment they made the Orinthians and Ackmians the
same species and in another they made them different species. The authors then
asked the subjects a set of questions, which the authors manipulated as follows: they
always asked about role and category distribution, they sometimes asked for an
explanation of why the Orinthians and Ackmians occupied the social roles that they
did, and they asked for traits specific to each category. Finally, they interviewed the
subjects to see if the subjects could detect the purpose of the experiment. (They
could not.) The authors found that a strikingly large number (72 percent) of the
subjects in the explanation condition attributed the roles to personality differences
and stereotyped the categories by personality differences that reflected stereotypes of
gender differences in personality. (Remember, there were no personality differences.)
In the no explanation condition the subjects were much less likely to stereotype the
categories. They interpret these results as showing that “objective sex differences in
personality are not necessary to the formation of gender stereotypes; the fact of an
unequal role distribution is sufficient” (Hoffman and Hurst 1990, 206). Further, the
studies show that stereotype formation is at least partly mediated by the attempt to
explain or rationalize the category-role correlation. Hence, stereotyping cannot be
seen as an unbiased information-processing phenomenon, but one that is creatively
manipulated by persons to serve their interest in a coherent rationalization of the
social roles and the social groups that perform them.
A pair of studies conducted by Nyla Branscombe and her colleagues suggests that
persons think differently about their social group-related privileges and disadvantages
in order to bolster their social identity or to avoid group-effacing facts, and that this
use of “social creativity strategies” is common to both advantaged and disadvantaged
social groups (Branscombe 1999; Branscombe 1998). In one study Branscombe asked
gender-segregated groups of men and women to write down ways that they had been
privileged, for one set of groups (she calls this “the privilege condition”), or disad-
vantaged, for another set (‘the disadvantage condition”). Their responses were coded
for degree of severity by independent coders. The subjects then were assessed by a
standard self-esteem scale, and by questions that assessed their emotional attachment
to their gender group, their feeling that membership in that group was a positive
experience, their general satisfaction with their lives, and their current mood.
Branscombe found first that men tended to identify trivial ways that they were
disadvantaged (e.g., having to pay for drinks) and serious ways that they were priv-
ileged (e.g., having higher incomes), while the reverse was true for women (e.g.,
having limited freedom of movement because of the threat of sexual assault vs.
having doors opened for them). She also found that thinking about privilege or
disadvantage had significantly different consequences for men and women.
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 73

On all of the well-being measures, thinking about privilege in men resulted in lower
scores than when disadvantage was focused on. Different effects emerged for the
gender comparisons in the two conditions on the personal and group relevant
measures. Thinking about privilege resulted in less pride in and attachment to their
gender group in men compared to women. However, on the personal measures,
thinking about disadvantage resulted in higher personal self-esteem in men com-
pared to women. (Branscombe 1998, 173)

Tajfel recognized the phenomenon of social creativity in interpretation of stereotypes

on the part of disadvantaged groups: they tend to think about disadvantage mainly as
a way of creating positive distinctiveness for their social group and increasing their
identity with it (Tajfel 1978). Branscombe’s experiment points to a correlative social
creativity on the part of the advantaged. Her explanation of men’s lowered mood
when thinking of their privilege is that it is a result of the well-recognized “attri-
bution error” that persons make by explaining their negative outcomes by pointing to
external causes and their positive outcomes by attributing them to internal causes.
So by focusing on only trivial disadvantages they can see women and men as both
having disadvantages and also protect the notion that any success they have is due to
their own personal capacities. If women were to also equate such privileges with
those accorded men, and men’s disadvantages with women’s, then this might rep-
resent the development of a false consciousness. '* In another study, Branscombe and
her colleagues found a similar pattern of social creativity in accounting the advan-
tages and disadvantages from race (Branscombe et al. 1996).
Stereotypes thus serve not only to group the social world, and then to place
oneself in the social order, but also to do so in a way that bolsters the valuation of
one’s self-identity, insofar as that is possible within the given social realities. By
determining alliances and oppositions among in-groups and out-groups, categori-
zation provides the basis of social orientation toward others. Returning now to the
discussion of the desire for recognition, the social cognitive description of this desire
would be that we have the desire to categorize ourselves as members of in-groups
and then to make those groups distinctive, and insofar as possible, positive. Thus,
this psychological theory can explain the desire for recognition as a part of our
cognitive functioning in a social world.
These theories, social categorization theory and self-identity theory, show how
and why persons want to be members of in-groups and formulate stereotypes to
structure the social psychological world in which they interact. We have, thus,
provided an answer to the “why groups?” question. But we have still not answered
the question, “why these groups?” There are actually three questions here: Why did
these groups (as opposed to other groupings) first get started? Why do they continue
as they do? And why do they change when they do? To answer this we must first note
that individuals are not creating these in-group/out-group distinctions in a social
cognitive vacuum, and (unless we subscribe to a creation ex nihilo theory) they never
were. There is no first moment that there were human social groups. Humans have
always been social groupers, if only by tribe or clan. So if we can answer the other two
questions we should be able to theorize how humans came to sort themselves by the
groups that we now find. There are two apparently competing accounts of the
74 A Framework for Analysis

constraints imposed by existing social stereotypes in the social cognitive literature.

One theory is that we learn generalized patterns, called schemas, that are then
virtually fixed, causing counter-instances to be misperceived as conforming instances
of the schema. The other, propounded by Oakes et al. following Tajfel, is that our
categories reflect the reality of social groups, and so, as social groups change, our
stereotypes would change as well. It seems to me that to answer both the continuity
and change questions involves a combination of these theories.
There are a wide variety of stereotypes that individuals learn from their social
environment among which they are normally constrained to choose. One cannot
choose to stereotype women as large, aggressive, socially abrasive persons: First, one
would never think of that (except to come up with an outlandish example for an
academic paper), and second, one would have too hard a time communicating with
others if one made this highly unconventional assumption. Schema theory postu-
lates that we have cognitive structures, called ‘‘schemas,” that are representations of
concepts, that guide our perception, memory, inferential reasoning, and association,
and in turn our behavior (Bem 1981). Schemas are networks of associations that
organize our perceptions by assimilating them to relevant networks of ideas. We
have schemas for persons (our folk psychology), for events (called “‘scripts”), and of
most relevance to stereotypes, role schemas that code our perceptions and associ-
ations for social roles. Role schemas are, thus, one way of cognitively accounting for
social stereotypes. Schema research differs from categorization research in that the
latter is more concerned with the classification of instances and the former with the
application of organized, generic, prior knowledge to the understanding of new
information (Fiske and Taylor 1991). The difference here is that schemas generalize
from specific instances, and so are represented as lists of attributes or associations,
while categories are webs of prototypical and varying instances. As | see it, then,
there is nothing inconsistent about accepting both theories as compatible, but
serving slightly different functions in modeling the cognition of stereotypes. In
particular, role schemas account for the stability of stereotypes and the categori-
zation process for the plasticity and capacity for change in stereotypes.
Schemas frame our perceptions and then code our memories. Recalling the
example of the black man on campus, the perceiver took in a few perceptual details
and the schema for black man was engaged and several inferences were drawn about
the man. In numerous studies it has been shown that were the perceiver to then
learn something directly about the person, say by asking him what he was listening
to, that fact would be much more likely to be remembered if it were consistent with
the schema, that is, if in the example he were listening to gangsta rap (Fiske and
Taylor 1991). Thus schemas code our memories and we have a difficult time with
memories that do not fit the schema. Schemas also carry emotional responses with
them; in the example the perceiver was apprehensive upon judging the object to be
a black man. Although schemas are readily engaged by initial perceptions and are
important to our cognitive and affective functioning, people are clearly able to
disengage their schemas upon the presentation of sufficient counterevidence, under
circumstances in which their decisions matter to them.!°
Sandra Bem has provided the most well-developed account of role schemas in
her theory of gender schemas. On her view, girls and boys learn gender roles as they
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 75

grow up and code these as role schemas for gender. Gender, she claims, is the most
ubiquitous schema we have: “No other dichotomy in human experience appears to
have as many entities linked to it as does the distinction between female and male”
(Bem 1987, 304). Children learn that there are gender appropriate and inappro-
priate attributes, then they apply these to themselves, that is, they identify them-
selves with one gender and take on the appropriate role for that gender. Through
this identification and assimilation the gender schema becomes a self-fulfilling
prophesy for cultural myths about sexual difference. Role schemas are thus learned
through the social environment by assimilation of the self to the existing role
schemas, and reinforced, reified, and justified in the assimilation. Social learning
and reinforcement of role schemas account for the continuity and preservation of
stereotypes over time, and thus account for the fact that women mother and men
do not, for example.
There is a great deal of evidence supporting the idea that gender stereotypes are
socially learned and that they are self-perpetuating. Gender stereotypes are learned
especially early from one’s parents. In an analysis of 172 different studies of parents’
differential socialization of girls and boys, Hugh Lytton and David Romney (1991)
found that parents’ differentially reinforced gender behavior to conform to tradi-
tional stereotypes of female and male behavior, even though there was no other
systematic way in which they differentially socialized their sons and daughters.
There is a large literature about the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes, that is,
about how stereotypical expectations by perceivers and common knowledge of these
expectations cause persons to behave stereotypically. In an experiment by Berna
Skrypnek and Mark Snyder (1982) anonymous male-female pairs bargained over
three tasks, one stereotypically male, one female, and one neutral. In a third of the
pairs the male partner (called “the perceiver”) was told that his partner was male, in
another third female, and in another third the male was not told the sex of the
partner. The female (called “the target”) partner knew the sex of the perceiver and
what he had been told her sex was. The experimenters found that the behavior both
of choosing and bargaining was affected by both the perceiver’s perception and the
target’s knowledge of what the perceiver thought she was. “Targets believed by
perceivers to be male chose tasks relatively feminine in nature [sic], and targets
believed by perceivers to be female chose tasks relatively feminine in nature [sic]”
(Skrypnek and Snyder 1982, 288). Another experiment by Snyder, Elizabeth
Tanke, and Ellen Berscheid (1977) showed how the stereotype-generated attribu-
tions by a perceiver can cause the target to conform her behavior to the stereotype
even if she does not know what stereotype he holds about her. In this experiment
the (again male) perceivers were given controlled but specious information about
their (again female) targets, with whom they then had a ten-minute phone con-
versation. The targets got no information about their partners, including no
information about what information the males had, but the male perceivers were
given snapshots that were purportedly of their partners, but which the experi-
menters had actually carefully chosen to be of either an attractive or unattractive
woman (as perceived by independent coders) independently of the actual attrac-
tiveness or unattractiveness of the target subjects. The hypothesis was that the
stereotypes of attractive women (that they are more sociable, sexually warm, kind,
76 A Framework for Analysis

poised, outgoing) would affect the behavior of both the perceivers and the targets,
in particular, that the behavior of both would tend to confirm the stereotypes. The
data was coded by independent raters of the conversations, who rated the warmth
and enthusiasm of each side of the conversations independently, with no infor-
mation about the experiment or the men and women in them, and it convincingly
corroborated the hypothesis. The authors explained the results by saying, “the
differences in the level of sociability manifested and expressed by the male per-
ceivers may have been a key factor in bringing out the reciprocating patterns of
expression in the target women” (Snyder et al. 1977, 662).
To summarize the results surveyed here, then, people learn stereotypes from
their social environment independently of their fit with the individual attributes
grouped by the stereotypes, people’s behavior induced by stereotypical attributions,
whether true or false in the individual case, guide the behavior of their partners in
interactions to conform to the stereotypes, and individuals’ expectations of others’
stereotypes guide their behavior to conform to stereotypes. Schema theory explains
and predicts these experimental results because it postulates that schemas are
learned in the environment, and individuals identify with them then assimilate their
own behavior to accord with them.
Schema theory can thus account for the stability of stereotypes, but given their
rigid entrenchment and self-fulfilling nature, it is difficult to see how stereotypes would
ever change. Yet clearly they do; we do not stereotype Polish Americans as we used to,
and now there are stereotypes for teenagers who wear baggy pants. Furthermore, the
question of origin of particular groupings still has not been answered. To explain
stereotype origin and change we need to look carefully at the kinds of things that
motivate us to engage particular stereotypes when we do. We have seen how self-
identity theory can explain how a particular stereotype from among a set of available
ones can be contextually motivated, namely, the particular stereotype that is attended
to is the one that makes one’s self-identity most valuable to one under the circum-
stances. There are other sources of motivation that have been overlooked by the
psychologists, namely economic incentives to conform to stereotypes or to cause others
to do so. For the economically dominant group in society, there is a clear motivation to
behave according to the stereotypes for that group, since by doing so one is most likely
to reap the financial rewards that go with status in that group.
There is also, as I shall argue in chapter 5, an economic incentive fon members of
subordinated groups to behave according to the stereotypes for their groups, unless
they can successfully pass as a member of a more dominant group. Social groups
consist partly in incentive structures for persons to behave in particular ways. Take
women in our culture, for instance. There are clear financial incentives for them to
marry, since they then have access to a man’s wealth and income, which, regardless
of race, is on average higher than that of women (Idson and Price 1992), and which,
therefore, they could rationally expect in the individual instance to be higher. Then
if they have children, there are financial incentives for families for women to sub-
ordinate their careers so that their husbands can continue on the fast track in their
higher earning potential career. Racial minorities also have some financial incen-
tives to do what is stereotypical for them. Consider a poor black single woman
with children. The social stereotype that applies is the “welfare mom.” Given her
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 77

situation, there is a financial incentive for her to receive welfare, especially when one
takes into account the cost of alternative and equivalent-quality childcare, and not
to marty, since statistically she is likely to find someone who is unemployed or
underemployed and she would no longer be eligible for welfare. The point is that
social stereotypes reflect the social incentive structures that people ought, rationally,
to react to. Therefore, there is often a material incentive to comply with the behavior
that stereotypes prescribe.
If the material incentives change, then it is only reasonable to assume that the
stereotypes will change to reflect new incentives, though there may be some lag
time. When Irish American men were no longer discriminated against in employ-
ment so that they had greater options than police work, the stereotypes of po-
licemen as Irish faded. Just as there is a material incentive for persons to conform to
their group stereotypés (unless they can pass for a member of a group with higher
status), there are material incentives for persons to apply stereotypes to others
strategically, when they can do it successfully. Consider the firm interviewing ap-
plicants for a position, some of whom are men and some women. Since it is sta-
tistically more likely that women will take reduced hours, maternity leave, and so on
than a man, there is an incentive for firms, at least when hiring workers who are in
their early middle age and who are likely not to stay over an entire career, to
stereotype women and discriminate against them, either by not hiring them or by
offering them lower salaries for equal work. Likewise, there is an incentive for
employers who are hiring in segregated job classifications in which women or racial
minorities predominate, to maintain the segregation and with it the lower wages.
For dominant groups, it is in the workers’ interest to maintain job segregation by
maintaining ugly images of subordinate groups and by engaging in discriminatory
and threatening behavior. Again, these stereotypes begin to change when material
incentives change. As racial minorities entered professional baseball, the stereotype
of the ballplayer changed considerably. Thus, economic theory can be combined
with self-identity theory to explain how stereotypes are strategically employed and
change over time in response to social incentives, both material and psychological.

3. Objections

One objection to any psychological theory that claims to explain all forms of op-
pression is that it does not apply cross-culturally."© We saw this, for example, in
Chodorow’s objections to Freudian psychoanalytic theory or Fanon’s and Willett’s
objections to Hegel’s recognition theory as Eurocentric or androcentric. Might social
cognitive theory be likewise criticized? Just as Chodorow and Willett each tried to
argue that there are psychological universals in their psychological theory that made
it universal, so I want to claim that there are universal cognitive mechanisms that cut
across cultures, and that are enacted in culturally specific ways. Consider human
linguistic ability. All human neonates who are not seriously brain damaged possess it,
yet the particular language they learn to use is culturally determined. Social cognitive
theory, as I have presented it, proposes three such mechanisms: categorization (the
tendency to organize information under categories), in-group out-group formation
78 A Framework for Analysis

and accentuation of difference between those groups, and self-identification with the
in-group. In addition, I have argued that people respond to material incentives and
tend to give more weight to short-term gains than to long-term ones. What evidence
is there that these are universal psychological mechanisms (as opposed to Western or
androcentric or modern constructs)? First, even confining the idea of categorization
to social categories, there exist numerous studies that show that categorization is a
cultural universal, and I could find none that throw doubt on that hypothesis
(Troadec 1995; Pinto 1992; Dhawan et al. 1995; Oddou and Mendenhall 1984;
Miller 1984; Vassiliou and Vassiliou 1974). Second, a great deal of evidence also
exists in the social cognitive literature on the tendency to form in-groups and out-
groups (Han and Park 1995; Tzeng and Jackson 1994; Smith, Whitehead, and
Sussman 1990; Boski 1988; Ward 1985; Oddou and Mendenhall 1984; Vassiliou and
Vassiliou 1974). The very existence and wide acceptance of the concept of the Other
in the phenomenological literature also testifies to this. Third, there is also evidence
for the hypothesis that persons tend to self-identify with their in-group (Dhawan et
al. 1995; Han and Park 1995; de Leon 1993; Turner, Gervai, and Hinde 1993; Boski
1988; Oddou and Mendenhall 1984; Vassiliou and Vassiliou 1974) and somewhat
more mixed evidence of the positive attribution bias toward the in-group (Smith et
al. 1990; Boski 1988) Finally, there is also some evidence for the claim that cross-
culturally, people respond to material incentives and tend to give more weight to
short-term gains than to long-term ones (Felson and Tedeschi, 1993; Ostaszewski
and Green 1995; Wilson et al. 1995). Although what in-groups and out-groups form
and how much persons respond to material incentives or weigh short-term gains over
long ones differs by culture, it is clear from the data that these are universal human
cognitive mechanisms.
Some remarks about the accuracy of stereotypes and the concept of a social
group are in order at this point. Oakes et al. (1994) argue that social groups are real,
and our stereotypes reflect the reality of groups: “a group of individuals might be
stereotyped in terms of a particular social categorization (as Irish, say) not because
this is cognitively economical but because groups are real” (Oakes et al. 1994, 127).
Although I think that they are right to assert that social groups are real, I think that
they are wrong in their understanding of what social groups are. The process of
stereotyping from individual goes like this: We infer from the individual to the
group and then project back to the individual. The data we take in is about the
individual. The group information stored in schemas is then added to that data, and
we project that back to the individual. This is a highly inaccurate process, as my
black man on campus example suggests, as do many studies showing the inaccuracy
of stereotypes in individual cases.'’ Oakes et al. (1994) argue that stereotypes are
accurate because they represent real differences in the statistical facts about the sets
of individuals grouped by the stereotype. But these stereotypes often attribute
properties to individuals shared by only a minuscule proportion of the group
(though it may indeed be greater than the proportion of individuals in another
group who share that attribute). While it is then true that there is a real difference
in the two sets that does not make the stereotype accurate as a property of the
group, much less as projected onto individuals. To put the point concretely, if 1
percent of white women are named Ann, and a much smaller number of women of
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 79

any other race are, then it is true that there is a real difference here between white
women and women of other races, but that does not mean that the group of white
women is legitimately stereotyped as a bunch of Anns nor is it a good bet that any
particular white woman is an Ann.
I do not deny that there are social groups, however. As I argued in chapter 2, social
groups are determined by the set of stereotypes by which we categorize and separate or
assimilate those categories to our own, by the social reinforcement of these stereotypes
by the self-fulfilling nature of role schemas, and just as important, by the socially
structured material incentives that reinforce stereotype fulfilling behavior. Groups are
not sets of persons, they are cognitive processes (stereotypes) and socially structured
material incentives. Thus, we are not seeing directly the group, but our seeing sets in
motion a grouping, and this grouping is objectively real in its effects. This grouping
causes us to have prejudices and discriminate against (or for) persons because of how
we have grouped them, and regardless of the fit between the stereotypical character-
istics of the group and their personal characteristics. Groups are real as constraints on
thought, feeling, and behavior. But stereotypical group attributes often are not true,
not even a kernel of truth, when applied to individuals.

4. The Cyclical Nature of Oppression

It is a common theme in writings on various oppressions that oppression is self-

maintaining: It is characterized as a vicious cycle (Okin 1989), a cage (Frye 1983), a
self-fulfilling prophesy (Snyder et al. 1977), a Nash equilibrium (chapter 5 of this
book), a convention (chapter 6). To make this point clearer in the context of
psychology, let me summarize the ways in which the psychological forces of op-
pression are created by and in turn reinforce the psychology of oppression.
There are three ways in which stereotypes are self-fulfilling, one cognitive, one
behavioral, and one a combination of cognition and behavior that is best charac-
terized as “rational.” I have characterized stereotyping as the fundamental cognitive
process of oppression. Stereotyping is a kind of categorizing applied to the social
realm that is reified in role schemas that are then applied to new data. Stereotyping
is the process of taking data, assimilating it to role schemas by which one codes that
kind of data, shaping it by accentuation of group difference, manipulating the
differences in ways that make the in-group look as good as possible and as different
from the out-group as possible. Given the social reality of existing groups, that is,
existing attributions to persons based on visual characteristics that they share, new
data is more likely to be assimilated to the schemas that currently exist, rather than
creating new ones. This means that stereotypes are very stable cognitive structures.
So stereotypes that bias some groups positively and others negatively will tend to
remain that way even in the face of contrary data.
The second way in which the stereotypes are self-fulfilling is through the psy-
chological harm caused by psychological forces of oppression that affect the behavior
and performance of the oppressed. This means that persons are victimized, degraded,
humiliated, and discriminated against because of the stereotypes that characterize the
social group in which they are categorized. Victims of the forces of psychological
80 A Framework for Analysis

oppression may suffer from feelings of inferiority, shame, hopelessness, and the like,
making them less well-equipped to compete equally with their oppressors and in turn
confirming the stereotypes of them as vulnerable, weak, lazy, incompetent, or alter-
natively, savage, violent, and so on. An even more important, though perhaps more
subtle, way that stereotypes harm oppressed groups is through stereotype threat. In
his seminal work on this phenomenon, Claude Steele characterizes stereotype threat as
“a social psychological threat that arises when one is in a situation or doing something
for which a negative stereotype about one’s group applies” (Steele 1997, 614).
Members of oppressed groups often find themselves in such situations when they are in
a position to compete for social goods, such as in schooling, job interviews, or in
competitive occupations. In these situations, they fear being reduced to that negative
stereotype—even if they believe that it does not apply to them. The fear is stronger the
more the person cares about or identifies with the situation, that is, the more the
person wishes to perform well in those situations. Steele has shown in many different
settings and experimental conditions that persons who face stereotype threat will
perform below persons of the same ability level who do not face the stereotype threat
(Spencer, Steele, and Quinn 1999). Furthermore, he has shown that persons who are
initially identified with the situation, such as schooling, or a particular subject matter
or occupation, will tend to disidentify as they become frustrated by their performance
under stereotype threat. This explains, for example, why girls who initially like and are
talented at math often begin to perform worse and eventually decide they no longer
like math, or why African Americans on average perform less well than whites in
school and are more disaffected by it. When many of the more talented members of the
groups underperform because of stereotype threat and subsequently turn away from
the field entirely, the stereotype of the group as not as good in that field is reinforced
and the threat becomes self-fulfilling.
The third way that stereotypes are self-fulfilling is through motivating the
oppressed themselves to accept negative stereotypes and to choose to act in ac-
cordance with them. First, persons are motivated to attach stereotypes to them-
selves in order to create a sense of being a part of an in-group, and to view this in
a positive light. In some cases, though, it is accepting the grouping that is wrong;
I would argue that this is the case with gender, for instance. This is what Marx
thought was wrong with the class system as a whole. Accepting the grouping, which
plays this psychologically fulfilling role of creating a self-identity even when the
group is negatively affected by it, is the phenomenon of false consciousness, which
we can now understand as a kind of cognitive processing. Second, stigma itself can
create a self-protective strategy because the stigmatized can blame their failures on
the stereotypes and prejudices of the dominant group (Crocker and Major 1989).
Finally, once these groupings exist, social psychological incentives arise for persons
to act in accordance with the stereotypes of the group that others assign them to, for
the alternative may well be social isolation.
These three processes together help us to formulate at least the cognitive piece
of the psychological answer to the question that Hobbes’s equality thesis raised for
us. Oppressed persons often acquiesce to and accept their oppression because they come to
believe in the stereotypes that represent their own inferiority, are weakened by those
stereotypes, and even motivated to fulfill them.
 Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression 81

5. Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to provide a foundation in our psychological makeup for
oppression to explain why there are social groups, why particular groups endure, and
how groups change over time. I have argued that oppression is fundamentally driven
by the cognitive process of stereotyping. Stereotyping makes possible the phenomena
of social grouping. It is the cognitive process of categorizing applied to the social
world combined with self-identity formation in the individual, whereby the indi-
vidual orders the social world in a way that best suits her material and psychological
interests within the given constraints. Individuals do not create their stereotypes ex
nihilo. Individuals are constrained in their categorizing by the social groups and
stereotypes that they find in their environment and the role schemas that they learn
and into which they are trained. Finally I have argued that oppressed groups are
motivated to acquiesce in and assimilate these oppressive stereotypes by three kinds
of processes that make oppression a self-maintaining system: cognitive, behavioral,
and rational.
In the following chapters I will argue that oppression originates in material
forces, that is, violence and economic deprivation, but endures by a combination of
material forces and psychological forces, acting on individuals and creating common
knowledge conditions that reinforce stereotypic social groupings and the material
incentive structures in the world. The psychological forces, which I term “psy-
chological forces of oppression,” are primarily affective forces that hurt and weaken
individuals, making them more susceptible to further oppressive harm. But there are
also additional cognitive forces, which create apparently willing victims of oppres-
sion, and which make the breaking of the vicious cycle of oppression that much
more difficult.
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 PART II

FORCES OF OPPRESSION
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 Violence as a Force
of Oppression

orces of oppression harm group members directly and indirectly by reducing social
|aes members’ options relative to otherwise similarly situated members of so-
ciety. Violence is the most forceful and direct way to affect persons’ options. In this
chapter I will argue that violence is and has always been a crucial component in the
origin and maintenance of oppression. In the previous chapter we saw how humans
are cognitively wired and motivated to form groupings of persons. One of the key ways
that these group boundaries are enforced and differences are maintained is through
violence. Oppressor or privileged groups construct and then maintain their advan-
tages and privileges in part through violence or the threat of violence. Violence
directed against oppressed groups disables and impoverishes them, while enriching or
empowering the oppressor or the indirectly privileged. Although oppression has se-
rious psychological effects and can be effected in part psychologically, oppression does
not occur or continue without some ongoing material forces, by which I mean three
kinds of things: violence, economic deprivation, or the credible threat of either of
these. In this chapter I explore how violence and the threat of violence constrain the
actions of groups, harming the victims and benefiting the correlative privileged social
groups.
One of the motivating puzzles of this study is what I have called the endurance
question: why or how does oppression endure through generations. This is a par-
ticularly vexing issue when it comes to the mainly one-sided violence that is a part of
oppressive situations. It may seem that violence can always be answered by violence,
and if there is enough violent reaction on the part of the oppressed, the oppressor will
finally give in for the sake of peace. Their oppressive privileges, after all, come over
and above what they could gain themselves in a situation in which they are either at
peace with or living apart from the opposing group. Thus, violence in one way may
seem to be an obvious way for one group to dominate another, and yet it is puzzling
how dominance can be maintained through violence on a long-term basis. Let us call
this the puzzle of enduring violence: how can largely one-sided violence continue for
generations?

85
86 Forces of Oppression

This puzzle is related to a second puzzle that will be explored in this chapter.
Sometimes the open show of violence is itself a powerful tool of oppression, while in
other cases violence has to be hidden under an ideological cloak. Surprising though
it may sound, violence can also be quite invisible in the wider world, as it often is in
the case of violence against women. In the case of women, in particular, violence
often happens surreptitiously. It is diffuse, and often literally hidden enough to
appear unsystematic, and yet it is widespread and recognizable enough to discipline
women to stay within what is normatively termed their natural place. I will call this
the puzzle of hidden violence: how can violence be invisible?
Some might argue against my thesis of the necessity of material force that
(middle class, white, first world, able-bodied) women are oppressed only psycho-
logically, for example. In this chapter I will take pains to dispute this claim con-
cerning women because it stands as the most difficult test of my thesis of the
necessity of material force. I will argue first that women as a group are oppressed
materially through violence. Second, and more importantly, I will argue that there is
a credible, psychologically effective threat of greater harm that is transmitted by the
obvious material harm that they do suffer. Women are perhaps the original victims
of oppressive violence, and suffer ongoing violence as a part of their ongoing op-
pression. Violence or the threat of violence work to maintain an effective prison
around the oppressed. In some cases that violence is quite openly practiced, while in
others it is covert. And this pattern, I shall argue in the following chapters, is typical
in other cases of oppression: economic deprivation and fear of violence combine to
create and maintain the psychological harms of oppression.

1. Defining Violence

By “violence” I mean to denote actions intended to physically harm a person or

persons through application of physical force. This use of the term is more restrictive
than some have argued for. I restrict the term because | think it is important to have
a separate term for the harm inflicted by forceful, physical violence as opposed to
what I shall term “nonviolent” economic deprivation (e.g., through wage slavery), or
the “nonviolent” infliction of psychological harm (e.g., through degrading images of
one’s social group members), for two reasons. First, we need to separate these ca-
tegories of harm if we are to have a nuanced account of oppression that covers the
many different cases we have discovered and might yet uncover. For example, when
poorly paid working men toil for subsistence wages all day, then come home and beat
their wives, there are two separable kinds of oppressive forces at work on two groups:
the working men and the women. It does no social good nor does it reveal more
reality to conflate the economic with the violent. Second, violence harms in unique
ways and requires unique means of resistance to counteract it. |do not mean to ar-
gue or imply that economic deprivation or psychological torture is less harmful than
violence in my more restricted sense of the term. Whether it is legitimate to separate
these forms of harm depends not on some metaphysical truth of the matter of
whether “homelessness is violence,” or some similar issue, but rather on whether the
kinds of harms require different causal analyses, and whether they require different
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 87

strategies of resistance and confrontation. The definition of violence I shall offer is

primarily descriptive, not normative. It aims to say what violence is, and not to
assume a normative analysis of violence or any particular type of action.
Violence connotes first a particularly egregious and immediate harm, damage,
or abuse. Second, it connotes harm that comes about in a particular way, namely
forcefully, quickly, intensely. One of the Latin roots of the term is violentus, meaning
forcible or vehement (Wade 1971). Although violence is sometimes used to talk
about very forceful, physical events in which humans are not involved, as in “the
storm lashed the shore with great violence,” I consider these to be metaphorical or
peripheral uses of the term. Third, to say that someone inflicts “violence” is to say
that there was an intention to inflict some forceful harm. A car accident, while
sometimes said to be violent in effect, does not usually lead to the responsible party
being called “violent.” In those cases where the responsible party is accused of
violence it is because she or he used the car as a weapon intentionally to apply force;
that is to say, it was neither an accident nor a case of culpable negligence. I define
violence, then, as the intentional, forceful infliction of physical harm or abuse on one or
more persons or their material or animal possessions.
There are several additional objections that might be proposed to this definition.
First, one might object that it does not include enough. What about non-forceful
inflictions of physical harm or abuse? Imagine a case of poisoning without the use of
any force to get the victim to consume it. Suppose Mary puts a completely tasteless
but inevitably fatal poison in Sam’s drink, causing Sam’s death. With most poisons
there is an application of force at some point in the process of the poison’s deadly
work. If the poison acts by destroying the victim’s guts, causing pain and agony, then
this case would be a case of intentional, forceful infliction of harm. Would we then
have to say that forced starvation should be termed “violence,” since starvation is
such a painful, forceful harm? I admit that starvation is a hard case; in some cases |
would say yes, but in others, no. While the force criterion is met, what about the
intent criterion? It depends on the scope of the intent of the agent imposing the
starvation and the method by which it is imposed. Suppose one person causes
another to starve by forcefully preventing the starving person from obtaining food. In
that case there is an intentional, forceful infliction of harm and my definition would
classify it as violence. Someone may be starved through neglect, though. In that case,
if there is an intent to impose starvation, a forceful kind of harm, then it is only if
someone is starved with the intent to starve that it would be termed violence. If
the starvation occurs through neglect, no matter how culpable, but without intent to
starve, then such a starving, however tragic or horrible, is not violence. Returning to
the poison case, suppose it works quietly, putting the victim into a gentle dreamy
sleep before stopping the heart and bringing death. Then calling this a case of
nonviolent poisoning seems warranted, and my definition would so classify it.
The second objection is that this definition includes too much by allowing cases
of forceful abuse or damage of property to be counted as violence. Again, I would
claim that this accords well with our common use of the term. To say that “she
reacted violently” would be a good description of someone smashing up some dishes
or throwing a hammer at the television set, even if this did no harm to any per-
son’s body. However, the legal use of “violent crime” includes only crimes against
88 Forces of Oppression

people’s bodies and not their property (Dobrin 1996). This usage is primarily nor-
mative, though, and I am giving a descriptive account of the term. The purpose of
defining the term this way in a legal context is to distinguish crimes against persons
from crimes against property. While in a legal context this may be warranted, in the
context of analyzing oppression I think it is not. The descriptive account concerns
how something is done, rather than the disapprobation that accrues to the action.
More importantly, it makes sense to include forceful abuse of property as a kind of
violence because forceful abuse of one’s property, especially of animals, portends or
threatens forceful abuse of one’s person. It threatens the victim through the show of
force, and if aimed at members of a particular social group because of their mem-
bership, it transmits that threat to the other members of the group. Furthermore,
forceful abuse of property escalates the cost of resistance techniques that potential
victims must apply. One must either respond with violence or risk injury in re-
sponding nonviolently. While I do not want to argue that such intuitions about the
term are definitive for how “violence” must be used, I do maintain that they are
reasonable; intuitions about its use do not undermine my case for a restrictive use of
the term “violence.”
One consequence of my definition is that violence is not necessarily unjustified.
Thus, it makes sense to ask if the use of violence was justified in any particular case,
which I take to be a good aspect of the definition. It also allows us to speak of state-
sponsored use of force as violence without first asking whether the state is a legiti-
mate authority and whether, in the particular case at hand, the use of force was legal
and justified. Further, of all the cases of unjustified violence, not all of them are
oppressive. Oppression, recall, is a socially systematic, undeserved harm suffered by
individuals, consequent on their social group membership. For violence to be a force
of oppression, then, it has to be a part of the cause of the systematic, undeserved harm
of some social group, from which another social group benefits, and which is
transmitted through the systematic constraints that make up the social groups.
There are varying kinds and levels of violence that differ with respect to the
degree and manner in which they reinforce oppression. First, we must distinguish
random violence from systematic violence. Truly random violence is violence aimed
at no particular social group and is therefore not a force of oppression. It is im-
portant, though, to note that calling an act of violence a “random” act is a theo-
retical move that might be challenged in particular cases. Domestic violence, for
instance, has always been treated in the law, and until recently, by society, as a kind
of random violence, though through feminist analyses we are coming to see it as
systematic violence against women. Violence is systematic when its victims are a
social group, or in other words, grouped by an institutionally structured set of
incentives. Thus, systematic violence is part of a pattern of harms that dispropor-
tionately affect a particular social group. To say that some violence is systematic, or
is part of a pattern of harms disproportionately affecting a particular social group, is
not to say that the pattern itself is intentional on any person’s part, though it may
be. It is important to consider the effect and not the intention here because what
matters in considering how violence constructs oppression is how it constrains social
groups. Constraints are transmitted through the perceptions of the people who
would make up the putative group. Thus, it is the perceptions of the affected, not
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 89

Violence

Random Systematic

Intragroup Subordinate Non—State-sponsored State-sponsored War between

resistance by dominant against against independent
subordinate groups subordinate groups nations

L___potentiatty oppressive viclened =a)

FIGURE 4.1

the intentions of the violent persons, that matter for determining whether the
violence is systematic.
Systematic violence itself has to be divided into five different kinds: war be-
tween independent, sovereign nations, state-sponsored violence against subordinate
groups in society, non-state-sponsored violence by dominant groups against sub-
ordinate groups, violence by subordinate groups aimed at dominant groups, and
intragroup violence! (see fig. 4.1).
The last two of these do not result in harms that can be classified as oppression
(though they may be caused by oppression) ,”so I leave them out of this discussion. War
between sovereign nations may be oppressive or not, depending on whether the war is
to prevent gross injustice in the attacked nation or for some oppressive advantage of
the aggressor nation. Two national groups constitute two social groups, and one can,
for its own benefit, harm the other. Clearly war is a systematic way of harming another
social group. If, for instance, a larger or more powerful nation wages an unjustified war
of aggression to subjugate, annex, or colonize a smaller or demonstrably weaker nation,
then the war is oppressive, since it would then satisfy the coercion condition.? An
example of this kind of war would be the many wars waged in the struggles of European
states to install colonial rule in Africa—the wars against the Zulus in South Africa
waged by British and Dutch-Afrikaner forces, for example. State-sponsored violence
against subordinate groups describes political repression of various kinds, be it the
maintenance of colonial rule by an imperial power over an indigenous people (such as
the reign of the French over the Algerians), terror-enforced rule of a military dicta-
torship over their own people (such as Pinochet’s rule in Chile), or operations by the
state internal security forces to quell dissent within a nominally democratic regime
(such as law enforcement’s violent actions against the Freedom Movement during the
Civil Rights era in the United States). These are cases of oppression, where the state is
an oppressor group and the victims of the violence are the oppressed. These cases tend
to be clear and obvious cases of oppression. They are taken by many to be the typical
cases of oppression. They are also typically (but not always) relatively short-lived. For
such blatant, violent oppression requires great energy and commitment to sustain, yet
at the same time energizes the forces of resistance against it.
The final category of systematic violence, that aimed at a subordinate group's
members by members of a dominant group, is the one that most often leads to long-
standing, ongoing oppression. This includes violence against women, against gays
and lesbians, and racial violence. The reason that this tends to be long-standing, I
go Forces of Oppression

shall maintain, is that it is more easily hidden under an ideological cloak that appears
to justify the violence. One ambiguity of this category’s description concerns the
word “aimed”—what is the intent behind the violence in this case of systematic
violence? As I have argued, there need not be a conscious intent to maintain
oppression, so long as it serves that function. To assess blame, of course, we would
want to assess the conscious intent of oppressors. But the question of blame is
secondary to the questions of whether and how oppression is maintained. Although
for an event to count as violence it must involve intentional physical force, it only
need be intended to be forceful and harmful to be a kind of violence. For it to be part
of systematic violence, on the other hand, the violent event must be part of a pattern
of harms against a particular social group. But that only requires the effect to be part
of the pattern. To say that some violence is systematic is to say, then, that the effects
of the violence are part of a pattern of violence against members of that group.
One of the insidious aspects of systematic violence is that it affects more than
the immediate victim(s) of the force. Who exactly are the victims of violence? The
key to fully understanding how powerful yet invisible violence can be as a force of
oppression is to see that not only are those who are directly injured victims but also
those who see themselves as sharing, or know that others see themselves as sharing,
the characteristics that motivated the violence. In other words, all members of
social groups are harmed when some of their members suffer violence motivated by
their group membership. For, as I shall argue, they suffer from the threat of violence.

2. Threats and Being Threatened

One effect of violence is that it portends future violence. That is, it implies for both
the victim and the perpetrator a dangerous situation in which more violence can be
expected. The victim fears further attack, and the perpetrator fears retaliation or
becoming a victim of some further perpetrator. The fear is more palpable in the
presence of an explicit threat. To threaten is a four-place relation that relates two
subjects, a and b, a set of conditions, c,,..., c, and a state of affairs, S. To say that a
threatens b with S under c,,..., C, means that a implies that a will see to it that x
happens if conditions c,,..., C, come about, and b understands the implication. An
explicit threat exists when a makes his threat to see to it that S under conditions
C1)+++» Cy Verbally or through a well-understood conventional sign: “if you don’t give
me your money, I will shoot you.” Threats may also be implicit, when a signals in a less
clear-cut or veiled way: a bully says to another child on the playground, “got any
money?”
A social threat situation is a common belief that members of group A frequently
threaten violence or perpetrate violence on members of group B. In such a case we
can say that members of A pose a threat to members of B. Oppression usually
involves a social threat situation in which members of the dominant group pose a
threat to the oppressed group. Sometimes threat situations go both ways, either in
reality or in fantasy. Although individual women may threaten individual men,
between women and men as groups, it goes only one way. Men (as a group) pose a
threat to women (as a group).* Social threat situations can be explicit or tacit. An
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 91

example of an explicit social threat situation is colonial oppression, where the

colonial power is an invading force that keeps its power by force of arms, though
with an outward appearance of order and peace when there is no open resistance.
Social threat situations keep their victims on edge and prevent them from being
able to forget that violence is imminent. Hobbes names situations in which there is
no security against violence “war”: “For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a
shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the
nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto
during all the time there is not assurance to the contrary” (Hobbes 1985, ch.13). A
social threat situation is tacit when there is a social threat situation that is never
spaken about as such, but nevertheless is real in the sense that persons plan and act
based on the assumption that that social threat situation exists. Since tacit threats
so constrain persons’ behaviors, whether a threat is tacit or explicit does not matter
for deciding whether it is a force of oppression. But discovering or presenting
evidence of tacit threats is clearly more difficult than doing so for explicit ones. One
type of evidence of a tacit threat is statistical evidence that a group acts in a more
constrained or less beneficial way. Such evidence is not unimpeachable, as it might
be claimed that the group contains members who happen to prefer acting that
way regardless of any outside force or threat. It might be claimed that women like to
stay indoors because they are timid, because they do not like uncomfortable
weather, or because they feel it is impious to go outdoors rather than that they stay
indoors because they face a tacit threat of violence if they go out. Such excuses deny
my basic assumption of equality that, absent oppression, persons’ preferences and
character traits would be widely and roughly randomly spread across society, rather
than clustered in (nonvoluntary) social groups. The second, that differing religious
standards of behavior would apply to different groups, is more likely the effect of
oppression rather than a sincere understanding of God's will. Both types of re-
sponses are countered by the claim that these preferences and behavior standards
are endogenously caused by oppression. That is, the tacit threat of violence may
have caused women to prefer to behave as if they do not like to go out or to believe
that going out is impious. Another type of evidence for a social threat situation
comes from direct expressions of fear. This evidence can also be challenged on the
grounds that the group that expressed the fear is seeking some unwarranted stra-
tegic advantage by doing so. While it is no doubt true that persons will seek
advantages from whatever situation they find themselves in, the existence of sta-
tistical evidence of systematic suboptimal behavior should be considered prima facie
evidence that a social threat situation exists in fact.
There are two more important pairs of distinctions to draw between kinds of
threats and threat situations. Threats may be objective or subjective. A threat is
objective when there is good objective reason to believe that a will follow through
on the threat under the specified conditions, and it is subjective when it is believed
by 6 that a will follow through. A social threat situation is objective when it is
objectively true that members of A often threaten members of B, and subjective
when members of B believe that members of A often threaten them. Finally, threats
may be credible, incredible, or ineffective. A threat is credible when it is both
objective and subjective, incredible if not objective, and ineffective if not subjective.
92 Forces of Oppression

I shall argue that the social threat situation of violence by men against women
is tacit but credible. Tacit social threat situations are difficult to recognize precisely
because they are not explicitly acknowledged by the community. It is this combi-
nation of tacitness and credibility that makes the oppression of women through
threat of violence by men so difficult to see. To see why it is effective, though, we
need first to look briefly at the effects of violence.

3. Effects of Violence: Trauma and Material Loss

The understanding of the psychological effects of violence has undergone a paradigm

change in the past two decades with the acceptance and theorization of the concept
of trauma and the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diag-
nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to the psychological
account of trauma, PTSD is consequent on an event that involves “death or serious
injury, or threat to one’s physical integrity,” or witnessing such an event, or learning
that a family member or close friend has experienced such an event.> Trauma is a
psychological state involving a more or less constant feeling of powerlessness and fear
for personal, familial, or community security (Brison 2002). Violence is the paradigm
case of a traumatic event. PTSD is understood primarily as a disorder that is con-
sequent on a traumatic event. Unfortunately, this definition is only partially helpful
for an understanding of the psychological sufferings of persons subjected to sys-
tematic violence. Systematic violence is ever-present and when consequent on an
involuntary attribute, inescapable. The fact that it is not random maintains the ever-
present credible threat of further violence (Becker 1995).°
PTSD exhibits a variety of possible symptoms including depression, amnesia,
insomnia, irritability, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilance, or an exaggerated
startle response. There are also less dramatic, but still seriously damaging, psycho-
logical effects of systematic violence. Persons who are subjected to violence suffer
shame and loss of self-esteem. And these losses often make persons unable to cope
effectively in society. In effect, they are victimized thrice: once by the violence, then
again by the loss of self-worth that one feels when one has been dominated, hu-
miliated, and violated, and then again by the loss of social ties and the ability to
cope that these psychological states often bring about. Systematic violence creates
even worse problems in these latter two regards, and particularly if the violence is
consequent on some involuntary, permanent attribute, such as race or gender or
sexual orientation.’
Material losses consequent on systematic violence may seem even more evident
than psychological ones. When persons are traumatized, injured, or killed, they
cannot work,® and so cannot acquire the property that they otherwise could. Caring
for their injuries or conducting their funerals are costs that the community must
bear. Property is sometimes directly damaged and lost by violence. But these losses
are not just individual losses when the victim is a member of an oppressed social
group. More insidious, systematic losses accumulate disadvantage to the social
group over long periods of time. One important aspect of oppression is that the
oppressed social group members typically lack wealth relative to members of more
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 93

advantaged groups. Wealth opens many opportunities and choices for persons. It
allows one to own a home, send a child to college, start a business, run for political
office, survive the loss of a job, and leave something for the next generation to
build on. The major source of wealth is inheritance (Darity 2000, B18).? Hence,
victims of violence are less likely to be able to pass on wealth to the next generation.
If a social group is subject to systematic violence, then their descendants are likely
to be less wealthy than and disadvantaged compared to the descendants of groups
not subject to such violence.!° Lack of collective wealth is a key feature of the main-
tenance of the oppression of African Americans, and this fact is directly related to
the systematic violence—from Ku Klux Klan terror that destroyed and uprooted
families and communities to inner city riots that destroy buildings and businesses—
that they have faced in American society.
I have argued that violence is a force of oppression through its immediate
damage and psychological harm, its negative consequences for income and long-term
wealth of its victims, and through its terrorizing and income and wealth effects on
other members of the social group. Violence thus increases the differences between
oppressed and privileged social groups by making the victims of trauma less able to
cope with everyday challenges and less able to compete for social resources. In the
next section I examine how violence and the threat of violence are pervasive forces
of oppression of women. Through a detailed analysis of this case of violent oppressive
force, I show how violence can more generally be seen as a powerful force of op-
pression, closely interconnected with the other two kinds of forces, namely economic
and psychological forces.

4. Violence against Women

That human males are on average larger, stronger, and faster than human females is
neither controversial nor contrived. What those facts should or must mean for our
social institutions, however, is both constructed and actively contested. I shall argue
that through the systematic application of violent force against their nearest female
relatives, human males have forged institutions that make them dominant over the
females. Violence by men against women has expanded to violence against women
who are strangers. In the process of dominating and responding to this violent
domination, males have become men and females women. Violence, in other words,
is the foundation on which gender, the hierarchical organization of human males
over females, rests.

4.1. Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence

I connect these two forms of violence against women together because they are
perhaps the most powerful forces of the oppression of women. Yet in the case of
women, the puzzle of hidden violence is particularly pressing. Despite the fact that
sexual assault and domestic violence are clear instances of violence, women in our
society are not seen as oppressed violently. One might wonder whether rape and
domestic violence should be separated because rape can be committed by a stranger
94 Forces of Oppression

while domestic violence, by definition, is committed by intimates. But I have argued

that what makes a force of oppression forceful and oppressive is its impact on the
victims, the social group that is oppressed by it. Thus, sexual assault and domestic
violence, which are both kinds of violent assault on women because they are women
(so I shall argue), belong together in this analysis of oppression. In this section I will
concentrate on the incidence of sexual assault and rape in the United States, though
this is not to deny that sexual assault and rape are equally or more prevalent in other
societies.!!
Domestic violence against women is a prevalent phenomenon. By the most
conservative estimate, each year one million women in the United States suffer
nonfatal violence by an intimate, but other studies estimate up to four million, and
one in three adult women suffer at least one physical assault by their partner at
some point in their lives. Female homicide victims are more than twice as likely to
have been killed by an intimate partner than are male homicide victims. While 28
percent of the violence against women is perpetrated by intimates, only 5 percent of
that against men is perpetrated by intimates.!? Much of the violence by women
against men is in self-defense or after the man has initiated violence, although in
many communities defensive actions by battered women are now considered ar-
testable offenses. Rape and sexual assault are even more predominately crimes by
men against women. In 2001 over 226,000 rapes and sexual assaults were reported
committed in the United States, and 92.8 percent of these were committed by men.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, though, that vastly under-
estimates the actual number of rapes and sexual assaults, since they estimate that
women report only 38 percent of their rape and sexual assault victimizations.?
Thus, a corrected figure for the rapes and sexual assaults in 2001 in the United
States would be around 590,000. To put this in perspective, this is just under half as
many as the number of young women who graduate from high school each year in
the United States, and it is well over twice the number of yearly American casu-
alties (killed and wounded) in the Vietnam War.'*
Violence against women is pervasive, and thus the question of why it is so long-
standing arises. Why does it not generate the sympathy from outsiders needed to
end it, as happens with genocide or wars? Why does it not generate the violent
reaction from the victims themselves as has happened in other cases that we have
examined? Part of the explanation is that violence against women is covert, neither
recognized as a systematic war against women by the victims nor by those who
would be sympathetic. There are four reasons that violence against women is
particularly covert. First, women are often not seen as constituting a social group,
and if that were true they could not constitute the victims of systematic violence. It
is often pointed out that women are not a culture but cut across all cultures, and
that they suffer sexual assault and domestic violence mainly at the hands of others
in their own cultures. As I argued in chapter 2, women do constitute a social group.
The statistics about rape are evidence of this, for women face a serious threat of
rape, and men do not. Thus, there is a systematic difference in the consequences of
their being recognized as women. Yet, and this is the second reason, this difference
is not taken to be a social one but rather a natural one, and so their vulnerability to
rape is taken to be a result of natural forces, not systematic violent ones. This appeal
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 95

to the naturalness of violence against women sets the case of women’s oppression
apart from violence against religious, sexual, and even racial minorities. Third,
women belong to different groups that suffer from many different forms of the types
of violence I have discussed, while most other groups suffer from one or just a few
very blatant examples on which media, governments, and researchers tend to focus.
So it is sometimes forgotten that while female Afghanis (but not female Chinese)
suffered under the oppressive and violent rule of the Taliban, and female Palesti-
nians (but not female Americans) suffer from the violent destruction of their homes
by Israelis, and lesbians (but not heterosexual females) are subject to gay bashing
assaults, all women suffer under the threat of sexual assault and domestic violence.
That is to say, they are targeted for these types of violence because they are women.
Fourth, the situation of women is, in many countries of the world, and to a greater
extent than most other groups, one of terror under the threat of violence. That is,
the threat of violence keeps women within the place that is deemed socially ac-
ceptable and natural by their communities. Thus, women stay indoors, they appease
their would-be attackers, they submit to indignities or demands to avoid overt
violence.
The threat of these kinds of violence limits women’s mobility. Women, as I
noted in chapter 3, think of this as a serious disadvantage to being women, even if
they do not generally think of themselves as oppressed. They feel fear, however
subtly it affects their behavior, in any place where they might be victims of this, that
is, anywhere where there might be men. Furthermore, they feel vulnerable, physi-
cally weaker than and so inferior to, men. This further reinforces stereotypes about
women’s weakness and vulnerability, and, ironically, their need for protection by
men. And this stereotype, once assimilated to the self-concept of individual women
as a positive distinctive sign of feminine grace, actually makes women weaker than
men. Because stereotypes are normative prescriptions for behavior, men assimilate
their stereotypes for aggression and violence and women for passivity and weakness.
Although many men are not violent, they nonetheless benefit from the systematic
subordination of women. Even if they do not use violence, it is impossible for them
to refuse their male privileges in every situation. They are able to exploit women
economically and sexually, and they gain materially from these abilities vis-a-vis
otherwise similarly situated women. All women act under the shadow of a social
threat situation, which is, statistically, credible yet tacit. It changes our behavior; it
makes us acquiesce to limitations on our liberty that men do not have; it alters our
sense of what is possible.
Men’s violence against women has a variety of motivations and causes.
Sometimes it may not seem like part of a systematic application of force, although it
is by the effect on the victim group, not the motivation of the perpetrators, that this
must be judged. It is clear, however, that there are many cases of violence against
women motivated by the intention to dominate women. These attacks may be most
furious in areas where men have traditionally held a monopoly on the use of force.
One example of this is the sexual harassment and rape of women soldiers by male
soldiers. Recent reports show that at least sixty-three U.S. women soldiers were
raped by their fellow soldiers in Iraq in the first year of the war (Hardy and Moffeit
2004). This is despite the fact that women soldiers are armed and at least theo-
96 Forces of Oppression

retically have access to military courts. Since prostitutes would surely involve far less
risk to the soldiers, there must be some nonsexual incentive to target women
soldiers. The infamous Tailhook scandal, in which at least twenty-six women, four-
teen of them officers, were sexually assaulted at a convention of naval aviators
revealed that not only women were not were not welcome among the ranks, but the
men of the navy would go to great lengths to protect their fellow male officers, even
when they had personal and professional relationships with the assaulted women
(Salholz and Waller 1991, 40). In another nearly male only preserve, the first
woman to score points in a Division I (the most competitive) NCAA football game,
Katie Hnida, quit her first Division I team, the University of Colorado, after she was
raped by a teammate (“Female Kicker” 2004, D6). Examples like these show that
men as a group become particularly protective of their superior capacity and pro-
pensity to use violence. Were women to become equally adept at violence, the
enforcement of women’s subordinate status would be in jeopardy.
The argument that sexual assault and domestic violence are systematic vio-
lence against women can be summarized as follows: First, these acts are prevalent,
not rare. Second, they are almost always by men against women. Third, men and
women form social groups that are in positions of dominance and subordination,”
and these relations are strengthened by acts of sexual assault end domestic violence.
Sexual assault and domestic violence reinforce the stereotype of women as weak
and vulnerable, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fourth, laws and enforcement
practices concerning these acts are systematically different from analogous acts,
which do not almost always involve men as perpetrators and women as victims.
Sexual assault and domestic violence are not considered just two other forms of
assault like beating someone with a bottle or with a fist are just two different ways of
assaulting someone. Sexual assault and domestic violence are treated by police and
prosecutors quite differently from other crimes in that the “provocation” of the
crime by the victim determines the degree to which they pursue prosecution, and
this systematically differentiates them from other violent crimes. What is significant
about this is that the systematic difference is determined by the gender of the
victim. Fifth, because they put women in a social threat situation, sexual assault and
domestic violence harm all women. Violence against women, in its many forms, is
thus a large part of the explanation of how women are oppressed, and why we have
not succeeded in ending the longest standing case of oppression on the planet.

4.2. Sexual Slavery and Prostitution

Another important form of violence against women is the violence applied in the
trafficking of women, either as unpaid sexual slaves or as prostitutes. A special case of
illegal slavery is the case of slaves held for sexual exploitation. It is a special case in
several senses. First, for the fact that nearly all such slaves are females. Second, for
the fact that it is perhaps especially harmful to its victims, violating them at such a
basic physical and psychic level, and often beginning when they are only children.
The harms of sexual slavery are also distributed broadly throughout society through
the transmission of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Third, for the
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 97

worldwide nature of the phenomenon—where most other forms of slavery are special
cases for one or another industry here and there, throughout the entire world there
are female sexual slaves. When it comes to sexual slavery, it is not only an economic
benefit for the owners of the brothels who hold them and the participants in the
travel industry who supply the customers, but it is also a part of the domination of
women by men throughout the world.
The extent of the trafficking in women today is utterly shocking to most people
who are not directly connected to it. As we shall see with nonsexual slavery, the
slaves tend to come from the ranks of the desperately poor, and as national fortunes
change, so do the numbers of women who are trafficked into and out of those
countries. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the poorest of the former socialist
republics have become prime locations for gangsters posing as legitimate business-
men to lure and kidnap women to be sent abroad to brothels. Once out of their
country their passports are stolen and they are without money or support by which
to return home. In similar ways women from Nigeria are trafficked in Italy and other
parts of southern Europe. Japan is a major importer of women from all over Asia,
and the list goes on. There are sexual slaves in nearly every country of the world,
nearly all of them are female, and most of them are young.
Perhaps no situation is more desperate than the girls who are sold into debt
bondage by their families to brothels in Thailand. Girls in Thailand are added
baggage to families there, where in a highly sexist society they will not be able to
earn much wealth or status, and just marrying them off constitutes a major expense
to their families. Because of the highly sexist attitude toward females, in addition to
their low economic value, families find it acceptable to sell their daughters to
brokers for the brothels. There are other means for filling the brothels with sexual
slaves. Sometimes the agents of the brothels lure girls with promises of factory or
domestic work. Some girls who are forced into prostitution are simply kidnapped.
They are then initiated into sex work violently so that they will do anything, even
accept having sex with 15 clients a night, for fear of being beaten or killed. Kevin
Bales writes of children sold to brothels in Thailand,

Violence—their enslavement enforced through rape, beatings, or threats—is al-

ways present. It is a girl’s typical introduction to her new status as a sex slave.
Virtually every girl interviewed repeated the same story: after she was taken to the
brothel or to her first client as a virgin, any resistance or refusal was met with
beatings and rape.... The immediate and forceful application of terror is the first
step in successful enslavement. Within hours of being brought to the brothel, the
girls are in pain and shock. Like other victims of torture, they often go numb,
paralyzed in their minds if not in their bodies. (Bales 1999, 58)

After their violent initiation has taken root, the girls are relatively easy to control,
but they are also unlikely ever to recover, even if they do manage to leave the brothel
without a fatal HIV infection.
Sexual slavery harms the slaves by robbing them of choice, subjecting them to
the most demeaning possible conditions of work in addition to psychological and
physical torture, and finally it leaves most of those who survive the initial brutality
98 Forces of Oppression

with a terminal illness. Although these are the most immediate and horrible of the
harms, sexual slavery is also a part of the oppressive economic domination of women
by men. The existence of prostitution in all its forms lowers the value of wifely
sexual services, and when the prostitutes can be had for a much lower price because
they are slaves, the value of sexual services is lowered even further. In a world
where most women’s market services are also devalued because of oppressive forces,
they are further oppressed when their nonmarket services are undercut, as well.
Sexual slavery is a small but the most violent and brutal part of the global domi-
nation of women by men. The oppression of women cannot be described or ex-
plained by reference to a single aspect or force. In the next chapter I will examine
these economic forces further. Not only are women harmed economically, they are
also harmed psychologically by the existence of the sex trade, and particularly
violently imposed sex trafficking. In chapter 6 I discuss how the objectification of
women through the sex trade harms women. In the context of this chapter it is
sufficient to point out that all women are harmed by sexual slavery, although the
slaves themselves are the violently harmed ones. The beneficiaries of sexual slavery
are not only the brothel owners who make outrageous profits, but also all men, even
those who oppose sexual slavery, because of their continued domination of women.
Violence against women is a force of oppression of women because it harms
women as a group, in addition to its immediate victims, while it preserves the priv-
ileges of men as the dominant gender. This dominance is bought at a price, however,
as men’s propensity to use violence to protect their advantages generally also leads
them to harm, oppress, and kill each other. Where the violence waged by men against
men is typically overt, that against women has been covered by a veil of tradition and
ideology. Yet violence by groups of men against other men is still often not seen as a
part of the oppression of some groups of men. By studying a list of examples of
systematic violence, we can see that there are many cases of oppression that may
appear to be natural or justifiable, but are in fact part of a larger set of interlocking
forces of oppression, just as violence against women is a part of the global oppression
of women.

5. Other Examples of Oppressive Violent Force

Within each of the categories of systematic oppressive violence, there are several
important subcategories to consider. In this section I discuss illustrative examples of
oppressive violence. These examples allow us to see how violence can divide persons
into involuntary groups and initiate oppression as well as enforce it. The explicitness
and severity of violence differs in response to differing intentions of oppressors and
reactions by the oppressed. The examples allow us to see the extent and variety of
oppressive institutions and regimes in the world, answering the question: Who is
oppressed? Recall that in order to argue that a situation is one of oppression, we must
show that there is unjust harm to a social group, definable apart from the oppressive
harm, a benefiting social group, and an institutional structure through which the
oppressive harm is transmitted. With this reminder in place, let us examine some
additional cases of oppressive violence.
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 99

5.1. War between Nations

In the following categorization of oppressive violence, I use the terms nations and
states, following Will Kymlicka (1995), as two distinct concepts. By state I intend
those political entities that are recognized at the time as the ruling federal govern-
ments of some territory. For now anyway, states can be operationally recognized as
those governmental bodies allowed seats in the General Council of the United
Nations. Not all states recognize the existence of all the other states, but for each of
them, many others do recognize them. By nation I intend those separate ethnic
groups with some prima facie right to self-determination (although I will not try to be
more precise here about what constitutes such a prima facie right) (see Wellman
2003). States are all either nations or multinational units, and there exist nations
within states that are sometimes denied their right to self-government. This con-
tradiction causes some important cases of oppression.
Many instances of oppression begin when one nation aggresses against another.
The existence of nation states or national peoples sets the stage for differentiation,
and an aggressive war produces the inequality that benefits the winners and harms
the losers. When the aggression is unjustified and effectively institutes domination,
it becomes a new (or renewed) case of oppression.!®

5.1.1. IDEOLOGICAL WARS OF AGGRESSION

Ideology connotes an illegitimate insinuation of one person’s or group’s ideas on

another. Thus, the term “ideological” is a heavily normatively loaded one. This
normativity cannot be avoided, though, as what is wrong or oppressive about these
wars is not only that the ideas are forced on another, but that they are the ideas of
the aggressor, not shared by the people of the society on whom they are being forced,
and they are ideas that are morally optional. While it must be insisted that all decent
societies treat their people with dignity and respect, there are ways that reasonable
and moral societies can differ on what that entails (Rawls 1993). Ideologues insist on
one of the options to the exclusion of all other (or all) reasonable ones. Ideological
wars of aggression are fought to insinuate that option on unwilling people. Although
there may well be disagreement on whether the conditions are met for a war to be an
ideological war of aggression, once we have identified a war as such, these wars are
clearly cases of oppression. The harm of war is immediate and deep, involving loss of
life, liberty, and property, sometimes in immense proportions. The social group
harmed is the nation aggressed against, the one benefited is the aggressor nation, or
perhaps only its elites, and the institutional structure is the aggressor nation’s military
force and whatever political and economic infrastructure is required to support the
military. Although these are cases of oppression, they are typically not long lasting,
unless the oppression transforms into another sort of oppression, such as colonialism.
Ideological war is an acute form of oppression.
Under the category of ideological wars of aggression J include wars such as the
Crusades, which aimed at converting peoples to other religious views, and more
contemporary examples of ideological conversion such as the Vietnam War that
aimed at curtailing communism. In these cases the aggressor state uses force to
100 Forces of Oppression

coerce another nation to officially sanction either a different religious view or eco-
nomic or legal structure. It differs from the case of colonialism in that the main object
of the aggressor state is not economic but ideological, at least in the first instance. To
charge an aggressor state with waging an ideological war, though, is often met with
opposition. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States has wielded far
and away the greatest military power in the world and is often charged with waging
“imperialist” war, by which the accuser often means that the military action is an
ideological war. Since that description would not be acceptable to a majority of the
U.S. population, though, the U.S. government tries to justify these actions by saying
that either they are self-defense or that they are in the interest of liberating the
people from a government that is oppressive. What about cases of wars where the
intention of the aggressor is to liberate the people of a state from a dictator or a
totalitarian or otherwise oppressive state, that is, to liberate the people from op-
pression by their own government? Should we say that such a war is oppressive?
Some argue that the U.S. war in Vietnam could be considered in this category. But
the resistance of the great majority of the people of Vietnam to the U.S. invasion tells
against this interpretation. There are cases where one of the superpowers of the Cold
War assisted an uprising by a portion of a society against their government, but in
these cases it was never only the superpower that is waging the war. So we could
consider the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan or the U.S.-backed war against the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Both cases count as instances of oppression, since they
were aimed not at bringing about democracy or some oppression-free conditions, but
rather at installing a government that would align itself politically with the sup-
porting country. As I] write this, the United States is waging war on Iraq, a war that
began to oust the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein from power, but now continues
against a seemingly widespread, popular insurgency. Many countries and peoples of
the world regard this as an ideological war of aggression by the United States, but
many others see this as a case of legitimate intervention against a regime in gross
violation of human rights and international arms treaties. We need not decide this
issue here, but the example stands as a case where it can be difficult to distinguish
oppressive ideological war from violent liberation.

5.1.2. COLONIALISM

Colonialism can also be classified as a state of war between nations if we take nation
in Kymlicka’s sense. Colonialism occurs when a nation or set of national or ethnic
groups in a territory is forcibly occupied by a more powerful nation, with the intent of
annexing or occupying the territory and its people for economic gain. Colonial
powers seek to magnify the already existing economic inequality between them and
the colonized nation. While the colonial power is clearly a sovereign nation, the
colonized territory is often unified only by the colonizers’ imaginations at first, and
possibly later by the colonized in their organized acts of resistance. Thus, the United
States came from a set of formerly unconnected territories that joined together to
tesist the colonizing efforts of Great Britain.
There are many examples of colonial oppression in history. Perhaps none is
more brutal than Belgium’s colonial occupation and oppression of the Congo in the
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 101

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. King Leopold II of Belgium discov-
ered that vast sums could be made by using the native people of the Congo as slave
labor to harvest the rubber from their trees. The loss of life was of genocidal
proportions. In his book, King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild estimated that
between 1880 and 1920, which includes but goes somewhat beyond the period of
King Leopold’s rule, the population of Congo fell by half—that is, by approximately
10 million people (Hochschild 1998). Much of this can be attributed to murder, but
also to starvation, disease, and to a plummeting birth rate that resulted from women
being unable or unwilling to bear children under the appalling conditions. Leopold’s
Congo became infamous for one of its methods of brutality inflicted by the soldiers
and by the natives that they had threatened and coerced into cooperating: chop-
ping off the hands of its victims, living and dead.

If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their
allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the
message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each
cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used
to kill someone, not “wasted” in hunting, or worse yet, saved for possible use in a
mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not
from a corpse. (Hochschild 1998, 165)

Colonial occupation has typically proceeded by means of appalling brutality, attempting

to stun or paralyze the colonized people and thereby keep them from rebelling.
Colonialism is generally practiced for the economic benefits it brings to the colonial
power. In the case of the Congo and Belgium, harvesting rubber, which grew naturally
in the Congo brought great riches to Leopold and indirectly to Belgians. Other eco-
nomic benefits that colonial powers have reaped include other natural resources, such
as minerals, gold, gems, ores, but also labor of the native people in the extracting of
these resources and on the farms and in the factories of the colonists. Colonial op-
pression typically ends, then, when the economic benefits are outweighed by economic
losses. One way that colonized people have resisted is through violent resistance, which
costs the colonizers materially both because it disrupts business and because war is
expensive to wage. Another way that colonized people have resisted is through work
stoppages and slowdowns, which eat away at the profits from colonization.
The issue of benefits raises a couple of interesting questions. First, it is sometimes
asserted that the colonized benefit in the long run from some colonial experiences if
the colonized are brought to a more industrialized and modern economic infrastruc-
ture, and left with a modern democratic political system. This kind of claim is most
often made concerning India, which was vastly modernized socially, politically, and
economically by the British colonial experience (D’Souza 2002). But the claim could
also be made on the part of many other former colonies. Might one then argue that
colonialism is not oppressive if it sufficiently benefits the former colony after the
colonial power leaves? The second question is the question of whether neocolonialism
is also a form of oppression. Neocolonialism is said to occur when the values, religion,
political, or economic system of a former colony are still dominated by those of the
former colonizer. Does the fact that some of the ideas, values, or social structures of the
former colonizer remain itself constitute oppression?
102 Forces of Oppression

I believe that answers to both questions must be deduced from the basic
principle that the human individual is morally primary, which informs my analysis of
social groups and oppression in this book. The first question must then be answered
no, that colonialism is not to be considered less or unoppressive because of its
effects on future generations. The British power in India robbed Indians of fun-
damental human rights and did so in the name of British imperialism. Many indi-
vidual Indians thus suffered from the violent repression of the British military might
and others from psychological and economic deprivations, which the British had no
right to inflict on them. They suffered these things because they were Indians. Thus,
they were the victims of oppression, and no future benefits to other Indians will
change that; even if one argued that they would have chosen to invest through
their suffering in their descendants’ fortunes, they were not permitted the dignity to
make that decision for themselves and so were seriously harmed.
The second question introduces more complications. On the one hand, it
might also be answered in the negative: some aspects of neocolonialism are not
forms of oppression for a similar reason. While no one has the right to impose their
values or religious views on others, as colonial powers attempt to do, no one has the
right to demand that others give up their views simply because of the causal origin
of those views either. Now reflection on those origins might give one good reason to
suspect their truth or value for one, but freedom of individual conscience is a basic
human right and is not to be sacrificed for the sake of some putative social good.
Furthermore, to force the victims of colonization to give up their ideals, values, or
religion is to victimize them again. Other aspects of neocolonialism might well carry
on the oppression of colonialism, though. What about capitalism or democracy—
why don’t the rulers of a former colony have the right, possibly even the duty, to
dismantle those in order to return to a pre-colonial state or simply because they
were imposed by the colonial power?
As for democracy, it is simply not plausible to argue that democracy is, in itself,
oppressive, if we define it as the rule of the people. Democracy is, of course, subject to
the problem of the tyranny of the majority. But then it is this tyranny, not the
democracy, which is oppressive. Democracy does not necessarily entail tyranny of the
majority. With regard to capitalism, again ] want to argue that it is not the system in
itself that is oppressive (as it is in the case of slavery or serfdom) but rather the
distribution of wealth that often results, which can be rectified by a redistribution of
wealth.'’ Capitalism is not in itself oppressive because it permits every individual,
regardless of social group membership, to operate as an economic agent in the same
way. However, capitalism allows persons to take advantage of and then magnify
inequalities that exist independently. Suppose that what is left by the colonial power
when it leaves is a capitalist economy with members of the colonial power group, or
their co-opted servants from the native group, still owning substantial interests in the
economy as a result of the colonial oppression, for example, through theft, coercion,
and slavery of the colonized people. Then this is a remnant of the oppression of the
colonial power, and it is clearly unjust. It is a basic principle of law that no one should
gain from their wrongdoing. Thus, anyone who has gained from theft, coercion, or
slavery should be forced to make restitution, to the victims if they are living, or to
some suitable descendant if the victims are not living.'* In the case of stolen natural
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 103

resources, the victim to be restored would be the people of the nation, who, one may
hope, are represented by the postcolonial government. I will expand my argument in
the next chapter, where I will discuss the economics of oppression, that the system of
capitalism itself is not oppressive, though neither is socialism.
Neocolonialism has also been understood in a more general way to include any
domination by a foreign power, even if that foreign power is not a former colonizer.
For example, Stephen Shalom defines neocolonialism as “an alliance between the
leading class or classes of two independent nations which facilitates their ability to
maintain a dominant position over the rest of the population of the weaker of the
two nations” (Shalom1981, xiv, xv; quoted in Blanchard 1996, 7). This is a pri-
marily economic alliance, although it may be in part violently maintained by the
police force of the neocolonized nation with the assistance of the foreign power, and
hence I will take it up in greater detail in the next chapter.

5.1.3. RAPE AS A WEAPON OF WAR

Male soldiers have always considered the raping of women to be part of the spoils of
war to which they are entitled. But rape in war is not always only an individual crime
or a crime simply of men against women. In some wars the raping of the enemy
women has been used by military commanders and civilian leaders as a systematic
weapon of war. The purpose of systematically raping enemy women as a way of wag-
ing war seems to be twofold: first, to generally terrorize and demoralize the enemy
through rape and sexualized torture, and second, to demoralize the combatants by
harming, polluting, or possessing “their” women. The first of these purposes can be
satisfied by any means of torture and would not have to be aimed specifically at
women to carry out its purpose. The latter, however, depends on a background
oppression of women, a situation in which women and their sexual activities are
considered the property of the men of the country to begin with.
In the infamous rape of Nanking, Japanese soldiers carried out massive rape and
torture of Chinese women after the surrender of the city (Chang 2000). There are
no good estimates of the number of rapes that occurred, as the shame and hu-
miliation of the victims kept so many from coming forth to allow a full assessment of
the scope of the crime. Many women committed suicide rather than live with the
aftermath of the rapes. In this case the purpose of or motivation for the rapes is
unclear, however. No group of women or girls was spared: Children, young women,
middle-aged women, and elderly alike were raped. The commanding officers as well
as the enlisted men engaged in multiple rapes. Perhaps the purpose was to terrorize
other Chinese to make subduing the entire population easier. This would explain
why even elderly women and children, who could hardly be sexually appealing to
most young men, would have been targeted.!? The effect was indeed to terrorize
and demoralize the Chinese population.
The more recent case of the rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbian soldiers in
the Bosnia-Herzegovina War illustrates both purposes of systematic rape as a weapon
of war. This was a war in which one national-ethnic group, the Serbian Christians,
sought to chase away another, the ethnic Bosnian Muslims, with whom they had
shared that part of the former Yugoslavia for generations, through a process that came
104 Forces of Oppression

to be called “ethnic cleansing.” As a part of this process, Serb soldiers raped Muslim
women to carry out four main purposes: to terrorize the population in order to drive
them away from Bosnia and into refugee camps in neighboring countries, to demoralize
Muslim men whose female relatives were raped and thereby cause them to quit
fighting and flee Bosnia, to impregnate Muslim women in order to create more Ser-
bians and prevent the creation of more Muslims, and to satisfy the soldier’s heightened
sexual compulsions through organized kidnapping and sexual slavery in “rape camps”
(Salzman 2000). The last purpose was satisfied by the kidnapping of women from other
areas and ethnic groups, as well. The United Nations has estimated that 20,000
Muslim women were raped and tortured during this conflict.”°
While it is immediately clear that the threat of mass rape and torture is likely to
drive persons from their homes, the second and third purposes require, in part at
least, the collusion of the victims’ own oppressive gender ideology to satisfy the
rapists’ purpose. It is commonplace that men are humiliated by the rape of “their
women.” The reason for this is that the image of masculinity in most cultures
requires that men possess women, and in particular their sexuality. Thus, another
man taking possession of a man’s woman causes the aggrieved man to lose status as a
man. Of course, it is also true that men, like women, may simply sympathize with
their relative’s physical pain and humiliation. But the reaction of women in Bosnia,
like those in Nanking, reveals that the pain of their male relatives was not so much
grief for the women’s pain as humiliation and anger for their loss of masculine pride.
The analysis of the third purpose of the rapes, to create more Serbs and prevent the
creation of more Muslims, is similarly charged with oppressive gender ideology. It
only makes sense if the social identity of the baby is determined by the biological
father. Since there are two equal parts to the genetic identity of the baby, there is first
a biological objection to this analysis. But secondly, the assumption that there is a
noticeable genetic difference between Serbian Christians and Bosnian Muslims is
questionable. Finally, the fact that the biological father would have only this mini-
mally differentiating biological influence, and no social influence whatsoever on the
baby save that which would come from the foregoing oppressive gender ideology
itself, implies that the baby could be completely socially Bosnian Muslim. Only by
treating these children as Serbs could they come to be Serbs. Thus, the analysis of
oppression in this kind of violence is multilayered and complicated.”! The Serbs were
clearly oppressing the Bosnian Muslims through rape as a weapon of war, but it was
the oppressive gender relations within the victim group itself that led to rape being as
effective a weapon as it was. Furthermore, the Serbian men were sending “their own”
women a message through the rape of the Bosnian women—that women are merely
the vessels of men’s semen for the purpose of creating more Serbs.

5.1.4. GENOCIDE
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
defines genocide as

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group;
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 105

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliber-
ately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Another category that has been recognized especially since the war in Bosnia is the
deliberate attempt to impregnate many of the women of a culture through rape. This
definition shows that genocide straddles this and the next category of oppressive
violence, in that it may be conducted by one national group or state upon another
national group, but it may also cut across state or national lines. Since genocide can
be considered a war on a particular social group, however, I include it in this first
category of oppressive violence.
This definition of genocide must be amended in one respect, however, for our
purposes. Why must the acts be intended to destroy the group? Is it not enough that
the acts have that effect? This definition of genocide is a legal one, designed in part
to determine culpability. I have argued that we should define oppression by con-
sidering the harm done to the victim rather than the intention of the oppressor or
privileged group who cause the harm. That is, the harmful effect on the victim
group, provided that it was not deserved harm, as well as the beneficial effects on
the privileged social group, determine whether there is oppression. Violence, on my
view, does require an intention to inflict harm, and genocide is certainly a species of
violence. However, there could be multiple acts of violence which, taken together,
result in the destruction or near-destruction of an entire group without there being
a conscious intention to destroy the group. The massive killing of Native Americans
on this view constitutes genocide without having to decide whether there was an
intention to destroy the Native Americans as such.
Genocide clearly counts as a kind of oppressive violence because, first, it is an
unjust harm to a social group, definable apart from the oppressive harm, since it
must be a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Second, the violence of
genocide is perpetrated by a social group because it is believed by members of that
group that it benefits that group. Now particularly with genocide, one might wish to
argue that it cannot possibly benefit someone or even some group to annihilate
another group. While I would certainly admit that genocide forever morally stains a
perpetrator group, and therefore cannot truly be seen as benefiting them, ict still
must also be admitted that in the short term at least the perpetrator group gains
some satisfaction from the violent purging of their rivals. There may also be longer
term gains, such as the just-mentioned European genocide of Native Americans,
which resulted in the expansion of European American landholding across the
American continents. This case also shows how genocide that is particularly suc-
cessful from the perpetrator’s perspective can be hidden from memory and ac-
countability for many generations, if not forever. As the saying goes, the victor
writes the history books, and this is particularly true for a “victorious” campaign of
genocide, where the losers are mostly or all dead. Third, genocide occurs through
institutional structures in the sense that the victim group, and often the perpetrator
group as well, are national or religious groups by which they can be identified. In
recent cases of genocide, such as the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus
106 Forces of Oppression

or the killings of the Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs,” the two groups had lived
together as neighbors in an integrated community quite peacefully until the
genocidal violence began rather suddenly. However, once it began it was quite easy
for one group to separate out its victims by telltale institutionalized signals, such as
different names, dress, and religious practices.
Genocide is an extreme application of violence as a force of oppression, but
most forms of oppression involve violence at a lower level than that. Most oppressor
groups would not wish the complete annihilation of the subordinate groups, perhaps
because of moral constraints, but mainly because economic exploitation is a com-
mon motivation for oppression. Genocide often results in the theft of the land and
property of the victims by the oppressors, giving even this form of violence an
economic motivation.
Oppressive wars between states or nations, where one nation aggresses against
another weaker nation or where one nation’s soldiers commit mass rapes against the
women of another, are the most obvious, spectacular forms of oppression. Particular
cases of oppression may be traced to the outset of such wars, answering the question,
in those cases, why is this group oppressed? Such oppression may continue for gener-
ations or centuries. But they may also engage world sympathy and concer, often in the
form of United Nations resolutions or even military intervention. The next category of
oppressive violence brings typically lower levels of worldwide scrutiny because they
occur within nominally national borders, or do not concern national groups as a whole.

5.2. State-Sponsored Violence against

Subordinate Groups
Some types of oppressive violence are employed on subgroups of society by the state.
This happens only when the subgroup is not in power and the oppressor group seeks
to maintain power and advantage by the use of force. Thus, this form of violence is
typically subsequent to the origin of the formation of the oppressed and oppressor or
privileged groups. Rather, it is, at least in part, the way that pre-existing relations of
oppression are maintained by those in power.

5.2.1. ETHNIC CLEANSING

Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to annihilate (in which case it is also genocide) or
remove an ethnic group from a particular territory. It may be state-sponsored, as in
the case of Serbian attempts to remove ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, where it is an
organized military action of the government, or state-sanctioned, as in the case of the
Hutu’s attempts to annihilate the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, which is conducted
largely by civilians but with the full knowledge of the government and no protection
afforded to victims. Ethnic cleansing, even when it is not also a case of genocide,
clearly fits the description of oppressive violence. It unjustly harms the group that is
removed from their homes for no reason beyond the fact of an ethnic identification,
which I presume cannot be a justification for forcible removal. Yet, it seems to the
perpetrator group to be to their benefit, and materially at least it must be so, for they
are able to seize the property of their victims. Like genocide, ethnic cleansing is a
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 107

harm that is transmitted through the institutional structures that create and maintain
ethnic identities.

5.2.2. VIOLENT ENFORCEMENT OF OPPRESSIVE LAWS

Government claims a monopoly on the use of violence or the threat of violence, but
its power can be legitimate. When it is not legitimate, when its laws are unjust, the
enforcement of those laws is a case of oppressive, state-sponsored violence. Examples
of this are, regrettably, too numerous to count. They exist on every continent in every
decade. Amnesty International compiles annual reports on violations of human rights
by governments around the world, and few governments are entirely innocent of
these charges. One example close to home is, as mentioned previously, the en-
forcement of segregation laws in the United States up until the mid-1960s, and the
violent reactions by law enforcement to the Civil Rights Movement resisters. An-
other example is the enforcement of Islamic law in Iran under the Islamic Revolution,
which began in the late 1970s under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, but
continues even as | write this. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi (2003)
chronicles her life under these laws. Women are forced to cover their bodies from
head to foot and not allowed to show anything but their faces. They are not permitted
to wear makeup or paint their nails. It is against the law for women to have sex outside
of marriage.”? Morality police roam the streets looking for violators, compelling
women to submit to arbitrary and humiliating searches, including “virginity checks.”
Violators are beaten or even stoned to death. In one story, typical of the treatment of
young women, Nafisi’s student Sanaz is visiting with friends in a resort town when the
morality squads come:
And then “they” came with their guns, the morality squads, surprising them by
jumping over the low walls. They claimed to have received a report of illegal
activities, and wanted to search the premises.... Their search for alcoholic bev-
erages, tapes, and CDs had led to nothing, but they already had a search warrant
and didn’t want it to go to waste. The guards took all of them to a special jail for
infractions in matters of morality. There, despite their protests, the girls were kept
in a small, dark room, which they shared the first night with several prostitutes and
a drug addict... . Apart from brief excursions to the rest room at appointed times,
they left the room twice—the first time to be led to a hospital, where they were
given virginity tests by a woman gynecologist, who had her students observe the
examinations. Not satisfied with her verdict, the guards took them to a private
clinic for a second check. ... The girls were then given a summary trial, forced to
sign a document confessing to sins they had not committed and subjected to
twenty-five lashes. (Nafisi 2003, 72-73)

In Iran the women are particularly badly treated by the state. They are constantly
aware of the possibility of violent treatment by agents of the state, even if they adhere
to the rules set by the state. Women form an oppressed social group, as they are
harmed by this violent treatment, their harms are transmitted through institutional
norms for what they can do, and where they can go and with whom. While the men
in this society are also subjected to strict laws, they are the beneficiaries of the
oppression of women in the sense that they may behave in much less restrictive ways
108 Forces of Oppression

and have power over the women with whom they are intimate, even if they choose
not to exercise it. Women must ask men to accompany them when they go out, and
in many occupations these restrictions make women rare or nonexistent. The mo-
tivation for this sort of oppression seems to be religious fundamentalism taken to an
extreme, but the motivation need not be shared by all the men in the society for this
to be an effective prison around the women. The violence wielded by the govern-
ment is directed against women and men who appear to be involved in women’s
violations of their assigned place. In this way the women are kept in check both by
the violence against them and by the violence against the men who are sympathetic
with them.

5.2.3. LEGAL SLAVERY

Slavery is the economic arrangement in which the worker has no control over any
aspect of the work or of his or her life. The legal slave is the property of another and
may be compelled to work on pain of corporal punishment. Unlike other economic
systems, there is no motivation for the slave to remain a slave, and hence this
economic system must be maintained by violence. Slavery is not legally sanctioned
anymore in any country of the world, although slavery as a practical institution still
exists and is widespread throughout the world. Legal slavery differs from illegal
slavery in that under the former, it is the state that (officially, legally) uses violence to
enforce the slave owner’s claim on the slave’s life, while under the illegal version,
which I discuss below, the slaveholder is the main perpetrator of violence to protect
his claim. Under most legal systems of slavery, the slave had some limited rights, but
not the rights of citizenship. As a state-sponsored institution, the United States had
one of the most brutally oppressive systems, which enslaved by some estimates over
20 million human beings over a period of over 200 years.** Corporal punishment was
common and rape of women slaves by their masters was not a crime. In The Bond-
woman's Narrative, a novel about a slave’s life and escape to freedom, author Hannah
Crafts (herself an escaped slave) illustrates the brutality of slavery through the voice
of a slave trader, who coldly deplores the fact that the brutality often leads to the loss
of slaves, and hence, money:

But these wenches will die. I have sometimes thought that accidents happened to
them oftener than to others. I have lost much in that way myself; probably ten
thousand dollars wouldn’t cover the amount. If the business in general had not
been so lucrative such things would have broke me up long ago. You see my trade is
altogether in the line of good-looking wenches, and these are a deal sight worse to
manage than men—every way more skittish and skeery. Then it don’t do to cross
them much; or if you do they'll cut up the devil, and like as anyhow break their
necks, or pine themselves to skeletons. I lost six in one season. (Crafts 2002, 104)

For some slaves, their treatment was to them worse than death. In the United States,
slaves, or former slaves, had no rights of citizenship until the Fourteenth and Fif-
teenth Amendments were ratified in 1868 and 1870, respectively.?°
In the American system, nearly all slaves were Africans or the descendants of
Africans, although Native Americans were also enslaved in much smaller numbers.
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 109

The children of slave women were automatically regarded as slaves, the property of
their mothers’ owners. This fact meant that all African or African-descended
persons were assumed to be slaves until proven otherwise. They formed a social
group, treated unjustly and harmfully, through the legal and social institutions that
constituted slavery. Slavery, whether the old legal variety or the new illegal one, is
motivated by the economic profits to be made from the slave’s production. With
legal slavery, their reproduction was also profitable, since the offspring of slaves were
typically slaves as well. Slave owners and the consumers of slave-made goods and
services are the beneficiaries of slavery, and they were typically distinguished racially
or ethnically from the slave class, distinctions which allow for easy identification of
slaves and rationalization of their brutal treatment.
Slavery was outlawed in the United States at approximately the time it became a
less profitable means of production than the sharecropping and wage labor systems
that succeeded it, combined with the growing industrialization of the country. There
were many beneficiaries of slavery. First among them were the slave owners, but also
the nation as a whole whose wealth was built significantly on the backs of this source
of unpaid and highly exploited labor. Slavery thus fits the model of violent oppression
well: there was a clear social group of harmed persons, a group of beneficiaries, and a
violent system of social coercion that kept slavery in place.

5.2.4. POLITICAL IMPRISONMENT, POLICE BRUTALITY,

AND TORTURE

Another important and well-recognized form that violent oppression can take is the
imprisonment and torture of persons who are actively opposing an illegitimate gov-
ernment. While torture clearly fits the definition of violence as a forceful infliction of
injury on a person, imprisonment fits the description of at least the threat of violence,
in that a person may not exercise personal freedoms without risking an immediate
violent response. Imprisonment may be actual violence, too, if the conditions under
which a prisoner is kept are sufficiently injurious, such as deliberate starvation or
infliction of illness. Torture may be defined as the deliberate infliction of serious or
painful injury or humiliation of a person in order to extract information or confession,
or to break the spirit of the prisoner or some group who cares about the tortured
person’s welfare. While torture is always violent and perhaps always wrong, it is not
always a force of oppression, since a violent criminal may be tortured by a legitimate
government in a way that does not constitute a systematic treatment of members of
some social group.
Again, there are too many cases that fall under this description to name them all.
A prominent example is the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and other members of
the African National Congress in the second half of the last century. The South
African government for most of the twentieth century was a white, European-
descended minority that denied equal rights and freedom to and imposed apartheid
on the black African majority. Blacks were subject to arbitrary arrest and police
brutality, as well as numerous daily humiliations at the hands of white persons. In the
1950s the African National Congress, which favored a multiracial state with full
franchise and civil rights for all, was beginning to become a more powerful force of
110 Forces of Oppression

resistance to white-only rule. They successfully organized strikes and other forms of
civil disobedience to apartheid. As it became clear that these nonviolent means of
struggle were ineffective and being met with violence by the state, the ANC, under
the leadership of Mandela, began to plan for sabotage and property-directed violence
by building a military force. Mandela was jailed in 1963 under a sentence of life
imprisonment for his actions, and he subsequently spent 27 years in prison, many of
those under the brutal conditions of the Robben Island prison, which was reserved for
non-white prisoners. During that time he was kept in a nine feet by seven feet cell
with few blankets, no bed, and a bucket for a toilet. He was only rarely permitted
visits from his family, or even to receive letters from them. He and his fellow prisoners
were forced to labor in a quarry and for long stretches of time were not permitted to
speak to one another. They were sometimes not permitted reading material, and at
all times their reading material was carefully monitored and censored. They were not
permitted to receive any political news from the outside; family visits were carefully
monitored to ensure that only family matters were discussed. (Although, it is im-
portant to recognize that nearly all of these restrictions were in small but meaningful
ways circumvented by these incredibly resourceful and determined prisoners.) This is
a clear case of oppressive use of violence and the threat of violence because there is a
group—black South Africans—who was being harmed unjustly and whose oppres-
sion benefits another group—white South Africans.
One might object that the repression of a violent group such as the African
National Congress (or any other violent resistance organizations) is a legitimate
function of a government, and hence its use of violence in putting down a violent
reaction to its policies is justifiable and not in itself oppressive. On the contrary I
would argue that, if the government is itself oppressive, violence may be justified.
To justify it 1 appeal to the principle of self-defense, which is that one may justi-
fiably use violence in self-defense of an unjustified attack, provided that the vio-
lence used to repel the attack is proportional to the violence suffered. The principle
of self-defense can legitimately be extended to defense of one’s social group if the
group is under systematic attack. Since, I have argued, violence against group
members that is inflicted because of their group status harms all group members,
violent response on the part of group members is justified (provided that it meets
the proportionality condition). Amnesty International is a worldwide organization
dedicated to seeking out information about and opposing political repression and
violations of human rights of prisoners, particularly political prisoners. Like the
imagined objector, they deny the status of “political prisoner” to groups and persons
who use violence in their opposition to illegitimate governments. The African
National Congress is one example of a group that they denied political prisoner
status to because of this. Yet as Mandela claims, “it is always the oppressor, not the
oppressed, who dictates the form of the struggle. If the oppressor uses violence, the
oppressed have no alternative but to respond violently” (Mandela 1994, 468). A
government that is oppressive is by definition a coercive oppressive force with at the
very least the threat of violence behind it. When it responds violently to nonviolent
protest of its oppressive policies, it opens itself to the legitimate use of violence by
the oppressed.
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 111

5.3. Non-state Sponsored Violence

Some forms of violence get no sponsorship or sanction from the state, but neither do
the victims get complete or even adequate protection. Because these forms of vio-
lence are not so sponsored or sanctioned, these are the forms of violence least likely
to be classified as systematic. Thus, these forms of oppression are most covert and
gain the least sympathy from outsiders. Some current and recent examples worth
considering here are illegal slavery, strikebreaking, and violence against women, and
racial, religious, and sexual minorities.

5-3-1. LYNCHING

Although mob violence or summary execution without trial has occurred throughout
time, in the United States the combination became so frequent as a practice by
particularly southern whites against southern blacks that it acquired a name, lynch-
ing.”° Lynchings were particularly violent summary executions by angry mobs, usually
of black males, but sometimes also black females or white males, that were horrifyingly
gruesome: hangings, mutilations, and burnings at the stake. Typically the person was
accused of some offense, sometimes a serious crime such as murder (of a white person)
or rape (of a white woman), or perhaps a petty slight, such as talking back to a white
person, or, if the lynching victim was white, some kind of racial “treason.” A mob,
often led by the Ku Klux Klan, who would hide their faces under white hoods, would
seize the victim and drag him or her to a tree or a stake. The victim was then brutally
and publicly executed.
This practice had the purpose and effect of terrorizing the black populace in
order to keep them subservient to whites. At the end of the Civil War, with the
emancipation of the slaves, white southerners wished to find a way to continue to
exploit blacks economically. A variety of legal means were devised, and they were
augmented by the terror imposed by lynching.

Practically every Southern state passed labour and vagrancy laws; “the former
masters, working through state legislatures, restored a kind of servitude by means of
apprentice, vagrancy, and poor laws.””’ Other discriminatory laws aimed at the
Negro and his suppression appeared as the years passed—disfranchisement laws,
“Jim Crow” car laws, statutes to prohibit common assemblage in school and even in
church. As the forerunner of such efforts to humiliate, oppress, and re-enslave the
freedmen, the lyncher’s rope and torch appeared. (White 1969, 99)

In the years 1882~—1927, there were 4,950 lynchings, and of these 3,513 (71 percent)
were of black persons in the United States, and 74 percent of them were in the ten
states of the Deep South (White 1969, 232-233). At the time this practice was
accepted among many whites of the South, and ignored by many in the North. After
intense and concerted efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and particularly the individual efforts of Walter White and Ida
Wells-Barnett to publicize the brutality to the wider nation, lynchings ended in the
1930S.
112 Forces of Oppression

Lynching was a prime example of a non-state-sponsored form of oppression.

Since they are by definition extra-legal, lynchings are not state-sponsored. But one
might argue that, as we saw with the new forms of illegal slavery, the state has to
overlook them in order for them to continue. This was indeed the case in the
American South, where mobs would often take their victims out of an unguarded
jail cell. The lynchings were a form of oppression because they targeted members of
a particular social group: either blacks or whites who were seen as allies of blacks.
The social group that benefited by this was the whites who were able to continue
their dominance of blacks, economically or at least socially. Although lynchings no
longer occur, blacks continue to be terrorized in some parts of the United States by
violence conducted by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups,
though at greatly reduced numbers of incidents and levels of brutality.

5.3.2. HATE CRIMES: VIOLENCE AGAINST RACIAL,

RELIGIOUS, ETHNIC, AND SEXUAL MINORITIES

The FBI defines “hate crime” as “a crime against a person or property motivated by
bias toward race, religion, ethnicity/national origin, disability, or sexual orienta-
tion.”28 The FBI has recently (i.e., in 1991) begun maintaining statistics on such
crimes, although they report that they do “not have any federal jurisdiction to
investigate hate crimes motivated by a sexual orientation bias.” Although they report
statistics for hate crimes against sexual minorities, they are apt to undercount.
Systematic violence against racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and the
disabled are cases of oppression: they target members of particular social groups
because they are members (or perceived to be members) of those groups, and because
they cause the members of those groups, even those not directly targeted, to seg-
regate themselves from those who perpetrate the violence and to behave in other
ways that make them subordinate to the majority social groups. It may be difficult to
see how these forms of violence would benefit any dominant group, but they can be
seen to do so by intimidating the subordinate groups not to question too forcefully
the dominant group’s privileges. For example, gays and lesbians refrain from dis-
playing affection publicly or calling attention to their romantic partners in ways that
heterosexuals would never think twice about. Although many heterosexuals would
not be affected by viewing the display of homosexual affection, others would be
offended and would wish to shield themselves and their children from it. It would be
a loss to those offended even if we take it to be an irrational and largely self-inflicted
one. Blacks refrain from approaching whites they do not know in places where they
may not be safe. This benefits those whites who wish, no matter how unfairly or
irrationally, to remain apart from blacks. Jews may protest Christian symbols actually
placed in courthouses, but not the fact that their holidays fall on workdays. This
benefits Christians who need not negotiate their holidays around the workweek. In
these ways the dominant members maintain their privileges of being left alone in the
position of the favored group in society, without having to question or negotiate over
their own practices or privileges.
For the year 2003 the FBI lists 7,489 reported hate crimes.”? Although this
surely represents an underreporting of such crimes, it does not indicate a high
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 113

probability for any one member of these social groups that they will be targeted.
Hate crimes are often spectacular and terrifying, and create terror in their target
populations far beyond the numbers. The 1999 crucifixion-like murder of Matthew
Shepard, a gay man, the 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd, Jr., a black man in
Texas, cross-burnings, and swastikas send the message that there are some in the
dominant populations who will enforce their dominant position at any cost, to
themselves or their victims. The message can be effectively sent in large part
because of the history of lynching and the Holocaust, where there were many more
direct victims of violence. In the case of hate crimes, at this point at least, the threat
of violence is a greater oppressive force than the violence itself. Because of their
spectacular and terrifying nature, as well as the fact that they are purposefully
targeted, hate crimes constitute a violent force of oppression against many subor-
dinate groups in society.

5-3-3- ILLEGAL SLAVERY

One of the most brutal and life-robbing forms of oppression is slavery, and it is deeply
disturbing to learn that it is still a widespread phenomenon today. Kevin Bales
(1999) defines a slave as a person held by violence or the threat of violence for
economic exploitation, and conservatively estimates that there are approximately 27
million slaves worldwide. To put this in historical perspective, this number is greater
than all the slaves believed to have been stolen from Africa during the transatlantic
slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Most of the slaves are in
Southeast Asia, northern and western Africa, and parts of South America, but there
are slaves in almost every country of the world. Slavery today is not legal in any
country of the world, but in countries where it is a thriving economic venture—
Brazil, Pakistan, India, Thailand—the police are either powerless to enforce the law,
or worse, are the corrupt enforcers of the slave system. Bales’s remarkably courageous
work shows how slavery operates very differently in different countries. In some
places it is a continuation of an age-old form of a caste or feudal class system, while in
others slavery has sprung up as a new response to global capitalist opportunities and
crises. What they all have in common, however, is violence and economic exploi-
tation. What makes them forms of oppression is that they are group-based, unjust
harms that benefit another social group.
In Mauritania Bales found an example of the former kind of slavery, where the
slaves and class of slaveholders are distinguished by race and the relations between
individual slave and master often go back many generations. While Mauritania
made slavery officially illegal in 1980, the country is ruled by the minority “White
Moor” slaveholding class and they do not enforce the law, but rather enforce
slaveholder’s claims. While many slaves, who are black Africans or so-called “Black
Moors,” do the same kind of domestic and agricultural work that has been done for
centuries by their ancestors, there are also new market ventures that slaveholders
have developed to earn cash from their slaves, although Mauritanians produce very
little for an international market. Some slaves are sent by their masters to do work
such as carrying water from city wells to sell to city dwellers, most of whom have no
running water. The money they earn is claimed entirely by the master. While this
114 Forces of Oppression

form of slavery is enforced by violence, including beatings and even killing of slaves
who try to escape, the long-standing nature of the master-slave relationship, the fact
that there can be no appeal to government for relief, and the threat of violence by
displeased masters are sufficient forces to keep the system in place.
In many other parts of the world the current conditions of slavery are relatively
new. This is true where the market for a good that can be produced by slave labor has
recently appeared. Other necessary background conditions for the growth of slavery
are that there is a desperately poor population that can be easily lured away from their
traditional support systems and a police and judiciary that is ineffective or unwilling
to enforce anti-slavery laws. In such situations greedy slaveholders can effectively use
violence to force people into slavery and keep them there for as long as their work
produces a profit. Such is the case in the charcoal camps of Brazil, where men are
enticed by promise of a salary, food, and shelter to leave their urban shantytown
homes and families to go to make charcoal from the Brazilian rainforests for sale to
the steel mills. Many of the “employers” turn out to be slaveholders. The men find
themselves at a camp at the edge of the forest, at least fifty miles from the nearest
town, with no transportation, little food or shelter, and they are denied the wages
they were promised. This is done under the pretext that they owe the camp man-
ager (the “gato”) a debt for the transportation they received to the camp and what-
ever food they consume, but in many cases this debt cannot be paid off because the
owner is unscrupulous in his accounting and there is no further appeal for the worker.
Workers rarely try to escape because of the prohibitive distance to the nearest town
and by staying they can be fed at least some food. Those who try to escape are often
hunted down, beaten, and starved until they work:again or die. Bales interviewed one
slave who described conditions in the camp as follows:

When we got here from Minas Gerais he taught us how to do the work by beating
us. We were scared to say anything, as it was clear he would do anything he wanted
to us. Very soon we realized that he wasn’t going to pay us. When we asked for
money he would beat us. Some of my friends from Bahia ran away, but the gato
chased after them with dogs and caught them. He brought them back at gunpoint
and beat them in front of us. He kept the dogs around us at night so that they
would bark if anyone tried to leave. (Bales 1999, 139)

Clearly this is a case of oppressive violence, in that there are groups of people (the
desperately poor) who are preyed upon by a group of persons who manage the
charcoal camps, and the forest from which the charcoal is made. Yet they are not
groups distinguished by gender or even by race, since the gatos are often from the
same group of people as the slaves. However, the gatos, while they are better off than
the slaves, are not the ultimate beneficiaries here, but rather the Brazilians who own
the forests and invest in the charcoal camps. These are people who may never see the
camps, and are able to keep the brutality of that existence at arm’s length. Racial and
ethnic distinctions in the past have played a role in determining who are the haves
and the have nots in Brazil. Brazil suffers from a highly unequal distribution of
income*® that distinguishes sharply the small landowning class descended mainly
from the Portuguese colonizers of previous centuries and the large peasant class of
white, mixed race, and Afro-Brazilians. Brazil was the last country to outlaw slavery
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 115

in the Americas, and although the country is highly racially integrated, in the sense
that there are no racial barriers to equal opportunity, the economic distinctions
among classes could not be sharper. It is the wealthy who benefit from the existence
of the slaves, and the poor who suffer. Not only do the slaves themselves suffer, but
the wages of those poor who are paid a wage to work in the charcoal camps are much
lower as a result of the existence of slavery. And not only do the owners of the
slaveholding camps gain from the existence of slavery but also those who own the
camps that pay depressed wages, as well as the steel mills that purchase the charcoal
at lower prices, and so on up the supply chain.
The illegal slavery that is a part of global international markets thus benefits a
mote diffuse, less easily identified group than the typical beneficiaries of oppression.
The beneficiaries are those who participate in the global markets as investors and
consumers. What determines who is or is not a part of these groups is a morass of
historical forces of oppression that cannot be generally defined but can, with due
diligence, be traced in particular places and times. That each place and time has its
particular story does not detract from the fact that there are stories to be told, but
does detract from the salience of the oppression and therefore from the attention
and sympathy that it generates.

5-3-4. STRIKEBREAKING

Strikes, or collective refusals to work, are legitimate ways for workers to collectively
exercise market power in capitalism in order to raise wages and secure better working
conditions. After all, one is always (morally) permitted to refuse to work for wages.
As Marx pointed out, the market power of the capitalist far exceeds that of the
individual worker. While the worker must earn his daily bread, the capitalist can
sacrifice only economic profits, not her means of existence, if she does not run her
business for a day. Collective bargaining on the part of the workers, which allows
them to pool their meager surpluses to exercise some patience in negotiations, is only
tational and fair. However, because it is an effective strategy, and because the
material wealth and power of capitalists is much greater, capitalists constantly try to
thwart the abilities of workers to organize or effectively to conduct strikes. This
conflict has been waged both in politics, where capitalists attempt to use their
financial power to secure laws against unions or strikes, and with the sanctioned or
unsanctioned use of violence. Thus, violence has been used to coerce and intimidate
strikers to work for low wages and in poor working conditions. Consider the case of
the coal miners of West Virginia portrayed in the movie Matewan, a fictional his-
torical account of the coal mining wars there in the early 1900s. Workers there
protested the poor conditions of the mines, which caused many to perish in mine
cave ins and which the coal companies did little to prevent. They also protested the
poor pay and the corrupt accounting at the company store. When they went on
strike, the coal company hired a fictional version of the Pinkerton mercenaries to
break the strike through violence. The lone law enforcement agent was powerless to
prevent either the mercenaries from attempting to coerce the workers to quit their
strike, or to prevent the inevitable armed struggle between the two sides. Although
in the movie the workers won the shootout, as the credits roll the audience is told
116 Forces of Oppression

that in fact the Pinkertons returned in greater numbers and were able to force the
workers back to work on company terms.
Strikebreaking counts as a form of violent oppressive force, if it can be shown
that the workers form a social group. Clearly in the case of striking workers or
unions they do, since they are then a voluntary group with explicit and tacit
membership rules. Workers also form a social group on my account, though, even if
they do not belong to a union or are not part of a striking workforce. The reason for
this is basically Marx’s reason for calling workers a social group: workers face
common social constraints in that they cannot choose to own a business and hire
labor, but must sell their labor power at wages that are set by forces beyond their
control. The benefited social group is the capitalists, who form a social group for the
correlative reason that they need not sell their labor but rather can hire labor and
earn a profit on their capital instead. That is, they face similar social constraints
with other capitalists, and these constraints are improved when the workers are not
able to collectively bargain. The use of violence enforces the economic deprivation
of the workers through violence. Although in the United States violent strike-
breaking is effectively prohibited by law enforcement, it is still practiced in parts of
the world, and helps to maintain the economic domination of U.S. consumers,
businesses, and investors.
In this section I have surveyed the major types of oppressive violence, cate-
gorizing them by the level of organization of the social groups perpetrating and
suffering the violence. The examples show a wide variety of types. In each case
violence explains how the oppressed are harmed and kept in a position of subor-
dination, under control of the perpetrators. I argued that in some cases violence
originates oppression, while in others it maintains pre-existing dominance relations.
But in every case it is a powerful means—perhaps the most powerful means—of
maintaining oppression.

6. Violence and Oppression

Fundamentally, systematic violence is oppressive because it alters the sense of the
possible of its victims, victims who are not only the direct objects of violence but
also those who share group membership with them. Systematic violence circum-
scribes their choices to their own detriment and for the benefit of others. The cases
that we have examined in this chapter involved systematic violence on social groups,
where the victims of the violence are not only the directly harmed but also those
who share group membership with them. We have seen how persons’ fundamental
freedoms are curtailed by oppressive violence, ranging from, in the extreme cases of
war and genocide, the fundamental right to life or freedom from terror and brutality,
to lack of freedom of movement, and in somewhat less extreme cases freedom of
choice in occupation, sexual partners, and rights of self-expression.
The differences in brutality and salience of oppressive violence stand in indirect
proportion to the long-standing nature of the oppression. Wars, genocide, mass rapes
last for a short period of time and are highly salient, yet they also typically end quickly.
Victims are often aided by massive international movements, which mobilize forces
 Violence as a Force of Oppression 117

against the oppressors. Violence against racial, religious and sexual minorities is
somewhat longer lasting and less thoroughly brutal. These oppressed groups some-
times find it difficult to mobilize large protests against their treatment, except when
there are particularly brutal events that are known to sympathetic outsiders. Slavery
offers an interesting pair of contrasting cases in this regard. While the old, legal
slavery was brutal, the newer forms are even more so. While legal slavery lasted for
centuries, particular cases of the new forms of illegal slavery are beginning to motivate
international movements and are likely to either end through pressure on govern-
ments to crack down on slaveholders or the closing of world markets for the goods
that the slaves produce. Finally the case of violence against women is the most long-
lasting of all, yet is often so covert, consisting largely in the tacit social threat of
violence, as to be doubted that it constitutes a real phenomenon at all. In the next
two chapters I will discuss further the economic and psychological factors that explain
this relationship between the level of brutality, the economic motivations of the
oppressors, and the long-lasting nature of the oppression for these different cases.
Our examination of the force of violence answers in part some of the questions
posed in the introductory chapter. First, it often answers the question of the origin
of dominance relations between groups. Second, it can answer in part the endur-
ance question: why do some groups, particularly women, suffer ongoing oppression
for generation after generation, and why is it so difficult to recognize as oppression?
Violence very severely disadvantages a group in numerous ways, both by harming
individuals in the group, and by the secondary harms suffered throughout the group
via threats of violence. Systematic violence and social threat situations against
group members disadvantage that group materially and psychologically. Materially,
they can disadvantage members of the group by disabling them physically, either
temporarily or permanently (Neath 1997). Violence can disadvantage them by
destroying their goods, or by keeping them from pursuing opportunities for building
wealth that are not denied to others. Group members are either forced to react with
equal opposing force to throw off the oppression, or they must adopt strategies of
indirect resistance that may not succeed in overcoming oppression, passive non-
resistance, or even acquiescence, while privileged groups gain in wealth and power.
Systematic violence and social threat situations also disadvantage a group psycho-
logically. They cause terror and trauma not only in the immediate victims and their
families but also in the other members of the social group, who quite rationally take
themselves to be equally at risk for victimization. By traumatizing and paralyzing its
victims, the effective, credible threat of violence can effectively cause oppressed
groups to harm themselves. Yet the systematicity of violence against women is
difficult to recognize, and social threat situations, as I argued earlier, may be tacit
yet credible, and so also difficult to recognize.
Systematic violence is not the only form that oppression takes, but it is clearly
the most immediately harmful, both materially and psychologically. Its primary
effect is to enforce domination, exploitation, and segregation, which give immediate
benefits to other social groups, including the perpetrators of the violence. State-
sponsored violence is very clear to all concerned and difficult, though not impos-
sible, to rationalize, and thus often brings an effective response. However, sys-
tematic violence that is not officially state-sponsored, yet harms subordinate social
118 Forces of Oppression

groups while privileging dominant ones, is more difficult to recognize and name as
oppression. Those who are oppressed by such violence often find it hard even to
name their own terror and lack of material success as due to oppression, and instead
find reasons to blame themselves. In the next chapter we will see how economic
forces of oppression work both directly and indirectly to reinforce the violent forces
of oppression to form an effective prison around the oppressed, not only through
externally imposed constraints, but sometimes also through the choices of the op-
pressed themselves.
 Economic Forces
of Oppression

1. Economic Deprivation

In the previous chapter I suggested ways in which violence can cause a social group
to be poor, or at least poorer than, the dominant social group. Economic institutions
have their own ways of maintaining oppression, making social groups more vulner-
able to the material and psychological harms of oppression. Economic deprivation
harms, and economic institutions can systematically harm, specific social groups.
Social institutions that are not recognized as economic institutions can also enforce
economic deprivation, and thereby oppression, on certain social groups. Consider for
example the distribution of labor by race, which happens when occupations are
racially segregated. If that causes undeserved economic deprivation for one group,
then the social institutions that cause this distribution oppress through economic
force. Social institutions that transmit economic forces often appear to be or stem
from innocuous or idiosyncratic cultural, social, religious, or even biological differ-
ences among people. However, I shall argue that such social institutions transmit
forces of oppression, often through the apparently free choices of individuals.
By ‘economic deprivation’ I mean the forces that cause persons to be poor, to
be unable adequately to secure material existence through the production of goods
and services. Poverty is not an absolute term; what counts as an adequate material
existence is relative to time and place. While only a poor person would lack indoor
plumbing in contemporary Western societies, in another time or place that would
be perfectly acceptable. So, when we say that someone or some group is poor, we
already mean that relative to others in that time and place. We do not mean by
poverty the same thing as inequality, which is a completely comparative term.
No one who has a decent standard of living in some absolute sense (i.e., has ade-
quate food, shelter, and the expectation that they will continue to be materially
secure from extreme distress) is poor, even if they lack much of what their neighbors
have. The concept of economic oppression, I argue, also extends to those groups

119
120 Forces of Oppression

who, while not poor in an absolute sense, still have reduced life options compared to
dominant social groups as a result of their relatively poor circumstances.
This claim raises two questions about economic oppression. The first is whether
poverty is equivalent to economic oppression. The second is whether economic inequality
is equivalent to economic oppression. That is, can we say either that members of a
group are economically oppressed if and only if they are poor or if and only if they
are economically unequal to members of another social group? I will argue that
neither poverty nor inequality is a sufficient condition for economic oppression, but
that inequality is a necessary condition. Poverty is not necessary for economic op-
pression in cases where there is great inequality that reduces the options of one
group relative to others in society. In such a situation, the relatively poorer group
might be oppressed even if not absolutely poor. Poverty is not sufficient for eco-
nomic oppression if it is not systematically related to social group membership. This
point will be controversial because it suggests that “the poor” are not a social group.
The account of social groups that I argued for in chapter 2 is that social groups are
constituted by some common constraints that are not equivalent to the group’s
defining features. If the poor are a social group, then anyone who chooses poverty
will be a member of the group. But then poverty cannot be oppressive because it is
not undeserved or unfair. This is not to deny that poverty can be, and usually is,
oppressive; poverty itself causes further poverty, and so it is an exacerbating feature
of the oppression of persons who are poor. Poverty makes it difficult to invest in the
kinds of things that make for opportunities and options in life. Like psychological
oppression, which I shall argue is self-reinforcing, poverty reinforces economic
oppression. I
I have described the forces of oppression as harming group members both
directly and by reducing social group members’ options relative to otherwise simi-
larly situated members of society. Thus, for there to be some economic oppression
there must be economic inequality. Economic inequality, when it is consequent on
social group membership, causes much other harm. Economic inequality harms
psychologically and makes one vulnerable to violence. Economic inequality makes
one less able to invest in education and training or in business enterprises, and that
further exacerbates economic inequality. This suggests that inequality might be a
better candidate for a necessary and sufficient condition of economic oppression,
but even here I want to deny such a neat relation. Even if it is systematically related
to social group membership, inequality is not sufficient for economic oppression if the
inequality comes about fairly. Take the Amish communities in parts of the United
States. In order to avoid the distractions and temptations of consumer society, they
voluntarily keep themselves relatively poor (though perhaps not impoverished by
world standards), and thus create inequality between the Amish and non-Amish.”
Their relative economic deprivation, then, is not an aspect of oppression, but a fair
result of a voluntary commitment to a valuable way of life. However, inequality is a
necessary condition of economic oppression. One might object to this claim that the
people of a country might be uniformly poor (though this is not common), and yet
we would still want to say they are economically oppressed. The former colonies in
Africa give us some examples, although poverty is not completely uniform even in
these countries. But we would still want to say that the people of, say, Chad, are
 Economic Forces of Oppression 121

economically oppressed ultimately stemming from the colonial rule of France, even if
the French are long gone from its borders. The appropriate comparison class would
be the French (and other former colonial nations), not groups within Chad. In
discussing economic oppression, restriction of the comparison class to “similarly
situated members of society” seems to rule out international comparisons, which is
unacceptable in this age of the global village, where the economics of one society
affect the lives of those in others. Inequality, we can say, is a necessary condition of
oppression when considered from a global perspective, although in many cases of
oppression we need not even look outside the society to find a relatively wealthy
group.
Economic oppression is fundamentally a matter of having reduced economic
opportunity, consequent on one’s social group membership, compared to a group
whose members have relatively more economic opportunities. For it to be a case of
oppression on the account I have been developing in this book, the inequality must
be unfair or undeserved, it must harm, and it must benefit the members of another
social group. The oppressed group need not be absolutely poor, but there must be a
privileged group relative to which they are economically deprived.

2. Oppressive Economic Systems

Karl Marx presented the most influential account of economic oppression in his work
on the history of class and exploitation. On his view, class systems oppress through
economic exploitation, which exists whenever one class is forced to give up the
surplus value of their labor to another. In ancient (and some not so ancient)
economies, slavery prevailed as the original form of exploitation. The slave’s actions
were completely determined by the master, and the master owned all the product of
the slave’s labor. In medieval societies slavery gave way to serfdom, where the lord’s
relation to the serf became less like that of a master to a slave and more like a
hereditary landlord to a poor tenant without an option to leave. The lord exploited
the serf’s labor by directing the serf to work on the lord’s land or by taking in kind or
cash rental payments from the serf’s products from the land he occupied. The rise of
a merchant class in late medieval times and the forcible removal of serfs from their
lands brought about the development of capitalism and the exploitation of the
working class by the class of owners of capital (Dobb 1947, ch. 2; Marx 1967, ch. 27).
Now the exploited class was “free” to contract for employment with other capitalists,
but their poor bargaining position vis-a-vis capitalists would leave them, according to
Marx, with few real options but to accept mere subsistence wages while creating great
wealth for their employers.
Marx’s explanation of economic oppression is still useful, but it does not tell the
whole story of oppression. Marx reveals how the social production of goods creates
surplus value, and that exploitation occurs when this surplus value is unfairly dis-
tributed. However, Marx’s analysis of what counts as fair distribution is open to
dispute. His key insight was to see that economic oppression is crucial to oppression,
but he tried to reduce all oppression to economic oppression as a consequence of his
commitment to historical materialism. Any other force that shapes history—violence
122 Forces of Oppression

for example—he saw as just another economic power. In Capital he writes: “Force is
the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic
power” (Marx 1967, ch. 31). Yet many feminists and race theorists have argued that
such a reduction cannot account for the oppression of women or the oppression of
non-whites (Hartmann 1979; Ferguson 1991; Folbre 1994).
Marx divided history into five main epochs: primitive communism (hunting
and gathering or agricultural societies), slavery, serfdom, capitalism, and socialism.
While his historical facts may be questioned, this is a useful division of the ar-
chetypes of economic systems that have been tried in the world, although different
political, geographic, and cultural facts in different societies shape the economic
system in importantly different ways. Taking the four modern economic systems
into account, it is clear that the first two, slavery and serfdom, are oppressive
economic systems. For each of them classifies groups as workers whose labor is to be
appropriated for the exclusive use by others without compensation and without
the consent of the laborer. The work of slaves and serfs was coerced by force or the
threat of force. In these systems one is either born into, or forced into, a class. If one
is in the laboring classes, that is, a slave or a serf, then one is harmed by being forced
to work without compensation. If one is in one of the dominant classes, that is, lords
(and their ladies) or slave owners, then one is benefited by the work of the op-
pressed class. Thus, all the conditions for oppression—an unfairly harmed and
coerced social group and a benefited social group—exist in the case of serfdom and
slavery.
Marx also tried to argue that capitalism produces a similarly oppressive eco-
nomic relationship between workers and capitalists, and that socialism would be the
end of classes and therefore the end of oppression. On the other hand, many have
argued that socialism deprives persons of their natural rights to property, or, as
Robert Nozick colorfully put it, prevents “capitalist acts between consenting adults”
(Nozick 1974). Since capitalism and socialism are the major contending economic
systems today, it is important to examine these claims carefully to determine
whether either one is oppressive as a system. That is, are capitalism and socialism
necessarily oppressive, as slavery and serfdom are?
To begin that investigation, one feature that we should grant to both systems is
the property of self-ownership.> That is, each person is said to own her- or himself
in the sense that she or he cannot be forced to work against her or his will. Without
this feature capitalism immediately devolves into a system of slavery, since some
persons could be owned and then forced to work. Socialism, likewise, devolves into
a kind of serfdom, since without property in their persons, any person or all persons
can be made to work for the good of others, through a system of social roles that
determine what work one will do and for how long, independently of the individ-
ual’s wishes. With this clarification in mind, let us examine each system in turn.

2.1. Capitalism
The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is an economic system that allows
private ownership of the means of production, that is, of capital inputs to production.
In such a system, under very minimal assumptions of differences in preferences and/
 Economic Forces of Oppression 123

or initial distribution of capital inputs, markets will develop, including markets for
labor.* The definition of capitalism entails that these markets be free of undue
government intervention. Some government intervention is necessary, however, to
enforce laws against coercion, theft, fraud, and to enforce contracts. Many different
economic systems with different consequences for freedom and oppression have been
called capitalist, and many of the differences hinge on what counts as undue gov-
ernment intervention. Even the most libertarian defender of capitalism will accept
that “neither open nor concealed force” (Hayek 1944, 27-28) should determine
prices, wages, or which transactions will take place. Externalities, which are costs
(benefits) that are incurred by persons who are not compensated by (do not com-
pensate) the ones who inflicted the costs (benefits), can be seen as a kind of con-
cealed force, or at least an illegitimate way for one person to take advantage of
another, and thus laws that redistribute property rights to compensate for exter-
nalities would likewise be legitimate under capitalism. Capitalism is also held by most
libertarians to be compatible with laws that protect the consumer from hazardous
products or the worker from unduly hazardous conditions or long working hours.
These might be defended on the grounds that otherwise the consumer or the worker
is subject to fraudulent concealment of the actual qualities of the product or the
nature of the work. But that defense would not work in cases where the hazards are
fully revealed to the consumers or the potential workers, who can then be free to
consume or to choose in light of full information. A more promising justification of
such laws was provided by Friedrich Hayek, who argued that laws that create the
conditions for the proper working of competition, or that encourage competition, are
compatible with capitalism (Hayek 1944, 29). Although he is not altogether clear on
why this is so, he might reasonably be seen to be appealing to the internal logic of
capitalism itself, arguing that since the goal is an efficiently working market, com-
petitive market conditions are to be encouraged within capitalism. Since the
temptation to hide information about hazards would always be great, there would be
a tendency for competitors to cheat. Laws would give them the proper incentives (in
the form of fines or liability for damage) to make safe products and conditions.
Nozick rejects the idea that any social system should have any goal other than the
protection of a historical system of entitlements, and so would reject Hayek’s ar-
gument. But many other defenders of capitalism would not, and it would have other
advantageous implications. Thus, I shall suppose that any laws which further com-
petition are also allowed as appropriate governmental intervention. Such laws would
include those that prevent externalities from affecting others without some com-
pensation, and laws preventing monopoly or monopsony power from dominating the
market. Finally, although Hayek did not recognize these, I would argue that capi-
talism is compatible with laws designed to prevent noneconomic, invidious dis-
crimination among social groups, such as that associated with racism or sexism. Such
laws are compatible with the goal of capitalism to further market-based competition,
which is based on the relatively anonymous interaction of buyers and sellers. Dis-
crimination for reasons not based on the product of the labor would introduce
inefficiencies, and in the context of our argument, would introduce oppression for
reasons that are not strictly economic in nature, that is, not related to the structure
of capitalism itself.”
124 Forces of Oppression

Capitalism probably cannot be defended as a system that is not necessarily

oppressive unless it can be shown that it is compatible with the provision of social
services, such as a welfare minimum, provided that these do not stand in the way of
furthering competition. As with the above mentioned laws against discrimination,
provision of such services is not required, but it is enough for my purposes to show
that they are compatible with capitalism. The best way to argue for this claim is to
show that the justification of capitalist property rights itself rests on the right to a
minimum standard of living. Then, as Jeremy Waldron puts it, “if anyone thinks
that property rights may legitimately be enforced, he or she must think the same
about welfare rights on the present approach, because their recognition is part and
parcel of the justification of property” (Waldron 2003, 47). The standard entitle-
ment theory approach to the justification of private property rights, stemming from
Locke, is to begin with the claim that the fruits of the earth are our common legacy,
and then to justify individual appropriation from that common legacy, subject to
provisos. The point of the provisos is to recognize that each person has a right to
draw sustenance from the world in some way or other. Thus, Locke denied that all
the natural resources were simply up for grabs and introduced the proviso that there
be “enough and as good left for others” (Locke 1980, ch. 7). Since on the enti-
tlement theory view, after the initial appropriation of the natural resources, things
come into the world already owned (Nozick 1974, 160), there seems to be no way
for the person who has no resources to gain sustenance and so must die. But that
would include all (at least infant and toddler) children who are not cared for by
others who will charitably share their wealth, and so they must die. Since that
contradicts the notion that everyone has a right to gain sustenance from the world,
it seems that some welfare minimum, at least for the helpless, is required by the very
justification of property. We can extend this argument from the helpless to all those
who lack effective resources in their environment to make a living. If the economy
effectively prevents them from making a living because they have no marketable
skills and no usable capital, then again the right to gain sustenance from the world
would entail that they should be guaranteed a social minimum. Thus, a justifiable
capitalist society must provide sustenance for all who cannot, for whatever reason,
provide it for themselves. Now I grant that this way of speaking is loose. It will take
judgment to determine who cannot provide sustenance for themselves and who
simply will not. A capitalist society might decide to provide specified work for the
ones who they suspect of being unwilling rather than unable. But it is not necessary
for me to make these judgment calls; it suffices for my purposes to show that some
guaranteed social minimum is a necessary limit on the right to own property in
capital.
Let us say, then, that what counts as clearly acceptable (for the sake of clas-
sification as capitalism) governmental intervention includes laws that prohibit force
and fraud, or that prevent market inefficiencies such as externalities and monopoly
or monopsony power, or that provide a social minimum to the unendowed, or that
prevent invidious discrimination against social groups by gender, race/ethnicity,
disability, religion, or sexual orientation.° Taxationat reasonable levels for the sake
of meeting these goals is clearly acceptable, as well. Let us say that what would not
count as acceptable intervention would be what would cause the system to be
 Economic Forces of Oppression 125

classified as socialist, namely public ownership of the means of production, or a

system of taxation so drastic as to amount to the same.
Capitalism faces many allegations of oppressiveness. Although one might argue
that a system is oppressive if it is inefficient relative to another system and thereby
causes unnecessary misery and suffering, that charge is seldom laid against capi-
talism. The charges against capitalism are primarily moral: that capitalism exploits
workers, that it causes great inequalities in wealth, and that it causes extreme
poverty for the worst off members of society or for members of other societies whose
workers are exploited by transnational capitalism. John Roemer (1988) has argued
that the charge of exploitation is, morally speaking, a red herring. He shows how
exploitation can arise in morally neutral ways, and that when there is a case of
morally unacceptable exploitation, the cause of the moral objection to the system is
not the exploitation of labor or capital, but rather the fact of an inequality in wealth
and opportunity arising from an original inequality in the distribution of capital,
wealth, talent, or luck. Now if Roemer is correct, then we can dismiss the charge of
exploitation for the sake of our argument, since exploitation is not in itself the
problem but inequality is. We can also dismiss the charge of extreme poverty at least
for the argument regarding the intrinsic and necessary oppressiveness of capitalism,
since it would be consistent with capitalism to guarantee a social minimum, as I
have argued. The charge of intrinsic or necessary oppressiveness then revolves
around this inequality in the distribution of resources, an inequality that capitalism,
it must be recognized, appears to exacerbate.
The case for the claim that capitalism is oppressive can be summarized as
follows. Capitalism divides society into (roughly) two classes, workers and capital-
ists, and constrains the workers far more than similarly situated capitalists.’ It harms
the workers by causing them to be poorer, to have less leisure time, less (or no)
access to health care, less adequate nutrition, and less access to educational op-
portunities. Workers live lesser lives than capitalists. These facts must be granted.
However, this is not enough to confirm that capitalism is an oppressive economic
system, since it must also be shown that the harms to the workers are unfair and
undeserved, and this is just the point where the defenders of capitalism will argue
that capitalism in itself does not oppress. The fundamental moral defense of capi-
talism rests on the observation that in capitalism workers are not forced to work;
they are free to accept or reject any wage contract. Thus, any wage contract they
make is voluntary, and so uncoerced, and so it cannot, by my definition, be op-
pressive. If wage contracts generally are not oppressive, then capitalism is not
oppressive. Call this the choice negates oppression thesis. Let us see if that thesis
holds.

2.1.1. CHOICE AND COERCION

Another way of asking this is to see if voluntary wage contracts are ipso facto un-
coerced. A necessary condition of coercion is that one lacks a choice, but one has to
lack choice in the right way to be coerced. Choices may be voluntary or involuntary,
freely made or forced. To be coerced to act is still to act, that is, to exercise some
choice. Even when you get mugged (a paradigm case of coercion) you have a choice
126 Forces of Oppression

in the sense of two options: give the mugger your money or refuse and risk losing your
life. But a coerced choice is different from a voluntary choice psychologically and
morally. Psychologically, coerced persons feel that they are compelled to act as they
do by the unacceptability of their other options; one says in such circumstances that
one had “no choice” but to act as one did. Morally, coercion is a prima facie wrong
because it violates justice and the autonomy of its victim.®
There are two competing philosophical accounts of coercion, which I shall
describe, following Alan Wertheimer, as an empirical account and a moralized
account. An empirical account “maintains that the truth of a coercion claim rests,
at its core, on ordinary facts: will B be worse off than he now is if he fails to accept
A’s proposal? Is there great psychic pressure on B? Does B have any ‘reasonable’
alternative?” (Wertheimer 1987, 7) Empirical accounts ask about the allegedly
coerced agent’s state of mind, about whether he feels that his choice is voluntary, or
made under conditions of duress. They are parallel to psychological theories of
freedom and do not require a prior normative theory. A moralized theory “holds
that we cannot determine whether A coerces B without answering the following
sorts of questions: Does A have the right to make his proposal? Should B resist A’s
proposal? Is B entitled to recover should he succumb to A’s proposal?” (Wertheimer
1987, 7) Moralized theories of coercion claim that the state of mind of the allegedly
coerced person is irrelevant to the question of whether she is coerced and that the
only relevant matter is whether the agent is denied some choice that she ought
morally to have. Thus, moralized theories are embedded within a moral theory,
typically a theory of rights or entitlement.
Many Marxist arguments for the claim that workers are coerced in capitalism
employ empirical accounts of force and coercion. For example, G. A. Cohen (1988)
argues that workers are forced to make contracts that exploit them, or that subject
them to hazardous conditions, because they had no “acceptable alternative” to
making these contracts. He argues that the proletariat is unfree because they are
forced to work for capitalists who exploit them. Their only alternatives to working
for the wages proposed by the capitalist are starvation, or begging, or going on the
public dole, and these are not acceptable alternatives because they involve death or
serious disenfranchisement from society. Hence, workers are forced to make ex-
ploitative contracts. This is an empirical account of force, since it simply examines
the alternatives open to the persons, not whether the options are deserved.
However, one might argue that a moral theory sneaks into the account in
assessing the acceptability of one’s alternatives. If an alternative is unacceptable
because the agent feels that it is (an empirical question), then the theory is not
moralized, but it threatens to leave us with the view that all hard (i.e., psychologi-
cally difficult) choices are forced. If, on the other hand, an alternative counts as
unacceptable because it is undeserved or unusually unfair, then the theory of force is
moralized after all. Cohen explains what he means by “unacceptable” as follows. An
alternative B is unacceptable compared to A if and only if B is not worse than A or B
is not thoroughly bad, where “thoroughly bad” is understood in an absolute sense in
expected utility terms (Cohen 1988, 282).” He claims that by taking “thoroughly
bad” as “absolute in some sense” we avoid the conclusion that rational persons are
always forced to do what they do, since they always do the utility-maximizing thing.
 Economic Forces of Oppression 127

But Cohen’s understanding of unacceptable alternatives leads to the conclusion that

all hard choices are forced choices. Perhaps survival is an objective criterion of
acceptability, but it is difficult to see what else is objectively unacceptable in the
absence of a moral theory, and it is clear that survivability is too weak as a criterion of
acceptability. Furthermore, Cohen’s understanding does not allow choices to be
forced when the options are not so “thoroughly bad,” but when they are unfair,
unequal, or undeserved. Suppose that a person has a choice between two mediocre
and uninspired high schools, but is denied the option of attending a very good high
school in her neighborhood because she is black. This is a case where we would want
to say that she is forced to choose the school she chooses, even though it is not
“thoroughly bad,” since it is morally unacceptable that she should be prevented from
attending the good school on grounds of race.
Like most Marxists, Cohen argues that force, oppression, and exploitation are
objective circumstances of workers in capitalism. That claim seems to me to be right
when understood as saying that oppression goes deeper than mere feeling of
the workers, that oppression involves their physical circumstances. This explains
how workers can be oppressed even when they do not feel as though they are: they
could be in objectively bad circumstances and believe that they deserve them and
so deny that they are oppressed. It would be a mistake to take the claim of ob-
jectivity to imply that oppression is therefore non-normative, however. We can
make sense of a moralized theory of force as objectively determinable by an objective
moral theory, where the theory of force is moralized, and we can require that the
harms suffered by the forced or coerced persons be objective harms.'© Thus, we can
agree that force, coercion, and oppression are objective, while maintaining that the
theory of force, and so on, are moralized theories.
Like Cohen, Jeffrey Reiman (1987) conceptualizes force empirically, but he
applies it to situations of structural force, where a group of persons together make
choices within constraints that only appear statistically, relative to other persons in
society. That is, it appears only when one examines the outcomes statistically,
comparing groups of persons. This sort of force is built right into the structure of
society, through its laws, social practices, and norms. Structural force is difficult to
see, since, as Reiman points out, there is some play in the alternatives open to the
“forced” persons, some sense in which they can choose how they will comply with or
fit within the constraints of the structures. Reiman argues that the working class
only appears to be unforced in making employment contracts because they can
choose which capitalist to contract with, but their range of options “imposes fates”
on them that guarantee that there will always be workers who lack access to the
means of production and thus have to make less advantageous contracts with
capitalists (Reiman 1987, 12-13). This is the sense of force that we must recognize
if we are to make any headway in understanding oppressive economic structures,
since oppression is a structural phenomenon.
In contrast to these empirical accounts, Nozick argues that only a moralized
account of coercion supports the moral force of a coercion claim. On his view, one
cannot claim to be coerced simply because one has bad alternatives, but only if one
had the right to better ones. “A person’s choice among differing degrees of unpal-
atable alternatives is not rendered nonvoluntary by the fact that others voluntarily
128 Forces of Oppression

chose and acted within their rights in a way that did not provide him with a more
palatable alternative” (Nozick 1974, 264). The example he uses to argue this point
is choice of marriage partners among (presumably heterosexual) men and women
who have the same preference orderings over the members of the other gender as all
the other members of their own. Suppose that there are 26 of each, with names A—Z
for men and A’-Z’ for women, and suppose that they are rank ordered by each
member of the opposite gender in alphabetic order, so that A is preferred to B is
preferred to C, and so on by women and A’ is preferred to B’ is preferred to C’, and
so on by men. Suppose that their preferences are transitive and that they prefer any
of the other gender to remaining unmarried. Then if they are perfectly free to accept
or reject any other partner, A will marry A’, B will marry B’, and so forth. In this
situation B’s options limit him to selecting from among B’—Z’, C’s options are limited
to C’-Z’, and so on. Are they coerced into marrying their partners? Nozick argues
that clearly they are not, but that on an empirical account of coercion they must be
(provided that the agents’ first choices are significantly more preferred by them to
their other choices). They are not coerced, according to Nozick, since each of the
women who they could not marry had the right to choose another partner to marry,
and thus limit the men’s choices. But to say that this is coercive is to say that these
men are owed some remedy, and the only possible remedy would be to violate the
women’s choices and coerce them into marrying men whom they do not wish to
marry. Thus the choices that these people make, even those of Z and Z’, who are
each getting only their 26th choice of mates, cannot be coercive.
On Nozick’s view, coercion claims must be judged against a theory of rights.
Cohen denies this, pointing out that Nozick’s view “has the absurd upshot” that the
criminal who is imprisoned justly is therefore not forced to be in prison (Cohen
1988, 256). Clearly there are two senses of “force” being used here: in Cohen’s use
P is forced to A whenever P finds the alternatives to A unacceptable or physically
impossible to resist, while in Nozick’s use force arises only when P’s rights are being
violated by someone’s denying her another alternative. The issue concerning the
use of “force” would be entirely semantic but for the fact that each is trying to
derive a moral conclusion from them. In Nozick’s case the conclusion comes im-
mediately: being forced to do A means that one’s rights are being violated and thus
one is being wronged. In Cohen’s case the moral conclusion comes down the road a
bit: if P is forced to A then P is unfree, but since the lacked freedom is not a moral
freedom, the moral implication arises only when one shows that it is unjust for P to
be unfree, and that has to do with the fairness of P’s situation as compared to that of
her fellows. In deciding on the fairness of P’s situation, Cohen may not appeal to the
fact that P is forced, for no moral conclusion can follow from it, as the marriage case
or even the prison case clearly show. “Force” has no normative force unless it
appeals to a background moral theory when determining what counts as an ac-
ceptable alternative, either a theory of freedom that tells us when it is obstructed
immorally, or a theory of justice. Thus, Cohen’s account of force is either norma-
tively impotent or it appeals to a background moral theory after alll.
David Zimmerman objects to moralized accounts of coercion because they do
not appeal to freedom in explaining why coercion is prima facie wrong. On his view,
coercion is wrong “because it involves frustration of the victim’s desire to remain in
 Economic Forces of Oppression 129

the pre-threat situation or involves a use of his preference structure as a mere

means” (Zimmerman 1981, 130). Coercion is wrong because it violates freedom, not
justice as Nozick would have it. And if a threat frustrates one’s desires or manip-
ulates one into choosing what one does not want by offering only poor alternatives,
then it violates one’s freedom. But as was the case with Cohen’s non-moral account
of force, a lack of this sense of freedom is not itself prima facie wrong. It is, to be sure,
against the interests of the agent. But to argue that it is a wrong we must make the
case that the freedom denied is essential to the dignity or autonomy of the agent, or
that the agent had a right to that freedom. That is, we need to ask prior moral
questions. So if coercion is to be even prima facie wrong, there is no avoiding the
background moral theory. Yet Zimmerman uncovers an important aspect of coer-
cion that Nozick overlooks: to be denied autonomy in a sense that is essential to
one’s moral agency may count as a way of violating a person’s moral rights, but to
speak in terms of rights is sometimes to neglect an agent’s moral claim to that
autonomy. Coercion, then, should be judged against a background moral theory
that takes autonomy, as well as property rights, seriously.
I agree with Nozick that coercion claims are to be judged against a background
moral theory.'! Oppression claims themselves are prima facie moral claims for
remedy or redress. The point of the coercion requirement in my account of op-
pression is to transmit the prima facie moral claim, and Nozick shows convincingly
that only a moralized account can do this. To accept a moralized account of co-
ercion, however, is not necessarily to accept Nozick’s account. First, one may reject
Nozick’s theory of rights as historically grounded. Moreover, one may argue, as I do,
that coercion claims must be judged against a broader moral theory than the theory
of property rights. As in Nozick’s account of voluntary choice, I take coercion to be
a nonvoluntary choice where the voluntariness of the choice is moralized, and
where a choice that is involuntary but which could not be altered by human action
is also not coerced. But where Nozick discusses only violations of rights as the
requirement of involuntariness, | argue that the moral background should be
broadened to a theory of justice. Here’s why. Rights are formulated within social
institutions and norms that are taken for granted. Rex Martin writes that rights “are
institutional practices which require an institutional setting” (Martin 1993, 2).
Within a set of social practices, which normally appear to be determined prior to
moral or legal systems, rights may be justified as fair and just rules for interactions
among individuals. The emphasis on rights tends to obscure the contingent nature
of the social practices and the way that background social institutions and practices
tig the competition for the gains from social cooperation in favor of some and
against others. While seeing that rights must be morally justified for a system,
political philosophers tend to take their own social practices, or the ancestors of
those practices, for granted.'? For example, consider a Nozickean world where two
persons have the same rights but where the parents of one are wealthy and generous
to their child and the parents of the other are poor. Clearly they have differential
access to the gains from social cooperation. On Nozick’s theory there can be no
more moral consideration of the situation than whether the line of succession of the
property rights is unbroken by force or fraud. But it is arbitrary to restrict moral
consideration to property rights as they have been protected and enforced by the
130 Forces of Oppression

state powers in that historical chain. These powers have also denied women and
serfs and slaves the rights even to seek to own property, for instance. Almost every
person now living has some of these disenfranchised persons in their past, but some
have many more than others, and some are more immediately related to and related
only to such persons. Even if the men who have owned property had the right to
acquire the property and treated no one else unjustly in acquiring it, there were many
others who were prevented from competing with them for a claim to it. Since
owning property enables one more easily to acquire more property, those who were
denied the right to own property were not competing on an equal or fair basis even
once they were given those rights. Thus, there have been violations of justice, if not
of property rights per se, in the transmission of every claim to property ownership
that comes through Nozick’s historical account.
The point I am making is more general than this, however. I am claiming that
since social institutions define the available options in favor of some groups and to
the disadvantage of others, and since this advantage and disadvantage is sometimes
unjust but not a violation of (historically or currently specified) rights, we need a
broader moral theory as the background moral theory in our account of coercion.
Specifically, we need a moral theory that can recognize injustice in social institu-
tions. To illustrate the problem, let us reconsider Nozick’s marriage example. Sup-
pose again that the men and the women each have preference rankings of all the
members of the opposite gender, and that these rankings are transitive (i.e., if A
is preferred to B and B toC, then A is preferred to C) and strict (for any two choices
A and B either A is preferred to B or B to A), but suppose that the rankings are not
exactly the same for each member of the two groups. Now suppose that there is a
quaint social norm such that the men are allowed to propose to their favorite
women and the women are allowed only to accept or reject the proposals and not to
propose, and again suppose that everyone is free to refuse to marry anyone whom
they would rather not marry. In such a situation it can be shown analytically that:
(1) a stable set of marriages will form, in the sense that no one will be paired with
someone who he(she) likes worse than someone else who likes her(him) better than
his(her) partner; (2) the men (the proposers) are systematically advantaged over
the women (the group who can only accept or reject), in the sense that all the men
are happier or at least as happy with this match as the one that would have arisen
from the match made by women acting as proposers and men as the group who
could only accept or reject, and all the women like their match less than or at least
no better than the alternative match in which they get to propose.'* That is, the
men are benefited as a group by this matchmaking arrangement and have a com-
mon interest in maintaining it, even while they compete with each other within it
and it gives both men and women equal rights to reject any proposed partner. This
marriage market shows that the norms that govern transactions can seriously dis-
advantage one group, even while they are voluntary and equal under the law.
Nozick’s model of force is an agent-to-agent model; the marriage market ex-
ample shows that unfair force can also be applied by institutions on agents, and thus
that Nozick’s model is too limited.'* Social practices, institutions, and norms give
persons power (or differential access to burdens and benefits) in relationships, and
sometimes they do so by differentiating between persons on account of gender or
 Economic Forces of Oppression 131

trace. In the marriage market example the power to propose enforced the best
possible outcome for men within the confines of a stable matchmaking institution
that allowed women the right to reject any suitor. Social institutions thus create
unequal power in relationships among individuals of different groups. As Reiman
also saw, the agent-to-agent model conceals the force relationships between persons
with unequal power. What we need, then, is a moralized theory of coercion that
reveals these relationships and determines when they are unjust. Thus we need a
model of institutional coercion that takes a theory of fairness and justice as its
background moral theory. The definition of institutional coercion that I propose is
the following:
An institution (economic system, legal system, norm) is coercive if the institution
unfairly limits the choices of some group of persons relative to other groups in
society.

The account of coercion that will support the claim that oppression is prima facie
unjust is a moralized account of coercion, including institutional coercion. Choice
negates oppression, then, only when the choice is uncoerced.

2.1.2. FAIRNESS AND CAPITALISM

To be counted as fair, a social institution should, at minimum, distribute the burdens

and benefits impartially with respect to nonvoluntary social group membership. If this
does not seem to the reader to be an obvious minimal condition on fairness, then the
condition might be motivated by asking whether rational persons would agree to
this institution behind a veil of ignorance and choose to maintain it once the veil is
lifted. On any reasonable account of fairness, there would surely be no social insti-
tutions that would arbitrarily benefit certain social groups at the expense of others,
for example, men at the expense of women, white persons at the expense of persons
of color, straight persons at the expense of gay or lesbian ones, or make any other
humiliating discriminations between nonvoluntary social groups. Surely much more
needs to be said about the fairness of social institutions, but to return for the moment
to the question of whether capitalism is necessarily oppressive, what about the
differential rewards to workers and capitalists which cause the inequalities in choice
that these two groups enjoy in capitalism—is this a source of coercion? Appealing to
the notion of coercion just presented, the question is whether the choices of the
workers are limited. Their choices are limited if they would have more choices under
similar conditions but a different economic system. This means that what we have to
do is to compare the choice situation of workers under capitalism with the choice
situation of persons under socialism. If the benefits to capitalists are not at the
expense of workers but rather also increase the workers’ choices, then there is no
coercion.
Consider the two graphic illustrations in figures 5.1 and 5.2.
In each scenario there are two possibilities, either capitalism or socialism. The
height of the bars represents the number of choices open to each group of persons
and the width represents the number of persons in the respective groups. In the left
hand half of the graphs we have the situation of capitalism, where there are two
132 Forces of Oppression

Capitalists i
Choices H

Workers

Number of persons

FIGURE 5.1

Choices

Number of persons

FIGURE 5.2

groups, while in the right hand half of the graphs we have the situation of socialism
with no class distinctions. In figure 5.1, the number of choices for the workers is
greater in capitalism than the number of choices for everyone in socialism. In figure
5.2, the number of choices for the workers increases when they become part of the
classless society of socialism. So the question is whether figure 5.1 or figure 5.2 is a
better representation of the tradeoffs between capitalism and socialism. One of the
fundamental claims in favor of capitalism is that it increases the wealth of the worst
off while enriching the best off. If we take wealth to be a proxy for the number of
choices for persons, then figure 5.1 would be more representative of capitalism than
 Economic Forces of Oppression 133

figure 5.2. This is only true where there is a guaranteed social minimum, of course,
since the unemployed or the unskilled in capitalism are likely to be extremely poor.
But given a generous enough social minimum, the claim that even the worst off are
better off under capitalism than they would be under socialism is plausible. Thus,
inequality is not necessarily coercive, provided that the worst off are not worse off
than they would be in a noncapitalist system. And since it is compatible with
capitalism that there be a guaranteed social minimum, capitalism is not intrinsically
oppressive.

2.2. Socialism
Socialism is a system in which the means of production are publicly owned. As with
capitalism, I will define socialism as entailing self-ownership, in order to distinguish it
from a kind of serfdom. Self-ownership requires that no one can be forced to work
without their uncoerced consent. Since in socialism it is the state that determines
who produces what and how, and then how that will be distributed, there is plenty of
room, even with self-ownership, for oppressive forces to develop. In order to show that
socialism is not intrinsically oppressive as a system, | will argue that a socialist society
can develop mechanisms for production and distribution that are not oppressive.
First we will want to prevent the state from deciding on production or distri-
bution according to social group membership. In a socialist economy it should be
possible to allow a meritocracy to determine who will fill what roles in the economy.
Of course, there will have to be standards or criteria by which the most talented for
each occupation are chosen, and these will have to be implemented by individuals
who make judgment calls. As we shall see in the next section, there are many ways
that what appears to be a meritocracy can actually be an “old-boys network” re-
inforcing oppression. But that does not prevent the criteria from being specified
without reference to any social group membership and insisting on impartial appli-
cation of the criteria. It will be objected, though, that the greater problem is in getting
persons to apply for the more difficult, dirty, dangerous, or otherwise unpleasant tasks
of society. However, it is not contrary to socialism to allow differential reward of
occupations in order to inspire a competitive labor force even for these jobs. Indeed,
one could argue that under socialism it is easier to ensure that such unpleasant jobs
are properly compensated rather than forced upon an oppressed group.
A classic objection to socialism is that since the state controls the means of
production, it controls the means that people have to achieve their various ends,
and will distribute according to the state’s evaluation of those ends, which will
inevitably have two bad outcomes for freedom and justice. First, the state can
invidiously discriminate against social groups. We have argued that this can be
avoided, however. Second, the state can decide that some ends are not worth
supporting and so not provide the means to pursue them.!? Now it is not contrary to
socialism to allow persons to use their personal property in any way that such
property could be used under capitalism. But what is prohibited is the amassing of
the wealth that is needed to undertake production of commodities, that is, goods for
sale. There is no reason that the state cannot support artistic or recreational en-
deavors that are pursued by large numbers of people—symphonies, soccer leagues,
134 Forces of Oppression

and the like. It will be objected that only when the state sees those as valuable will
the support be available, and it is inevitable that a small minority preference will not
be supported. If this minority preference constitutes a social group, then perhaps
this is a place where oppression can occur in socialism. Although this is true, it is no
less true in capitalism. The difference between socialism and capitalism in this
regard is only in who decides which minority preferences will be pursued. Under
capitalism that is decided by the ability of the minority to pay for the activity or
good or to convince private foundations to support them; under socialism it is
determined by the ability of the minority to convince the majority that the activity
or good is valuable enough to be supported. Now one might argue that this opens
the possibility once again for discrimination against minority social groups with
preferences for activities or goods not shared by the majority. For example, sup-
pose a minority cultural group practice an expensive ritual. How will the state go
about deciding on whether to subsidize this activity? Again, invidious discrimina-
tion against social groups must be avoided, but not every expensive activity can be
supported. But, again, this is not different from the kinds of problems of supporting
minorities in capitalism. If it happens that the group itself cannot support the
activity and it seeks social support, then the support will only be forthcoming if the
state can be convinced that it is important enough to provide the support for it.
Although this sort of judgment call by the state leaves open the possibility of
oppression, it does not make oppression a necessary result. Hence this objection,
while it raises important cautionary notes for socialism, does not show socialism to
be necessarily oppressive.
The experience of the twentieth century with so-called Communist regimes has
shown that the fundamental problem of a centrally planned economy is that it tends
to create a class of government officials who have much greater power and lead
much less constrained lives than the rest of the society. Central control of the
means of production entails the centralization and accumulation of power in the
hands of the decision makers, who can choose to benefit themselves materially.
“Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument
of coercion and the enforcement of ideals, and as such essential if central planning
on a large scale is to be possible” (Hayek 1944, 52). Those who are not decision
makers lack this power and are harmed by their lack of power to control external
objects except by permission of the decision makers. In the twentieth-century
communist regimes this power imbalance caused great economic stagnation—slow
growth, absurd misallocation of resources, lack of innovation, and the like. More
horrifically, though, the rise of communist dictatorships led to forced labor and
drastic systems of punishment. Thus, we seem to have another case of oppression:
oppression of the citizens by the politicians in control of the means of production.
The examples of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China bear witness to
this claim. However, just as there are oppressive capitalist economies, there are
oppressive socialist economies. I am asking whether socialism is necessarily op-
pressive, though, and as with capitalism, I would deny that even this basic difficulty
with socialism shows it to be necessarily oppressive. First, note that capitalism also
has the tendency, unless there are controlling countermeasures, to accumulate
power in the hands of a few. But while I would agree that capitalism must set up a
 Economic Forces of Oppression 135

class system, socialism need not do so, and without one, there is no particular social
group to be oppressed in the manner just suggested. Suppose that the socialist
system is democratic and carefully builds in mechanisms to encourage participation
by the citizens in the democracy. Suppose also that different industries are run by
boards containing the many different stakeholders in the industry: workers, con-
sumers, persons affected by the resource use, and so on, and that these boards have
revolving membership. In this way power could be dissipated and held by different
people at different times. Then there would be no lasting or stable group that could
be identified by their greater or lesser constraints to compose a social group that is
oppressed or that is privileged by the social system.!° Thus, socialism need not be
oppressive. It may not be economically efficient under this scenario, but a lack of
economic efficiency does not entail oppression.!”
What we have seen in this section is that while both capitalism and socialism
can support oppressive regimes and institutions, they need not do so. Both systems
need to prevent invidious discrimination against social groups in the economic
sphere. While both systems have particular groups that can be vulnerable to op-
pression, both systems can be combined with political measures to avoid oppression.
In capitalism it is important to prevent poverty of working or unemployed classes
through a guaranteed social minimum. In socialism it is important to prevent the
development of a permanent ruling elite and to develop mechanisms for partici-
patory democratic control of the means of production.
Oppressive economic inequalities can come about in a variety of ways. One is
through the economic system itself, as in the case of slavery and serfdom. But
economic systems that are not oppressive in themselves can also contain within
them mechanisms by which some are deprived economically. This is especially true
for capitalism, which encourages and fosters economic inequalities. We have also
seen how socialism fosters political inequalities that can become oppressive, and
how socialism can harbor some of the same forces of oppression as capitalism. The
mechanisms by which oppressive economic inequalities originate and are main-
tained are what I call the economic forces of oppression.
In the following sections I distinguish two kinds of economic forces: direct and
indirect forces. Direct forces cause inequality through the intentional actions of a
dominant group on a subordinate one. Indirect forces cause inequality through the
choices and decisions of the members of the oppressed group themselves, as they try
to live in the face of other inequalities and injustices. It is important to distinguish
these two forces for both normative and descriptive reasons. First, once the case has
been made that something is a direct force of oppression, the moral case for opposing
it has already been made. A direct force is a constraint that is completely external to
the victim, and hence there can be no question of the victim’s role in the harm that is
caused by his or her action under the compulsion of direct oppression. There is also
no question that the force should immediately cease. The normative issues of re-
sponsibility and remedy are not so immediate for indirect forces. Although any force
of oppression indicates an injustice, it is more challenging to show that there is
oppression and, further, to oppose indirect forces is to oppose the choices and de-
cisions of the oppressed, and so possibly to victimize them once again. I discuss the
difficulties involved in choosing the techniques of resistance to indirect forces of
136 Forces of Oppression

oppression in chapter 7. Second, there is an analytic or descriptive reason to dif-

ferentiate the two kinds of forces. Indirect forces must work through the psychology
of the oppressed to result in choices and decisions that harm. This means that to
understand how or why the oppressive force is transmitted requires a look into the
victim’s psychology, as we saw already in discussing the transmission of violent
threats and of choice under coercion. I will discuss the psychology of oppression more
fully in the next chapter.

3. Direct Forces of Economic Oppression

Direct forces of economic oppression are means by which members of a dominant

social group maintain their wealth and income by intentional actions designed to
keep members of subordinate social groups economically inferior and exploitable.
Oppression is systematic and group based, and thus crime is not generally a means
of oppression, although many direct economic forces of oppression are criminal or
illegal. What follows is a catalog of direct forces of economic oppression.

3.1. Enslavement
The most extreme form of direct economic oppression is slavery. I discussed slavery
in the last chapter as a kind of violence. Slavery is a clear example of how violence
and the threat of violence works to enforce economic oppression. Slavery always
requires violence, whether at the beginning or throughout, though it can be main-
tained through psychological coercion in addition to the threat of violence. Slaves
often become dependent on the order and discipline that confines them, and they
find the thought of freedom painful and frightening (Bales 2002). Slavery is also an
economic system, with clear implications for inequality between slave and slave-
holding groups. As we saw in the previous chapter, slavery has changed as an
institution over time. While it used to be a legal institution, slavery is now illegal
in most countries of the world. The slavery that now exists we would not term an
economic system, but rather it has become a part of the global capitalist system.
Slavery is the extreme loss of free will and choice about movement, action, pro-
duction, and social relationships, backed up by the threat of violence, whether by the
slave owner or the state. What makes slavery a form of economic oppression is that
slaves are forced to produce goods or services for the slaveholder, who exercises
complete control over the production and distribution of the goods or services.
Slavery impoverishes the slave and enriches the slaveholder.
Although we might like to think of slavery as an economic system that ended
with the end of legal slavery, slaves and slaveholders still exist to a shocking degree
and this modern slavery flourishes in some economies. As we saw in the previous
chapter, modern slavery has become a prevalent social institution within contem-
porary global capitalism. In India and Pakistan there are whole communities in
hereditary debt bondage, and it is not uncommon for free parents to sell their
children into bondage in return for a small amount of money or even a loan. The
carpet industry of South Asia could not survive without the work of child slave
 Economic Forces of Oppression 137

labor. In Eastern Europe and Africa women are lured into going abroad to Western
Europe, North America, and other African countries for jobs, which, when they
arrive at their destination, turn out to be brothels from which they cannot escape
and in which they are forced to perform dangerous and degrading sex work. In Brazil
and West Africa, men are lured by the promise of jobs to far off plantations, and
then forced to work for no wages and not permitted to leave under the threat of
death. In virtually every country of the world there are slaves (in Canada estimates
are 10,000—20,000 and in the United States 100,000-150,000), and most countries
of the world provide slaves for the world market (Bales 2002).
Modern slavery exists for several reasons. First, gross inequalities of wealth and
great poverty among many lead some to be desperate enough to sell their children
into slavery or to be lured into slavery by false promises of decent wage work.
Second, international markets for cheap goods and services provide demand for the
goods produced. In these widely ranging markets, where the shoes are sewn in India
and worn in Iowa, it is easy to hide slavery from the view of the consumers of the
goods. Third, governmental unwillingness to crack down on slavers and on the sale
of goods made from slavery makes laws against slavery impotent. This is another
effect of gross worldwide inequality: poor countries are unwilling to risk lowering
their overall standard of living, or that of the elites, by ending the economic trans-
actions that involve slavery. Fourth, powerful organized crime groups effectively
make governmental interference infeasible and grow more powerful from the profits
made from slave labor.
Modern slavery is obviously harmful in the required ways to fit my definition of
oppression. It harms physically, psychologically, and severely reduces life options.
But it is not so clear that it is a group-based phenomenon. We are only beginning to
understand how slavery works, and there are not large social groups threatened by
slavery as was true of old style slavery. Modern slavery tends to prey on more local
conditions of status and poverty than, say, all West Africans being vulnerable to
slavery. Still, we can say something about the groups vulnerable to slavery. In
countries where sex trafficking is common, young women are the ones primarily
preyed upon, rarely male children and almost never adult men. Children of the poor
in very poor countries are often vulnerable to domestic slave work or cottage
industry slave work, where women and men are not (Becker and Cudd 2003). In
India the low castes are vulnerable to slavery, and not the higher castes. In other
words, it is a group-based phenomenon, but as we saw in the previous chapter,
different groups are vulnerable to slavery in different places of the world. Even
modern slavery is, thus, a group-based phenomenon.

3.2. Segregation
The second type of direct economic force is segregation. Segregation is the enforced
clustering of persons by social group status in certain residential areas, educational
institutions, and occupations or jobs. It is by definition a group-based phenomenon.
There are two distinct types of segregation: de jure segregation, where segregation is
legally defined and enforced, and de facto segregation, where segregation is not
legally sanctioned, but social groups practice and enforce separation that is not
138 Forces of Oppression

legally required. Many infamous de jure systems of segregation, such as those that
involve race, as in the apartheid system of South Africa and the Jim Crow laws of the
southern United States, or caste as practiced in India, have ended. It is tempting to
think that de jure segregation is now over. But legal sex segregation is still rampant in
the Muslim countries of the world, and still defended by many all over the world.
This is clearly a form of oppression, and it is being resisted actively by groups of
women in those countries. Furthermore, the prohibitions on or obstacles to immi-
gration constitute a kind of legal segregation, which may in some cases be a form of
oppression. ie
De facto racial and gender segregation continues in the United States to a
depressingly high degree. Racial segregation is rampant in residence and education,
and it is an important component of the wage gap between whites and non-whites.
Occupational gender segregation is a major force of women’s economic oppression
(Jacobsen 1994, ch. 6). Segregation at the job level, that is, at the level of particular
job titles within firms, is even more rigid. For example, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
describes two shoe factories in North Carolina, one in which all the assembly
workers are men and the other in which all the assembly workers are women. While
the occupation, shoe factory worker, is gender integrated, the jobs are completely
gender segregated. It is also worth noting that the former firm is unionized and has
much higher wages than the latter (Tomaskovic-Devey 1993, 24). Tomaskovic-
Devey’s study of job-level segregation gathered data from a random sample of
households in North Carolina in 1989. He found that only 14 percent of jobs were
demographically balanced by gender, meaning that the population in each job
reflected the proportion of females (52 percent) in the labor force. Eight percent
were mixed but male-dominated (1-29 percent female), 9 percent mixed but fe-
male-dominated (71-99 percent female), and 69 percent were either all male or all
female. In terms of racial segregation, he found 51 percent are all-white, 5 percent
all-black, and only 19 percent are demographically balanced (i.e., 22 percent black).
Thus, job segregation by race (taking into account black-white difference) is nearly
as pervasive as job segregation by gender.
To show that job segregation is oppressive, it must be shown that it is harmful
to the members of some social group, that it benefits another social group, and that
it is undeserved or unfair. It has been shown by many social scientists that occu-
pational or job segregation is harmful to women and to racial minorities and that it
benefits men and whites. Tomaskovic-Devey, for example, measures the female-
male wage gap in his sample at 71 percent (i.e., women earn 71 percent of the
hourly wage men earn, on average) and the black-white wage gap at 78 percent. Of
this he estimates that 86 percent of the gender wage gap is accounted for by gender
composition of the jobs, and 20 percent of the racial wage gap is due to the racial
composition of jobs. It is easy to explain using neoclassical economic theory why
segregation lowers the wages of those excluded from a certain occupation or job,
since the excluded will compete for the available jobs and occupations, which will
also have some residual members of the non-excluded class competing for them.
Since the supply of workers will be higher in those jobs that are available to all than
in jobs and occupations from which they are excluded, the wage rate will be lower
for the jobs that the excluded class may compete for. Thus, segregation by job or
 Economic Forces of Oppression 139

occupation clearly harms the excluded class by lowering wages. The benefit to men
and whites can be measured simply by the converse of the wage gaps. In other
words, men earn 141 percent of what women earn and whites earn 128 percent of
what blacks earn. Although there are surely women and blacks who are earning the
average or even higher than the average wage for white men, the averages reveal
that on a wide basis, white men are advantaged by their race and sex. Finally,
though, it must be shown that the benefit or penalty is undeserved to show that it is
oppressive, and this point is somewhat more controversial.
Indeed, much of the literature on the gender wage gap in economics concerns
whether women somehow deserve to be paid less than men. The argument goes
something like this. Women choose to be in sex-segregated occupations because they
prefer the working conditions available to them there and will accept lower pay to
work there—a theory known as “compensating differentials’—and because they
prepare for women’s occupations rather than occupations which require higher levels
of training and skills—differential human capital investments. Women, it is alleged,
choose occupations that allow them more work flexibility and lower penalties for
temporarily stopping out of the workforce in order to care for their families. Further,
women seem not to want to work with men in occupations that are outdoors or
require more physical exertion. This crowds them into certain occupations, which
accounts in part for their lower pay by the argument given above, as well.
There are many responses that must be made to these allegations, however.
First, if women are socialized to do more of the domestic work of society, then they
are being treated as means to someone else’s or society’s ends, and it is unfair to
penalize them for doing so. Second, if women can expect less from market work
because of the gender wage gap, then market work provides a less good option to
them than childbearing and childrearing. So the observation, even if it were a
confirmed observation, that women prefer children more than men do, does not
explain, let alone justify, the existence of the gender wage gap. Third, gendered
preferences over working conditions in the presence of a gender wage gap cannot
explain or justify the existence of the wage gap, by the same argument. Given the
wage gap, the opportunity cost for taking work with better working conditions is
lower. Fourth, there is no good evidence to suggest that women’s jobs actually do
involve better working conditions. In fact, women’s jobs often involve less flexible
hours than men’s jobs; women’s jobs often involve dirty and physically demanding
activities (e.g., housecleaning, nursing); and women’s jobs often bring less status
and respect.
It is not clear that the neoclassical human capital theory explanation provides a
good account of job segregation. Sociologists tend to reject human capital theory in
favor of what they call social closure theory, which says that a dominant social group
creates and preserves its identity and advantages by reserving certain opportunities
for members of the group. Social closure strategies include such old boy network
strategies as asking friends and acquaintances (of the same social group) for rec-
ommendations for employees to hire or put in firm training programs and refusing to
find members of different social groups qualified for jobs. Sexual harassment is a
blatant social closure strategy. Such processes are sexist and as such clearly un-
justified.
140 Forces of Oppression

Racial job segregation is due to a combination of human capital differences and

racist social closure processes. It is clear in the case of race, as in the case of gender,
that the human capital differences between whites and blacks are unjustified reasons
for lower status, although for different reasons. While it is not alleged that blacks
have different preferences for kinds of work or would accept compensating differ-
entials, it is rather claimed that blacks have lower levels of education than whites.
Although this is true, it is no doubt a function of the historical racial discrimination
and lowered opportunities blacks have been allowed as a result. Thus, although the
black-white wage gap is in a greater part due to human capital differences, those
differences are themselves largely the result of oppression. Black—white segregation
may be less the result of currently active social closure processes than of historical
ones, but it is no more justified for that fact, yet it does indicate that different means
must be pursued to integration.
De jure segregation is clearly unfair, based as it is on an involuntary group
membership of persons, but de facto segregation can often be shown also to result
from undeserved and unfair inequalities between social groups. De jure segregation
harms psychologically by sending the message of inferiority that is socially endorsed,
but de facto segregation can make group members also question their right to equal
treatment. Both de jure and de facto segregation harm economically by reducing
wages of the excluded subordinate group, while benefiting the dominant group with
higher than normal wages and all the social advantages that accrue to greater
wealth and income (Jacobsen 1994, 241-245).

3.3. Employment Discrimination

The third type of economic oppression is (invidious) employment discrimination,
which can be divided into two types of discrimination: occupational or job dis-
crimination, which is discrimination in the types of jobs offered, and wage discrim-
ination, which is discrimination in the wages offered. According to economists’
definitions, employment discrimination occurs when “two persons who have equal
productivity and tastes for work conditions, but who are members of different groups,
receive different outcomes in the workplace in terms of the wages they are paid and/
or of their access to jobs” (Jacobsen 1994, 310). Again, discrimination is by definition
group-based. With occupational discrimination, individuals are not offered jobs
because of their social group status, which is irrelevant to their qualifications for the
job. It can happen at the occupation level (construction jobs are male, secretary jobs
are female) or at the job level (in this shoe factory all the line workers are male, in
that one female). It is not synonymous with prejudice, since there can be reasons for
discrimination other than prejudice against the social group, such as the ability to
exploit a monopsony, imperfect information on the part of the employers, or what
Adrian Piper calls “higher order discrimination” (Piper 1990), which occurs when an
employer discriminates against an employee because of the customers’ or co-workers’
prejudices. Both types of discrimination are harmful. Wage discrimination harms in
straightforward ways—by reducing income and wealth. Occupation discrimination
harms by enforcing segregation, which we have already seen to be harmful. Since
discrimination is based on nonvoluntary social group status, it is unfair.
 Economic Forces of Oppression 141

According to standard neoclassical economic theory, discrimination cannot

occur in a perfectly competitive market in the long run, except as it caters to the
prejudices of customers. Any firm that discriminates against a group for reasons
unrelated to qualifications will end up paying a premium to those workers it hires
and/or hiring workers who are less productive for the same wage as the more pro-
ductive workers from the excluded group. In the long run such firms cannot compete
and will be driven out of the market. Nonetheless, employment discrimination ap-
pears to be thriving. However, to argue this using the dominant economic theory and
its statistics is not a trivial task. Begin with the uncontroversial claim that wage
disparities by group exist in the United States and virtually every economy. In every
country in the world, women earn less than men, though it approaches parity in
Scandinavia. In the United States and many other countries, there are great wage
disparities by race and ethnicity. Economists begin from these disparities and then try
to find what they consider purely “economic reasons” to explain the disparities.
Whatever is left when the explained disparities are taken away is the measure of
discrimination. The economic reasons that are taken into account are of two basic
types: preferences on the part of employees for certain types of jobs (working con-
ditions, etc., as mentioned above) and human capital investments (which is taken to
represent productivity) of the employees. Both kinds of reasons are typically con-
sidered to be the voluntary choices of the individuals involved, and therefore it is
tempting to conclude that any differences in wages due to those factors are morally
acceptable. There are problems with the measurement of preferences, though, since
they are measured by the expressed preferences of persons, which does not allow one
to consider the degree to which the choices are made under coercive circumstances,
nor does it allow us a noncircular measurement of the premium placed on more
pleasant job conditions, since those are measured by the degree to which persons will
take lower pay for jobs.'? There is a further, and to my mind quite revealing, problem
with this methodology of measuring discrimination. Even if the individuals of some
groups do have preferences that lead to lower wages, and they invest in human
capital at lower rates and thus earn lower wages, we cannot infer from those facts
that those are the expressions of voluntary choices of individuals and so not aspects
of oppression. For the preferences are formed under existing conditions of oppres-
sion, and the human capital investment decisions are made under conditions of
discriminatory wages and workplace segregation. I will expand on these two points in
section 4 of this chapter when I talk about indirect forces of economic oppression.
However, for understanding the employment discrimination component of eco-
nomic oppression, it is important to note that the “unexplained wage differentials”
method of measuring discrimination does not in any way amount to a complete
assessment of unfair or undeserved group-based restriction of opportunity, that is,
oppression. ;
The only methodology for discovering discrimination directly is to send out
resumes or job candidates who differ only by race or sex to see if they are offered
employment or wages at different rates. The use of job candidates has obvious
control problems that can be alleviated by the use of resumes, which can provide
double-blind experiments. One recent study showed that resumes with African
American-sounding names received 50% lower callbacks for interviews than those
142 Forces of Oppression

with white-sounding names. Furthermore, the study showed that having better
qualifications benefited the white applications more than the African American
applications (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004). This strengthens my argument
that the existence of discrimination is itself a deterrent to human capital formation,
since if group members are rewarded less for developing human capital, they will be
less motivated to do so.

3.4. Group-based Harassment

A fourth force of economic oppression is sexual, racial, and ethnic harassment in the
workplace. I would define group-based harassment as the singling out of a minority
group member for disrespectful, degrading, or humiliating behavior, which maintains
or tends to maintain segregation. Harassment may even go as far as battery or assault.
Thus, this force of oppression can be violent, but what makes it also economic is its
enforcement of segregation. Group-based harassment is often an explicit technique
used by the dominant group members to maintain their monopoly on better paid jobs
or over better housing or to keep disliked groups out of their neighborhood. An im-
portant documented case of sexual harassment is revealed in the legal case known
as Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc.,?° which became the basis for hostile en-
vironment sexual harassment law. Lois Robinson was one of only a few female
welders in the shipyards, and she was subjected to continual degrading treatment,
including pinups displayed in a way that she could not avoid seeing them, and being
seen to be forced to view them by her male co-workers, sexual innuendo and jokes,
and various sexual and demeaning remarks and gestures toward her. She was reg-
ularly told, directly and through such treatment, that she did not belong in the
workplace because of her gender. Robinson successfully sued on grounds that her
fellow workers created a hostile environment. Some argue that this behavior is
normal male behavior, and that it is not necessarily directed at the women. But,
again, whether or not economic domination is the intent of the specific individuals
who are doing the harassing, it is a significant constraining factor on subordinated
groups in certain occupations and is a major cause of de facto segregation. Fur-
thermore, it cannot be argued that the behavior is not intentionally designed to
make the workplace a comfortable place for some and uncomfortable for others, and
that the difference is delineated by social group status.
For the same reasons that segregation and discrimination are unfair and
harmful, so is harassment. Harassment also causes significant harm because it
conveys a threat of violence or is in fact violence.

3.5. Opportunity Inequality

The fifth force of economic oppression is what has been called by some “discrimi-
nation before the market,” but which I shall call opportunity inequality, which refers
to differential access to schooling, healthcare, nutrition, and other necessary in-
vestments required for a successful working life (Schiller 1989). As a result of eco-
nomic deprivation, members of many oppressed social groups suffer from these basic
deprivations.
 Economic Forces of Oppression 143

Jonathon Kozol (1991) has written several books on the state of American
schools and the inequalities that exist between the schools of the rich and poor in
America. In Savage Inequalities he compares the schools of many urban, poor, black
neighborhoods with those of affluent white ones, such as this comparison of two
school systems in New Jersey:
in an elementary school in Jersey City, seventeenth-poorest city in America, where
the schools are 85 percent nonwhite, only 30 of 680 children can participate in
instrumental music. The school provides no instruments—the children have to rent
them—and the classes take place not in “music suites” but in the lunchroom or the
basement of the school. Art instruction is also meager.... Computer classes take
place in the storage closet. This may be compared to Princeton, where the high
school students work in comfortable computer areas equipped with some 200 IBMs,
as well as with a hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions. These kind of
things are unknown to kids in Jersey City. (Kozol 1991, 158)

These descriptive anecdotal stories of inequality are backed up by clear statistical

evidence of the consequences of these differences:
the high school dropout rate of Jersey City, 52 percent, translates to failure for some
2,500 children every four years. The corresponding rate in Princeton, less than 6
percent, translates to only 40 children. Behind the good statistics of the richest
districts lies the triumph of a few. Behind the saddening statistics of the poorest
cities lies the misery of many. (Kozol 1991, 158)

Opportunity inequalities are not only harmful in themselves but also because
they make victims less able to compete for economic and social goods. This is a
group-based phenomenon because oppressed groups often are economically de-
prived and so lack the means to satisfy these basic needs. This begins a vicious cycle
for oppressed groups in which they lack opportunities and thus cannot make human
capital investments, which leads to lower earnings and ability to create wealth,
which in turn leads to lesser opportunities for themselves and their children, and
thus the cycle begins again. Kozol describes this process as self-justifying, concealing
the causes and interests that led to the initial inequalities:
One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-
evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing
in itself. But the business leaders who put emphasis on filling entry-level job slots
are too frequently the people who, by prior lobbying and voting patterns and their
impact on social policy, have made it all but certain that few of these urban kids
would get the education in their early years that would have made them look like
college prospects by their secondary years. First we circumscribe their destinies and
then we look at the diminished produce and we say, “Let’s be pragmatic and do
with them what we can.” (Kozol 1991, 75)

As we saw with occupational segregation for blacks in the United States, historical
economic oppression leads to a lack of human capital with which to level the playing
field of the competitive job market, resulting in lower income. And this in turn
results in lower opportunities in a wide range of categories, from health care to
education to opportunities to invest in entrepreneurial or capital-building activities.
144 Forces of Oppression

In many places in the world, women as a group also lack access to education,
nutrition, and health care equal to that of men in the same societies. Particularly in
Africa females attend school in significantly lower numbers (UNICEF 1997, 98-99).
In Asia and North Africa particularly, women are often less well nourished than
men. Although women have a longer life expectancy in most of the world, they
often are sicker, in part because they are less well nourished and are less likely to
have precious healthcare resources expended on them rather than the more valued
males in the family.”!
These inequalities for women also institute vicious cycles of oppression, but in
somewhat different ways than for minority social groups. Women have been stig-
matized as the inferior sex and therefore less worthy of investment. But the lack of
investment in the health and education of women leads to their inability to prove
themselves, on a large scale, to be as capable as men are in a wide variety of the
valued social activities that men engage in: producing knowledge, marketable goods
and services, political organizing and ruling, and so on. To put it in the language of
economics, unequal investments in women’s human capital leaves them with less
human capital and furthers the notion that they are the inferior sex. Since some
sexual differences are obvious and obviously significant, and since all societies en-
force some gendered division of labor, the claim that one sex is inferior to another in
particular tasks is plausible to many and seems to justify differential treatment of the
individuals of each sex. These facts entrench gender-based social inequalities to a
degree unequaled by any other group-based social inequalities.””

3-6. Neocolonialism and Governmental Corruption

The direct forces that I have discussed work within societies to pick out social groups
for oppression as compared with other groups in their societies. But the most glaring
economic inequalities in health, nutrition, and education exist worldwide between
different international groups. In some cases international inequalities do qualify as
oppression, but not all. It is important to sort through thee cases carefully in order to
see where globalization is a source of progress, where it is a continuation of past
colonial oppression, and where it may be the vehicle of a new form of colonialism.
Recall that on my account of oppression, there must be a group that is harmed,
one that benefits from the oppressive conditions, and the harms must be unde-
served or unfair. These conditions hold for those nations that are linked by ties of
past colonial oppression wherever the former colonial power continues to benefit
from the linkage at the expense of the former colony, say because the rulers of the
former colony were put in place by or supported by the former colonial power, and
where the people of the former colony are harmed in one of several ways. The
people might be harmed by the unfair inequalities that are instituted or maintained
in their society by the continuing enrichment of the elites who were empowered by
the colonial power. The people might be harmed by having to pay high taxes to
support those elites or to pay off loans the elites have borrowed from the IMF or the
colonial power and squandered on personal indulgences.
There are also many cases where both the former colony and the former co-
lonial power are benefited by the trade that is done between the countries. In these
 Economic Forces of Oppression 145

cases there is no neocolonial oppression. To say whether a group of persons is

benefited by trade involves a counterfactual judgment, comparing what is the case
in the presence of trade with what would be the case without trade. While neo-
classical economic theory suggests that international trade is always good in the
sense of raising the overall welfare of a country, it is also clear that trade creates
winners and losers. If the country is able to spread the gains from trade in such a
way that everyone benefits, or at least no one loses, trade is clearly a benefit and so
could not be a force of oppression. In most countries it is not politically feasible to
spread the gains so evenly. If the gains from trade create a systematic set of losers,
then it is a source of oppression. But it is only neocolonial oppression if there is some
link between the benefited social group and some previous colonial power. If there is
no connection, then the oppression is likely a case of governmental corruption, a
case we dealt with in the previous chapter, since government is, by definition, the
body claiming a monopoly on violence within the society.
Finally, the argument is even less clear for countries that engage in international
trade but have no previous record of colonial exploitation with each other, but there
are still possibilities for oppression that would be best described as coming out of
global capitalism and that have a resemblance to colonialism. Suppose that an elite
arises indigenously, perhaps through organized crime or violent manipulation of the
breakdown of legitimate government, as has occurred in Russia in the wake of the
breakup of the Soviet Union. Now suppose that this elite is able to internally dom-
inate the people coercively but to convince international businesses and govern-
ments to make capital investments in the country from which the elites then skim the
profits. In this situation we would have a kind of neocolonial oppression, where
the new elites are collaborating with the international firms or foreign governments
to deprive and defraud the remainder of the people. The people are deprived of the
opportunity to seek international investments from which they can gain as well, and
if the elites default on any loans taken out in the name of the people, then they will
be liable for repaying the loans or for any resulting defaults on the loans. Although
this oppression is economic and occurs through the forces of global capital, it would
be a mistake to argue that global capitalism is therefore necessarily oppressive. In this
case it is governmental corruption: the coercive, illegitimately wielded force of the
elites, which is the basic cause of oppression.
Many charge that multinational agencies, particularly the IMF and the World
Trade Organization (WTO), oppress poor the peoples of poor nations by imposing
structural adjustment policies (SAPs, in the case of the IMF) and unjust terms of
trade (in the case of the WTO) on them. While | do agree that oppression may
occur through SAPs and unjust trade agreements, these are often wrongly blamed
on the IMF or the WTO. SAPs are imposed as conditions on loans from the IMF,
and they are intended to make the economy more capable of generating capital for
investment, which is the purpose for which the loans are made. SAPs are an
attempt at monetary and fiscal reform to make the economy more competitive and
better able to grow in terms of its GDP. Growth in GDP, while it ignores the
informal economy and home production, almost invariably is correlated with im-
proved outcomes for the citizens of a nation in terms of such crucially important
values as life expectancy, literacy, and maternal and child mortality (Dollar and
146 Forces of Oppression

Kraay 2002). Reforms sometimes fail to achieve their objectives, however. Some-
times they are misguided and sometimes they are undermined or ended before they
can have their hoped for effects. Politically they are often difficult to maintain
because there are always winners and losers, and because the gains inevitably in-
volve fundamental social changes and come after the losses. Reforms are like in-
vestments for the future, and sometimes the gains are too vague or uncertain to
sustain the will to invest. Gains and losses are also not uniformly distributed and can
be manipulated by those in power to benefit themselves and their friends. Similarly
multinational trade agreements entered into by trade representatives for countries
can be manipulated for the benefit of certain sectors of society rather than the
whole of society. The WTO exists to lower overall barriers to trade, in order to
avoid the kinds of trade wars that have historically led to serious financial upheavals
(such as the Great Depression) and even wars between nations. No nation is forced
to accept any agreements brokered by the WTO; the WTO has no army and no
police force. It can merely judge that another country is justified in erecting a trade
barrier as a response to an existing one by a country, in order to give that country an
incentive to remove the barrier.
In sum, I would argue that the multinational financial and trade organizations
are not oppressive neocolonial forces. Their loans and rulings can be manipulated,
however, by the powerful political forces within a nation to benefit some at the
expense of others. Since this institutes a situation in which some group or groups are
benefited while anothers are harmed through a systematic policy, it is an instance of
economic oppression.

4. Indirect Forces: Oppression by Choice

Many writers have noted that some of the harms of oppression are to some degree
self-inflicted wounds. This is also the case with economic oppression. Indirect eco-
nomic forces cause inequality through the choices and decisions of the members of
the oppressed group themselves, as they try to live in the face of other inequalities
and injustices. I call this phenomenon “oppression by choice,” in order to highlight
the twin facts that it is a force of oppression, and yet comes about through oppressed
persons’ choices. This force of oppression is particularly invidious because the op-
pressed choose the conditions under which they suffer. Everyone may seem content,
and suggesting that there is oppression or victimization is likely to be met with
hostility by privileged and oppressed groups alike. So it is deeply entrenched in the
functioning social institutions of the society. When indirect forces can be seen to be
at work in a case of oppression, we can predict that it is a long-standing one, and that
resistance to it will be difficult to motivate or maintain.
Although there are other examples that could be used, women in contemporary
Western societies, in the face of certain prejudices and economic forces of op-
pression, often make decisions that reinforce their oppression. In the next section I
illustrate the rational dilemma that women face in trying to live within these
oppressive constraints. In the following section I will argue that this indirect force of
oppression can be seen to be acting in other cases of oppression as well.
 Economic Forces of Oppression 147

4.1. Women’s Choices

There is a loaded query aimed at feminists that goes something like this: Don’t
(relatively privileged, middle and upper-class) women choose to stay home with the
kids? The point of the question is simply this: If one chooses her situation, how can
anyone call it oppression? The question is rhetorical; it is supposed to absolve society
of any guilt for putting women into a disadvantageous position vis-a-vis men. The
question presupposes an analysis of oppression that says that a society in which
persons may choose their occupations is free (at least in this sphere), and if the
society is free then there is no oppression (in that sphere), no matter what results
from their choices. If someone freely chooses her situation, she is responsible for its
consequences, and if she was rational when making her choice, then she must really
want, all things considered, whatever she could foresee as its consequences. That is,
choice confers responsibility, which is a corollary of the choice negates oppression
thesis we examined earlier. As we saw, this thesis holds only if the choices are
uncoerced. A social institution is coercive if it unfairly limits the choices of the
members of some social group relative to the members of other social groups.
Contemporary Western society is commonly thought to be free in this sense
(among others) of occupational choice. There is anecdotal evidence for this belief:
The ranks of the owners of business and leaders of government and education
include people who raised themselves from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder
to near the top, and their stories, appealing as they are, become well known.” Since
there are those who do succeed in climbing the ladder in their chosen field, many
infer that it is possible for all to do so. And they further infer that this implies free
choice of occupation, subject only to the constraints of native talent. There is also
an a priori argument that economists give for the claim that there is no discrimi-
nation on the part of business against any particular racial group or gender. Since
businesses are out to maximize profits, and indeed (so the argument goes) cannot
survive if they do not, they must seek to hire the most talented individuals re-
gardless of race or gender. Thus, they do not discriminate on the basis of race or
gender, since those who would discriminate would tend to go out of business.”*
At the same time, women who are employed in the outside labor force in the
United States continue to earn about 77 percent of what men earn (Institute for
Women’s Policy Research 2003). How can we explain this wage gap? As we saw in
the section on direct forces of economic oppression, there are two general kinds of
sources of wage differentials between genders: (1) outright discrimination against
women; (2) gender differences in human capital investments that give rise to the
gap. Although the first item—the discrimination explanation—can be shown to
have considerable support (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2003), it is un-
likely that it completely explains the gender wage gap. First, segregated workplaces
are common, and it is common to hear women claim that they prefer to work with
women. Second, since employers in the United States are also at least as prejudiced
against blacks in this society, one would expect that the black-white wage gap would
be as severe as the female—male wage gap. But the black-white wage gap (comparing
only men) is less than half (15 percent) of the female—male wage gap (40 percent)
(comparing only whites).”° (I do not mean to imply that black men are less oppressed
148 Forces of Oppression

than white women, but these statistics suggest that the discrimination against each
group leads to different kinds of bad consequences for them.) In the United States,
well-established Civil Rights law states that employers must pay equally for equal
work.”° But while this law seems to have decreased the wage effects of racial dis-
crimination, the wage gap among men and women has decreased to a lesser degree.
This lends evidence to both explanations, so that it is not necessary to choose
between them.”’ Thus, at least some of the wage gap results from different occu-
pational choices of women and men.
Why would women choose different occupations if that causes them to have
lower wages? In this section I argue that there is a vicious cycle that is instituted by
several existing gender inequalities that causes women rationally to choose such
occupations. The wage gap sets women up for this vicious cycle. What makes it
particularly insidious is that the cycle is the result of apparently rational choices of
individual women themselves. In her book Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan
Moller Okin explains how women are caught in “a cycle of socially caused and
distinctly asymmetric vulnerability” (Okin 1989, 138). By “asymmetric vulnerabil-
ity” Okin is referring to constraints on women’s choices relative to men’s. If these
constraints are unfair, then the social institutions that cause the asymmetry are co-
ercive, and hence oppressive. To show that these choices are both rational and
coercive, I need a model of how such decisions are made, and for this I shall borrow
heavily from Okin’s illustrations. The explanation I shall give of why the wage gap
persists is an example of an invisible foot explanation: The individually rational choices,
taken by large numbers of individuals, lead to socially suboptimal outcomes. To show
this I build a simple rational choice model of a man and a woman of the same age (say
around 25) with exactly equal talents, education, and work experience (i.e., equal
marginal productivity of labor). Let us suppose that these two, call them Larry and
Lisa, have decided to marry and to have children together. In the beginning they
have equal power in the relationship to enforce their individual intentions for col-
lective action. Suppose that they harbor no prejudices about “men’s” or “women’s”
work, and that with exception of the specific tasks of impregnation, conception,
childbearing, and lactation, they are equally capable, and believe they are equally
capable, of all childrearing and domestic tasks. Suppose that they also believe that
one parent ought to take primary care of the children, in other words, that neither
socialized childcare nor equally shared care by both parents is as good as care by one
parent who specializes in the children’s care. Then if there is a wage gap between
men and women, and Larry and Lisa have rational expectations about their relative
earning potential, and if they consider only family income in making their decision,
they will decide that Lisa should specialize in childcare and Larry in wage work.
This decision has enormous implications for their future and the relative share
of power in the family. In staying home, it will be rational for Lisa to take on the
burden of the greater share of other domestic work as well and will come to have
greater skill for it. Her skills for outside employment will become less valuable, and
especially relative to Larry she will become even less valuable as a wage worker for
the family. Lisa will become the domestic specialist and Larry the specialist in wage
work. Even later, when the children are grown to the point where both parents feel
they can work outside the home, her value as a domestic worker will be on the
 Economic Forces of Oppression 149

whole greater than Larry’s, and his greater value as a wage worker will guarantee
that he need never take on a large share of domestic tasks.
This division of labor could be neutral with respect to power in some societies,
but not in societies such as our own in which wealth determines power, domestic
work is unpaid, and divorce laws do not evenly divide wealth (Arendell 1986). In a
relationship the relative power of the partners is determined largely by the oppor-
tunities available to each if the relationship should end.?° While Lisa’s value as a
domestic worker does not increase much since it is unpaid work, Larry’s value in-
creases with experience. He builds what economists call “human capital.” If their
relationship ends, then Larry has the human capital to guarantee that his income will
continue the same, while Lisa, whose skills and value as a wage worker have atro-
phied since she took on the domestic work, will see her income fall appreciably. Even
if divorce laws evenly divide the accumulated wealth between them, the difference in
their future incomes as a result of their uneven human capital will be greater the
longer the marriage (and hence her domestic specialization) has lasted. Furthermore,
Lisa still faces the wage gap, which was the reason that she specialized in domestic
work to begin with. Thus, Lisa’s prospects are considerably dimmer than Larry’s if the
relationship ends. And this means that she has less power in the ongoing relationship.
Her lack of power might be manifested in many ways in the marriage. He can
demand that she work more hours than he does, that she continue to serve him after
each has put in a day of work. He may demand that, if she gets a job outside the
home, she sacrifice her job to meet family needs and emergencies, she take time from
work to care for sick children or household repairs. He may demand more leisure
time or refuse to share his wages with her. He may beat or rape her with much less
risk of punishment than if they held power equally, since she will turn him in only
when the loss of utility from her lower income (and whatever else she thinks she
loses) without him is outweighed by the loss of utility of being beaten or raped.”
If Larry and Lisa represent typical men and women in society, then there are
serious consequences for all men and women arising from the typical individually
rational choices about work and family. If it is the case that women typically make
the decision to subordinate career and work to family and domestic tasks, then
women will be seen as the domestic workers of the society and as unreliable wage
workers. There is evidence, statistical and anecdotal, showing that this is indeed a
significant obstacle to equality of opportunity for women in the workforce (Fuchs
1989). Employers tend not to trust that women will stay with their careers, or that if
they do, they will devote the kind of time and energy to them that men will.°°
Women, on average, are poorer risks, and so employers will not invest in specialized
training for them as easily as for men, and women will not be promoted as quickly as
men. The supposed unreliability of women, on average, counteracts the a priori
argument that purports to show that employers ought not to discriminate against
women. If women are less reliable workers, then it makes sense for employers to
do whatever they can to skirt the laws that demand equal treatment for men and
women, for statistically speaking women are poor risks for jobs that require mobility,
independence, and devotion. But these are, typically, the more highly paid and
otherwise more attractive positions. This means that women will on average earn
less for the same skill level as men. But it was this fact, the wage gap, that forced
150 Forces of Oppression

women (and men) to make the choices that led to this outcome. Thus, the cycle is
complete. It is a vicious cycle because the opportunities for women are lowered, or
at best remain stagnant, as a result of each revolution.
If the outcome for Lisa looks so bleak, then why does she agree to the original
division of labor? Is it really a rational choice for women themselves? Rational
choice theory, combining cooperative and noncooperative game theory, suggests
that it is rational under the right conditions (see the appendix). Begin with the
assumption that Larry and Lisa‘can unproblematically come to a joint decision. The
choices that they face are for each to work for wages or to do domestic work. They
cannot both choose domestic work in their society and still make a living. If
they choose to both do wage work, then because of the wage gap Lisa will still have
less power in the relationship, since her income is lower, and their children are less
well cared for (in their view, by hypothesis). If they choose to have Larry do
domestic work and Lisa do wage work, then their children are properly cared for but
they have a lower income than before. The share of power is indeterminate in this
case; it depends on how much she gains in human capital and how much he loses by
not working, and whether the wage gap is offset by her gain and his loss. Under
some conditions it will be optimal for Larry and Lisa to divide the domestic and
wage work as I hypothesized; the frequency of this division in our society suggests
that the conditions necessary are normal conditions. Now relax the assumption that
they can unproblematically come to a joint decision over the division of labor, and
let them bargain over it. Larry is bound to get what he wants in the negotiation,
since his no-agreement outcome is better than hers. Even if they break up he will
gain more by virtue of the wage gap. She will resist his demands only if her break up
outcome is better than his demand, that is, if she expects that her life with him as
the domestic worker will be worse than her life without him and working for wages
or as a domestic worker married to someone else.?!
The fact that individual women’s choices make the situation worse for all wo-
men does not play a role in the rationally self-interested calculation in a sufficiently
large society. If there are many women facing the same kinds of options, then what
any one woman chooses does not affect the overall position of women. One marginal
woman cannot change the stereotype of women for better or worse. This situation is
analogous to a market where there are many buyers: One buyer influences the
market price by a very small amount and so acts as a price taker. Similarly, Lisa must
take the stereotypes of men and women and the resulting wage gap as, for all
practical purposes, given. Where the result in the market is an invisible hand that
allocates goods efficiently, the result of individual rational choice in a vicious cycle is
an invisible foot that grinds down the social position of women.
The Larry and Lisa model shows how a vicious cycle can result from simply an
initial social inequality and subsequent rational, apparently voluntary, choices. Even
the maintenance of the social inequality is the rational result of the choices made by
individuals, given an initial social inequality.>* The vicious cycle in the Larry and
Lisa example is an example of an oppressive vicious cycle. A cycle is oppressively
vicious only if it is harmful. In the Larry and Lisa example I argued that women’s
employment opportunities are continually degraded both for the individuals and for
women as a group, and this is clearly a harm. My example is one in which only
 Economic Forces of Oppression 151

women suffer from the cycle, but one might argue that one can escape the cycle if
one does not share Larry and Lisa’s beliefs about child care. So they should be held
responsible for their beliefs and their consequences; we should not indict the social
institutions for allowing oppression to arise from such pathological beliefs. Yet the
fact that Larry can have those beliefs and still not get mired in the cycle indicates
that the cycle picks out women specifically for worse treatment. Furthermore, the
current structure of work and the lack of adequate day care for many parents makes
stay-at-home parenthood a necessity for many families.*? And it is, after all, possibly
true that children ought to be cared for primarily by one parent. Some people, namely
the Larrys of the world, benefit from the vicious cycle that the Lisas face. This is true
even for those Larrys who regret the cycle, since their wages are relatively better than
the wages of the Lisas. Furthermore, this economically oppressive cycle reveals one
of the strong motivations for women to remain in violent relationships with men.
Thus, the cycle is harmful for one social group and benefits another social group.
We come then to the coercion criterion. The vicious cycle phenomenon we
examined has the character of coercion because it leads to fewer and worse life
choices for women than they would have were it not for the vicious cycle, both on
the individual level and at the level of the wage gap for all women. This lack of
choice has no redeeming aspect that leads to greater freedom either. One just
cannot argue that women have more freedom as a result of the wage gap, or their
lack of social power, or the ever-deepening hole that women retrench for each other
by choosing traditional domestic roles. The option for Lisa in the model is to eschew
traditional domestic roles, either by not marrying, not having children, not raising
children as they would have them raised, or by getting Larry to do the domestic
work. Each of these thwarts Lisa’s desires except the last one. That option, though,
requires agreement by Larry and results in lower living standards for the family as a
whole, because of the original wage gap. Relative to the choices men face, relative
to what the situation would be if there were no original wage gap, these are bad
options. More importantly, they are unfair. Women’s freedom of choice here is like
that of the marriage market illustration of section 2: women’s freedom is complete
only within an unjust framework of options. Any acceptable background moral
theory would regard this fundamental asymmetry in the available life choices and
power as unfair. Thus, women are coerced in making the choice to eschew eco-
nomic power and status for domestic servitude. So I conclude that the vicious cycle
is coercive. This implies that women are oppressed by the vicious cycle phenome-
non, and thus, by means of their own individually rational choices.
There are other groups of women who also face vicious cycles of indirect eco-
nomic oppression. Young women who choose to be prostitutes in the face of grinding
poverty find that through that choice they not only make themselves vulnerable to
violence and disease, but they also strengthen the economic forces that oppress
them. In countries that suffer under enormous debts to the IMF, tourism is often
encouraged by the international community as a way of raising foreign revenue to pay
off their debts (Judd and Fainstein 1999; Sassen 2002, 254-274). When the women
then participate in the tourism industry as prostitutes, they build that industry,
which then sucks in more women, and crowds out other possible avenues of em-
ployment. Why would someone invest his capital in a marginally profitable
152 Forces of Oppression

manufacturing firm when he could own a very profitable brothel, after all? While it is
true that many women are forced into prostitution through violent coercion, the
majority are enticed by the promise of a wage. That is, like Lisa choosing to opt out
of the market, these women are making individually rational choices to become
prostitutes. Now prostitution is surely an occupation that has negative compensating
differentials; there can be few, if any, occupations that are more dirty, risky, and
undignified than that. But in countries such as Thailand where sex tourism is so-
profitable, there is little chance for women to earn a living in any other way, and the
treatment of women generally in society is very poor. Yet, in joining the sex work-
force these women are strengthening an industry that crowds out other opportuni-
ties. Furthermore, as sex tourism becomes a wider part of the economy, prostitution
comes to be seen as a legitimate way for women to have to earn a living. So, through
their own rational choices to become prostitutes (or to sell their daughters to
brothels), Thai women are reinforcing their own oppression.
Women who choose to do domestic labor abroad in order to support their
families may be making a rational choice under the circumstances, but once they
are abroad they find that they have little or no bargaining power in their rela-
tionships with employers and immigration authorities, and can be forced to take low
wages and acquiesce to poor working conditions. In working abroad they are not
building industries in their own countries that could help to provide opportunities
for themselves and other women to earn a living in their homeland. And this lack of
opportunity is precisely what lowers their bargaining power vis-a-vis their foreign
employers. Of course, any one poor woman would face insurmountable obstacles in
attempting to build a viable industry herself. Thus, in making their individually
rational choice to work abroad, they are reinforcing the forces of economic op-
pression that presented them with such poor options.

4.2. Choices of the Oppressed

Oppressed groups, particularly those who suffer economic oppression, generally face
similar structural constraints that cause them to structure their own preferences and
make decisions that then come to perpetuate their oppression. Persons sometimes do
this in the name of group identification or the tendency to form and exaggerate
ingroup-outgroup differences. Racial segregation in the United States offers a case in
point. Blacks and whites tend to live in different, segregated neighborhoods. The
direct economic forces of oppression (occupational segregation and opportunity in-
equality) have caused the lives of blacks and whites to differ considerably, and for
blacks to live in significantly poorer circumstances, on average, than whites. Since
Blacks tend to get information about job opportunities and form preferences about life
outcomes among other blacks, whose opportunities themselves have been (unfairly)
limited, they tend to form preferences for the kinds of lives that those opportunities
allow. Thus, in black ghettos in the inner city a proportion of male children dream of
becoming star athletes or rap stars far beyond their actual probability of succeeding in
those occupations, and failing that, figure that they will become drug dealers or
gangsters. Many female children choose to have children early (or perhaps they simply
do not choose not to have children early), giving them the illusion of independence
 Economic Forces of Oppression 153

early in life, but also effectively limiting their future opportunities to invest in human
capital that will reap significant financial and status returns. Although it may be a
rational calculation of their chances for middle-class success, the choice to prepare for
these lives often forecloses any opportunity to join the middle class and reveals that
their preferences have adapted to the opportunities available.
A Marxist analysis of the plight of the working class reveals another form of the
vicious cycle phenomenon. On the Marxist analysis, to put it in the language of
neoclassical economic theory, workers are induced to work for wages that allow the
owners of firms to make an economic profit because workers must work for wages to
survive while mere survival is not at stake for firm owners. But this increases the
bargaining power of the owners of capital to a greater degree than the workers, and
hence in future bargains the workers are no less able to capture some of that profit.
Now on the neoclassical theory, there is a problem with this analysis. If there is
economic profit to be made, then neoclassical theory says that new firms will enter
the field until there is no more profit. But that is only in the long run, and in the
meantime owners of capital are enriched, while workers remain roughly at subsis-
tence level. If workers were to act collectively, to pool what resources they have and
organize a strike, they could increase their bargaining power. Indeed this has been a
successful strategy for workers in the past. But that raises a collective action problem,
and as in the Larry-Lisa model, they would have to lower the total payoff (to workers
and firms) to implement this strategy. Furthermore, strikes are difficult on the in-
dividual workers’ families and have to be undertaken in the face of an uncertain
future. This causes, as is typical with collective action, a tendency for some to free
ride on the efforts of others.
The vicious cycle phenomena that we have examined each involve a charac-
teristic set of problems. First, there is an initial inequality that shapes the rational
decisions of the oppressed. Second, under some circumstances, the oppressed seem
to shape their preferences to embrace the feasible set of options they are faced with,
while under others, they seem to constrict their outlook about the possible alter-
natives, while under still others, they are faced with an insurmountable collective
action problem. That is, either they declare the grapes that they cannot reach to be
sour, or they decide that the grapes’ being out of reach is a fact that cannot be
changed and must be worked around. While it is clear that the first problem is a
case of injustice, it is not enough to point to it only once the second problem arises.
For the second problem is the crux of the indirect force of oppression: The op-
pressed are co-opted to help keep themselves in their oppressed state. Resisting this
second problem requires either changing the preferences of the oppressed or
changing their belief in their power to change the situation, a power that could only
come through collective action. In chapter 7 I will take up the problem of resistance
to indirect forces of oppression in some detail.

5. Conclusion

In this chapter I have discussed three main forms of economic oppression. First, I
discussed the notion that an economic system can be, in itself, oppressive. I argued
154 Forces of Oppression

that while slavery and serfdom are intrinsically oppressive, capitalism and socialism
are not. However, both systems lend themselves to oppression in characteristic ways,
and therefore each sort of system must take certain steps to guard against their
respective characteristic oppressions. While capitalism characteristically leads to
economic inequality, it can prevent poverty, or oppressive inequalities, of working or
unemployed classes through a guaranteed social minimum. While socialism char-
acteristically leads to domination by a permanent ruling elite, it can prevent op-
pression by developing mechanisms for participatory democratic control of the means
of production. Furthermore, both systems will be economically oppressive if they
allow invidious discrimination in housing, employment, or education, and so laws
against such discrimination must be avoided.
The second form of economic oppression is what I called the direct forces of
economic oppression, including enslavement, segregation, employment discrimi-
nation, group-based harassment, and opportunity inequality. Direct forces are re-
strictions on opportunities that are applied from the outside on the oppressed. They
may not always be clearly visible, either because they happen far from the reach of
legal authorities or from the view of consumers, or because they are diffused in a
large society, and only apparent from a statistical analysis and comparison among
social groups. But direct forces, once seen, are to be opposed immediately. The third
form of economic oppression is what I called the indirect force of economic op-
pression, or oppression by choice, where the oppressed are co-opted into making
individual choices that add to their own oppression. When this force is at work the
oppressed are faced with options that rationally induce them to choose against the
collective good of their social group, and in the long run, against their own good as
well. But choosing otherwise requires choosing against their own immediate in-
terests, and changing their beliefs or preferences in ways that they may resent.
Economic forces of oppression are particularly long-lasting when they involve this
combination of belief in the stability of and preference for the status quo by the
oppressed themselves. For in these cases it is not immediately clear that the status
quo is to be opposed directly by nonmembers of the oppressed groups, since that
heaps more harm on the oppressed. The indirect economic force of oppression is a
central cause of enduring oppression.
 Psychological Harms
of Oppression

1. Psychological Harm as a Force of Oppression

If oppression is a group phenomenon, and groups are constructed in part by ste-

reotypes, then it follows that stereotyping is a fundamental psychological mechanism
of oppression. Stereotypes, and the in-group/out-group formation processes that they
are a part of, form the groundwork for the possibility of oppression as a group
phenomenon. Stereotypes would be toothless, however, were it not for the objective
individual actions and social forces that align with and are directed by them. Being
excluded from a group that one wants to belong to or included in one that one does
not want to be included in is not, by itself, seriously harmful. Serious harms arise
when one is thereby made the object of violence, degradation, exploitation, dis-
crimination, social exclusion, or another force that makes one suffer psychologically
or materially. In this chapter I turn to the many nonviolent and noneconomic forces
of oppression. Human activity involves a great deal of symbolic activity, in the many
forms of language and image production, distribution, and consumption. Because our
psychological makeup is such that we are symbol-using beings, we have many ways of
harming each other with these symbolic activities. It turns out that the saying “sticks
and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me” is at best only
partially right: if the words make people think I (and my kind) deserve the sticks and
stones and so urge people to harm me, if they make me think that I am not worthy of
equal concern and respect, if they make others shun or exclude me, then the words
harm me too. In this chapter I discuss the symbolic ways that stereotyping gets its
teeth to become oppression of groups, rather than some fairly innocuous social
distinguishing that appropriately would be called “mere words.”
There are three important distinctions to clarify as I begin my discussion of
psychological harms of oppression. Psychological harm can be group-based or in-
dividual. Individual psychological harm happens when one individual is abused by
another person or persons not because of and not by means of their social group
membership. The abuse may be violent or it may be psychological—words or actions

155
156 Forces of Oppression

that denigrate, humiliate, disrespect, or terrorize. Group-based psychological harm

happens when an individual is so harmed because of her or his group membership.
In this case there are additional words that can do the psychological harm, namely,
racial epithets, gender slurs, and humiliating or degrading descriptions and images of
one’s social group. Oppressive psychological harm is group-based, by definition. As
with the distinction between random and group-based violence, the distinction
between individual and group-based psychological harm may be difficult to make in
practice. One difficulty arises when both parties are members of the same oppressed
group. I maintain that this is a case of individual and not group-based harm, even if
the words expressed by the perpetrator are the same words as words which, when
expressed by a member of a privileged group relative to the victim, would create
group-based psychological harm. For example, one woman calls another woman (of
the same race and class) a “crazy bitch.” Plainly this indicates hostility, anger,
perhaps hatred. But when spoken by a woman these words cannot carry with them
the same message or meanings as when spoken by a man, which indicate in addition
a threat to exercise masculine domination by violence or other systems of power
(legal, mental health, etc.) that accord automatically higher status and authority to
men than to women.
Another apparent difficulty for the distinction arises when the perpetrator of
psychological harm is from a group that is privileged relative to the victim’s social
group, but the perpetrator did not intend to commit a group-based harm or did not
use any of the conventional signs of the victim’s subordinate group status to transmit
the harm. As I have argued before in this book, the crucial factor in assessing group
status and harm is the effect on the victim, not the intention of the perpetrator. This
is true for two reasons: first because intention is difficult to assess, and second because
intentions may not be consciously admitted. Also, members of privileged groups
are often quite unaware of their privilege—their prerogative to ignore these group
relations is part of what constitutes their privileged status. Thus, in this case again, it
is the effect on the victim that matters, and if the harm brings up for the victim and is
transmitted through her subordinate status, then it is group-based harm.
A final problem arises for this distinction, then, when the victim herself does not
recognize the harm as group-based. Take for instance a relationship between a bat-
tering husband and his battered wife, where they both believe that violent and
psychologically abusive behavior is due to her failure adequately to perform her
“duties,” such as cleaning the house, satisfying him sexually, and keeping the children
quiet. Even if the wife does not believe that the abuse she suffers is part of group-based
oppression, what matters is whether it is in fact a part of the systematic violence
against women. That is, does the abuse fit the four criteria of oppression in the same
ways as other instances of the oppression of women? Is it harm that is unjust and
happens to her because she is a woman? If the answers to these questions are “yes”
then this psychological harm is objectively a part of oppression, and so only by in-
cluding these cases can we maintain an objective account of psychological oppression.
A second important distinction parallels the distinction drawn in chapter
five between direct and indirect economic forces of oppression. Direct psychologi-
cal forces cause inequality through the intentional actions of members of a domi-
nant group on members of a subordinate one. Indirect psychological forces cause
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 157

inequality through the choices and decisions of the members of the oppressed group
themselves, as they try to live in the face of other inequalities and injustices. As I
argued in chapter 5 regarding economic forces, it is important to distinguish these
two forces for both normative and descriptive reasons. Normatively, once the case
has been made that something is a direct force of oppression, the moral case for
opposing it has already been made, whereas the issues of responsibility and remedy
are not so immediate for indirect forces. The descriptive reason in the case of
psychological force is more complex than in the economic case. While all psycho-
logical forces must be internal to the victim’s psychology in order to harm, indirect
forces work through the psychology of the oppressed to mold them and co-opt them
to result in choices and decisions that harm the oppressed while benefiting the
privileged. As with indirect economic force, I argue that indirect psychological force
is the key to understanding how oppression can be so enduring.
A third distinction in psychological forces of oppression has to do with how the
force is applied and can be drawn between thoée that are more directly applied to an
individual and those that are diffused throughout the culture. Andrew Kernohan
(1998, xi) draws an analogy with pollution to illuminate this distinction in a dis-
cussion of what he calls cultural oppression. Pollution develops in two ways, either
as a large point-source, where the source can be definitely located, or as a non-point
source, where the pollution comes from many small sources that are diffused
throughout the environment. When the sources of pollution are small, they are not
harmful in themselves, but only become harmful when they become part of the
larger set of sources which together make up a polluting mess that cannot be
effectively dissipated in the environment. Likewise, some psychological forces of
oppression can only be seen when they are taken together as a whole set of small
slights or insults against a group. Stereotypes themselves happen in this latter,
cultural way. That is, one person’s belief that certain sets of persons typically exhibit
a particular characteristic does not make a stereotype. It becomes a stereotype of a
social group only when this belief is widespread. Following Kernohan, I will call
these two kinds of psychological forces ‘‘point-source” and “cultural” when it is
necessary to distinguish them. This distinction parallels the distinction between
violence or a direct threat of violence and the threat of violence suffered by op-
pressed persons who feel threatened by a heightened degree of violence against
members of their group. Violence happens when someone is forcefully, physically
injured. Threats of violence can be directly made, or they can simply exist, diffuse in
the community, because others with similar social characteristics regularly suffer
from violence. Likewise, while individual psychological forces are or stem from face-
to-face assertions of differential power and value directed at persons because of their
perceived group membership, cultural psychological forces form the background
social beliefs and desires within which we perceive ourselves and others and act on
those beliefs and desires. Like tacit threats of violence, cultural psychological forces
can be invisible and insidious.
Since members of social groups see themselves as sharing some attributes or
features (if only the feature of being lumped under similar stereotypes by others and
thus treated similarly), they will be threatened with harm upon learning of other
members of their group being harmed. Thus, group-based psychological harm spreads
158 Forces of Oppression

from the immediate victims to others when the harms are publicly or widely rec-
ognized. Both direct and indirect forces of oppression work through stereotypes to
create and maintain a social environment in which persons are stereotyped and their
actions thereby constrained. The forces of oppression that I discuss here each have a
large literature in a variety of fields, from social history to philosophy to literature to
psychology and sociology. I cannot hope to do justice to this literature; instead my
purpose here is to show how the psychological forces of oppression tie into the
psychological theory of stereotyping that I have argued for, and the larger social force
account of oppression I am offering in this book.

2. Direct Psychological Forces

Direct psychological harms are intentionally inflicted by dominant on subordinate

groups. These forces can be applied by either large point sources that cause harm in
themselves, or by small and diffuse but frequently encountered cultural sources. I
begin this section by discussing the psychological harms brought on by large point
sources. These include terror and trauma, humiliation and degradation, and objec-
tification. Terror and trauma are caused by violence and the threat of violence.
Violence, almost by definition, originates outside the victim, but threats require the
victim to participate psychologically to generate the threat, ifonly by processing the in-
formation. Humiliation, degradation, and feelings of shame in oppressed persons are
brought on by many direct forces of psychological oppression, including degrading
images of one’s social group, hate speech or group defamation, harassment, and social
distancing. These are direct forces because they originate externally through the
direct confrontation by privileged others who intend to generate these feelings in
their victims. Feelings of shame and lowered self worth may also rebound indirectly
through oppressed individuals’ psychologies from material forces of oppression, as
well as from the direct psychological forces, and I discuss these indirect forces of
psychological oppression in the following section. The third category of direct psy-
chological oppression is objectification, which happens when persons in social groups
are systematically treated as objects, or as Kant would put it, as means to another’s
ends and not as ends in themselves. This force may be applied as a large point source
(such as when men rape women) or in a culturally diffuse way (such as when women
are objectified in a culture that systematically portrays them as objects for men’s
sexual pleasure). The final three categories of direct psychological forces are all
clearly non-point, cultural sources. Tradition and convention form, in my view, one
category because together they form the given background of social meaning that
defines the constraints of agency for a culture, even if one rejects or objects to the
given dominant cultural traditions and conventions. Religion is an immensely im-
portant source of tradition, with its own self-justifying belief system, so I treat it as its
own category. A third category of non-point sources is ideology, by which I mean the
more or less intentionally created beliefs of a culture. These political, social, and
scientific theories purport to offer rationalizations of mere tradition and convention.
Described this way one might question the distinction between religion and ideology.
I have separated them mainly because religion, or theological belief, tends to be
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 159

older, less subject to intentional change, and less subject to critique by evidence or
experience than the other sorts of theories, and thus closer to a tradition or habit
than to a justificatory theory. Although nothing hangs on this distinction from the
perspective of a theory of oppression, the question of how to resist this force of
oppression may well be affected by the degree to which religion is more or less like
scientific theory. The final category is cultural domination, which refers to the force
exerted on minority cultures to assimilate or defer to the majority culture practices.

2.1. Point Sources

2.1.1. TERROR AND PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA
Through violence and the threat of violence, terror reinforces the domination of
some groups by other groups in all cases of oppression. The trauma that violence and
threats of violence cause often has severe, continuing psychological effects that
themselves create further harm long after the perpetrator is gone or the threat has
been withdrawn. These effects ramify the material effects of oppression by making
their victims less able effectively to cope with the everyday challenges of life. When
these effects are concentrated in a social group, the effect is to further the stereotypes
of the group as inferior.
According to the psychiatrist Judith Herman, “Psychological trauma is an af-
fliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless
by overwhelming force” (Herman 1992, 33). She distinguishes three main cate-
gories of symptoms of PTSD: hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction. Persons with
PTSD go into state of alert as if danger might return at any moment, even when
danger is past and the alertness is maladaptive. People with PTSD have a variety of
other energy-sapping symptoms. They take longer to fall asleep and awaken more
frequently; they are often afraid and mistrustful. Secondly, persons with PTSD often
suffer from intrusive thoughts about their experience of violence, living through the
event as if it were continually recurring in the present. Reliving a traumatic ex-
perience carries with it the emotional intensity of the trauma event. However,
memories of trauma are fixed, frozen; they do not assimilate into other memories in
a linear way, and they lack verbal narrative and context. Thus, they are difficult to
process and deflate. PTSD often causes victims to reenact the scene of trauma,
whether in play (mainly for children) or through taking dangerous risks. Third,
persons with PTSD also suffer from periods of dissociation from reality, either where
they are in a state of surrender to the inevitable or an altered state of consciousness.
“These detached states of consciousness are similar to hypnotic trance states. They
share the same features of surrender of voluntary action, suspension of initiative and
critical judgment, subjective detachment or calm, enhanced perception of imagery,
altered sensation, including numbness and analgesia, and distortion of reality, in-
cluding depersonalization, de-realization, and change in the sense of time” (Herman
1992, 43). Thus, there is a typical psychological dialectic of trauma: The contra-
dictory responses of intrusion and constriction alternate, often at the extremes of
each. “The instability produced by these periodic alterations further exacerbates the
traumatized person’s sense of unpredictability and helplessness. The dialectic of
160 Forces of Oppression

trauma is therefore potentially self-perpetuating” (Herman 1992, 47). For most,

though, intrusion gives way to constriction, in the form of a more general state of
anxiety and fear. But this is also often accompanied by feelings that the victim is just
going through the motions of life, a kind of disengagement.
Trauma severely disrupts human relationships and the trust that victims have
in other people and in the divine. Trauma thus makes it more difficult for oppressed
persons to cooperate in many projects that might ease or erase the material effects of
oppression. Another effect of the isolating tendency of trauma is that victims tend
to believe that little can be done to make their lives bearable. Estimates of suicides
of trauma victims are controversial, but some studies show that a significant mi-
nority (19 percent) attempt suicide. Purposive action and social cooperation help
the traumatized individuals to recover and to resist oppression. Indeed, clinical
studies show the more stress-resistant individuals seem to be those who are highly
sociable, with thoughtful and active coping style, and strong perception of ability to
control their own destiny (Herman 1992, 58). The last element here explains why
privileged persons would be more stress resistant than persons from oppressed
groups. This creates its own vicious cycle for the oppressed: they are more vul-
nerable to the psychological harm of trauma owing to their oppressed status, that is,
the fact that they are less able to control their destiny, and once traumatized they
are reinforced in their beliefs that they are less able to control their destiny and thus
suffer greater harm by the trauma.
Although some persons are more resistant to trauma than others, trauma is
nearly inevitable for most persons given severe enough violence or threat. The most
powerful determinant of whether there will be psychological harm and how great it
will be is the character of the traumatic event, not the individual personality of the
victim. There is a typical dose response to trauma: the greater the exposure (in
terms of time, number of events, or intensity of event) to traumatic events the
higher probability of suffering PTSD and the longer the duration of the affliction.
Element of surprise, threat of death, deliberate malice of perpetrators all add to the
intensity of an event (Herman 1992, 57).
Herman argues that prolonged, repeated trauma raises further issues for its
victims beyond the episodic trauma of the immediate victim of a single violent
event. Of particular importance to this study is that prolonged, inescapable trauma
co-opts the victim—the captive—into willing acceptance of her circumstances.
Prolonged trauma, which happens when victims are trapped in captivity, such as in
prisons, concentration camps, religious cults, rape camps, brothels, and (cruel and
controlling) families, creates a situation of coercive control, where constant vio-
lence is not necessary to maintain the subordination. In these situations there is
someone who is clearly in control and not just intentionally using force against the
captive, but doing so with the purpose of keeping that person in a certain place and
carrying out certain tasks. Creation of a willing victim is the goal of the captor.
There are well-known material and psychological techniques for doing so. Initially,
violence is used to traumatize the captive. As I described previously, if the violence
is intense enough or lasts long enough, this causes most individuals to respond by
withdrawing inward and desensitizing themselves to reality, making them less likely
to strike back. Threats of further violence against the victim or persons or animals
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 161

close to the victim are then used by captors to maintain terror and trauma. Typical
techniques of captors include inconsistent and unpredictable outbursts, capricious
enforcement of petty rules, and destruction of the captive’s autonomy by strict rules
about dress and diet. The isolation of the captive is further enhanced by disrupting
and minimizing their connections with friends and family. This causes victims to
forge ties with perpetrators for material and emotional sustenance. It begins often
with unwilling compliance for the sake of a reward or just a lessening of torture
(Herman 1992, ch. 4). Kevin Bales, whose work on modern slavery has been
pathbreaking, writes of the Thai girls forced into sexual slavery:

In time, confusion and disbelief fade, leaving dread, resignation, and a break in the
conscious link between mind and body. Now the girl does whatever it takes to
reduce the pain, to adjust mentally to a life that means being used by fifteen men
a day. The reaction to this abuse takes many forms: lethargy, aggression, self-
loathing, suicide attempts, confusion, self-abuse, depression, full-blown psychoses,
and hallucinations. Girls who have been freed and taken into shelters exhibit all of
these disorders. Rehabilitation workers report that the girls suffer emotional in-
stability; they are unable to trust or to form relationships, to readjust to the world
outside the brothel, or to learn and develop normally. (Bales 1999, 59)

Captives’ compliance becomes more automatic and eventually is offered pre-

emptively. At this point it is not necessary to use violence often, and the coercion
becomes less obvious to the outsider, as well as to the captive and the captor. Bales
notes, “when slaves begin to accept their role and identify with their master, con-
stant physical bondage becomes unnecessary. They come to perceive their situation
not as a deliberate action taken to harm them in particular but as a part of the
normal, if regrettable, scheme of things” (Bales 2002, 84).
Prolonged endurance of traumatic events and the inability, perceived or actual,
to escape from them thus entails additional psychological harms on the victims.
Herman calls this further psychological harm from violently enforced captivity
“Complex PTSD,” claiming that this newly named syndrome better accounts for
prolonged trauma. Complex PTSD is properly diagnosed, she claims, when the
following factors are present:

. History of subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period;

. Alterations in affect regulation;
. Alterations in consciousness;
. Alterations in self-perception (helplessness, shame, guilt, self-blame);
m=
nb
wn. Alterations in perception of perpetrator, including an unrealistic attri-
bution of total power to perpetrator, idealization or paradoxical grati-
tude, acceptance of belief system or rationalizations of perpetrator;
. Alterations in relations with others (distrust);
ronAlterations in systems of meaning (loss of sustaining faith; hopelessness
and despair). (Herman 1992, 21)

This description fits many individuals who are members of oppressed social groups
and who are subject to the most immediate forces of the oppression of those groups.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, chronicled the psychological effects of
162 Forces of Oppression

systematic, state-sponsored violence on its victims in the Algerian resistance to

French colonialism. Violence and the credible threat of violence bring about in
persons terror, and feelings of inferiority, shame, and hopelessness. They bring about
a variety of psychoses and neuroses in some victims and make others resign them-
selves to being dominated. Fanon describes how the victims of torture suffered from
deep sadness, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, motor instability, lack of interest in life,
inability to construct moral arguments or justifications, and phobias related directly
to the forms of torture inflicted upon them (Fanon 1963, 272-289). He argues that
the feelings of resignation were much more widespread, however, reaching out to the
Algerians who were subjected only to the everyday insults and deprivations of life
under colonial rule. As with the slaves described by Bales, these everyday constraints
caused many of the people to passively resign themselves to their lives. “A belief in
fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty
is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration
ordained by God, he bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of
interior re-stabilization acquires a kind of stony calm” (Fanon 1963, 54-55).
This sense of resignation to fate describes the situation of members of social
groups where all the members of the social group are subject to a “history of sub-
jection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period.” The oppression of women
exemplifies these features of captivity. There are the immediate victims of violence
and captivity in the women who are raped, subject to domestic violence, or forced
into prostitution. While rape is typically episodic, domestic violence situations and
prostitution are often situations of long-term captivity. The typical behavior of
abusive men includes isolating the woman from her outside acquaintances, con-
trolling her dress and diet, setting petty rules, arbitrary and violent outbursts for
violations of those petty rules, and occasional emotional rewards. The systematic use
of coercive techniques to break women in prostitution is so typical that it is known
among its practitioners as “seasoning.”
I maintain that women as a group suffer from the trauma of subjection to
totalitarian control. Of course, not all women suffer from all the symptoms of PTSD
or complex PTSD—not all women have flashbacks to traumatic events or suffer from
a pervasive sense of hopelessness and despair. Rather, they suffer in two senses from a
group-based trauma. First, women as a group suffer from the fact that trauma is a
common feature of women’s lives. That is, the image of the group is shaped by the
image of the victim of trauma. Stereotypes of women as hysterical, not quite rational,
given to sudden rage or tears all may well have their roots in the fact that many
women are subject to traumatic violence. Worse, the dominance of men over women
that creates these traumas is made to seem natural by various social institutions.
Pornography eroticizes this sort of control of women by men, making women’s sexual
submission to men appear natural and normal to both men and women. Domestic
relations that are structured by the threat of violence or economic coercion make the
dominance of men in even nonviolent families seem natural or at least normal, that
is, to be expected. Second, to a milder extent than immediate victims of violence,
most women do share some of the effects of complex PTSD. There is a history of
subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period; women often suffer from a
pervasive sense of shame, as I shall discuss below; women often do think of men in
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 163

completely unrealistic ways, as captor, savior, or ruler, and typically they accept the
belief systems or rationalizations of men for their dominance.

2.1.2. HUMILIATION AND DEGRADATION

Persons who are members of oppressed groups often are made to feel humiliated or
degraded by their status and by the unappealing stereotypes that are applied to them.
To feel degraded is to feel lowered, less worthy of equal dignity and respect than
other persons. Degradation that comes to individuals as a result of oppression comes
to groups through the stereotypical images that apply to the group. A group is
degraded when their image is lowered in worth relative to that of other groups.
Because of the negative stereotypes that attach to oppressed groups, nearly all op-
pressed persons feel degradation and the consequent shame. Privileged groups
cannot suffer degradation at the hands of others, though they may (objectively,
relative to some moral conceptions of human worth) degrade themselves by being an
oppressor group. Various social structures may cause degrading group harms. Ste-
reotypes of blacks as lazy or violent harm all individual blacks. A practice of dis-
crimination against the disabled in employment harms all disabled persons. In both
cases the group is in a relatively powerless position. These practices reinforce neg-
ative stereotypes about these groups, degrading the social perception of their groups
in a downward spiral. Blacks who cannot work because they are seen as lazy appear to
be lazy because they do not work. The disabled who cannot work because of dis-
crimination appear to themselves and others to be unable to work.
When persons are subjected to unequal treatment as a result of their social
group membership, they feel shame. If the causes of the feeling seem to one to be
unjust, it may cause one to feel envious and angry. In her novel Woman on the Edge
of Time, Marge Piercy writes poignantly of the experience of degradation through
the character of Connie:
How did they stay so young? Did they take pills? Something kept them intact years
longer, the women with clean hair smelling of Arpege. The women went on through
college and got the clean jobs and married professional men and lived in houses
filled with machines and lapped by grass. She had not looked that young since—
since before Angelina was born.
Envy, sure, but the sense too of being cheated soured her, and the shame, the
shame of being second-class goods. Wore out fast. Shoddy merchandise. “We wear
out so early,” she said to the mirror, not really sure who the “we” was. Her life was
thin in meaningful “we’s”. Once she had heard a social worker talking about Puerto
Ricans, or “them” as they were popularly called in that clinic (as were her people in
similar clinics in Texas), saying that “they” got old fast and died young, so the
student doing her field work assignment shouldn’t be surprised by some of the
diseases they had, such as TB. It reminded her of Luis talking about the tropical fish
he kept in his living room, marriage after marriage: Oh, they die easily, those neon
tetras, you just buy more when your tank runs out. (Piercy 1976, 35-36)

Connie’s belief that she and other members of her social group (Puerto Rican
women) are objectively, materially degraded leads to both shame and anger, but also
a sense of resignation.
164 Forces of Oppression

As psychologists have amply demonstrated, people like to think well of

themselves; we have a deep desire for self-esteem and self-respect. Where self-
esteem is valuing oneself highly, self-respect is the belief that one is worthy of a high
value. Self-esteem often comes from self-respect. Self-esteem is often taken to be
what philosophers call an intrinsic good, a good that is desirable in itself and not
only for the sake of what it brings.’ Self-esteem is also an instrumental good,
though; it makes possible the confidence and the will to compete, to resist op-
pression, to help others, or even to enjoy everyday pursuits. Persons who are hu-
miliated or degraded suffer from a loss of self-esteem. Humiliation and degradation
give rise to shame, as well. Shame arises when one feels that one is lacking in some
important way, one is not good enough or not as good as others. While shame is
episodic for members of dominant classes, arising mainly when individuals transgress
moral norms, shame is “a pervasive sense of personal inadequacy” for the oppressed
(Bartky 1990, 84). Shame arises from felt inadequacies or shortcomings. Since
stereotypes of subordinated groups depict their members as inadequate, shame is an
inevitable consequence of oppression, and especially of those forces of oppression
that most serve to remind the oppressed of these negative stereotypes.
Oppressed persons are directly humiliated and degraded through hate speech or
group defamation, harassment, social distancing, social distrust, and objectification.
Hate speech takes the forms of racial, ethnic, and sexual epithets, as well as more
subtle forms such as gestures and other expressions of disrespect and disdain aimed
at persons because of their group status. Group defamation is the expression of
opinions about the attributes of members of a social group that are largely false and
serve to incite or justify other forms of psychological and material harm against the
members of the group. This includes speculations about the essential biological basis
for inferiority of groups and other rationalizations for discrimination against indi-
viduals classified as individuals belonging to that group (Matsuda et al. 1993).”
Harassment includes but is not limited to hate speech and group defamation,
and is directed against nearly all oppressed groups in one form or another. Sexual
harassment is the most well known because it is now a part of the law, even if its
enforcement is not yet effective. One kind, called quid pro quo sexual harassment,
involves coercive threats and offers by employers or educators. Quid pro quo sexual
harassment is a kind of direct sexual objectification (which I discuss below) that
sends the message to women that they are welcome only as sex objects. The other
kind is hostile environment sexual harassment, in which employers, educators, fellow
workers, or fellow students? create a work or learning environment that not only is
hostile to productive work or education but also that cause women and girls, and in -
some cases gay persons, a variety of psychological and material harms. Gender ha-
rassment, which differs from sexual harassment in that it does not involve explicit
teferences to sexual activity but attacks women as members of the dominated group,
harms women in much the same way. These send the message to women that they
are not welcome in the workplace or the classroom, or that they are only welcome as
sex objects or house servants. Harassment against gays and lesbians commonly in-
volves hostility or violence more than coercive offers (though the latter is not
unheard of—consider blackmailing closeted gays and lesbians). Racial and ethnic
harassment also often begins with hate speech or group defamation, including threats
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 165

of or intimidating references to slavery or lynching, and then may escalate to vio-

lence. Since harassment involves sending a message to individuals that, because of
their group status, they are unwanted or inferior, harassment can raise feelings of
shame or inferiority only in members of oppressed groups, because such messages
could only be harmful or plausible to someone who is a member of such groups.
White men cannot be sent the message that they are inferior because of their group
status; they can be unwanted because of their group status, but only by those from
whose fellowship they could not gain much materially.
Social distancing refers to a well recognized and measured phenomenon among
social psychologists, in which persons physically move away from, as if disgusted or
affronted by, persons in certain social groups. Nearly all oppressed groups suffer from
this form of humiliating treatment (Lott and Maluso 1995). Social distrust consists
in taking someone to be less trustworthy or less authoritative than is warranted by
clear and direct evidence because of their social grouping. Some examples should
suffice to get the reader to recognize the phenomenon.
¢ An American black man, well dressed and with a sophisticated manner,
gets into an elevator in a fancy Jerusalem hotel. The white American
woman already in the elevator clutches her purse and shrinks away
(Thomas 1990).
¢ A woman says something relevant and important in a meeting. Her
contribution is ignored. A man later says the same thing. He is warmly
congratulated (Sadker and Sadker 1994, vii).*
* A middle-class black college professor is regularly followed around in
stores by clerks in the Midwestern town where he lives and works.°
Social distrust makes people feel that they are not wanted or that their contributions
are not valued, and it makes it more difficult for people to make the kinds of
cooperative agreements that materially benefit them. While social distrust of some
groups is manifested as fear or avoidance, for women it is not fear but rather a denial
of cognitive authority or physical respect. Women, like children or the disabled, are
more likely to suffer from being disregarded or being taken as no threat at all. Their
space is more likely to be intruded upon or their bodies touched inappropriately or
carelessly. These kinds of affronts further reinforce the stereotypes of weakness,
insignificance, vulnerability that afflict women, children, and the disabled.

2.1.3. OBJECTIFICATION

Objectification as a direct force of psychological oppression refers to treating dom-

inated persons as mere objects, ignoring their full and equal status as persons. Ob-
jectifying treatment involves an epistemic and a pragmatic dimension: first, seeing
something as an object for the satisfaction of one’s desires, and secondly having the
power to force a person to be that object. Sexual objectification has received con-
siderable attention as a result of the feminist movement (MacKinnon 1983, 1987;
Haslanger 2002), but slaves are clearly objectified, as are workers whose basic hu-
man needs are ignored for the sake of squeezing out more profits. Hannah Arendt
talks about the treatment of Jews by the Germans during the Holocaust as a literal
166 Forces of Oppression

objectification: the Germans made the Jews into mere tools, homo faber, to build their
war machine (Bar On 2002, ch. 4).
On the definition given above, objectification is necessarily an unjust harm,
since it involves disregarding the deep moral equality of human persons. What is it to
disregard the deep moral equality of human persons? Humans have qualities and
abilities that other things lack that make us special, and humans ought to be pre-
served and protected for these qualities, not simply because they are genetically hu-
man. What makes humans morally special in the animal world is that we have the
capacity for a sense of the good and the right, the capacity to desire, to value, and to
plan for a future to be lived expressing those desires and values. These abilities are
threshold goods; they are fully active once they exist at a certain threshold. Any
other things that would prove to have these qualities and abilities at that threshold
level would thereby qualify for similarly reverent treatment. On these grounds,
humans are morally superior to mere objects, as well as to nonhuman animals (as far
as we know). Humans with normally developed human brains all have these capa-
cities; even if some have a greater capacity for deliberation about means or ends than
others. Since all such humans rise above the threshold for having these qualities and
abilities, they are morally equal, and equally deserving of the right to exercise these
capacities.© Dehumanizing objectification robs someone of their right to express
these unique qualities, and that is what makes it deeply morally wrong. Treating
persons this way psychologically harms them because it is humiliating and degrading,
and to succeed in treating persons in this way usually requires traumatizing or
terrorizing them, or instilling in them the belief that they are unworthy of equal
treatment because of their social group status.
Slavery objectifies, not simply by employing a person as a tool, since legitimate
and fulfilling work does this as well, but rather by treating the slave as someone who
does not have desires and values of her own. Patricia Williams writes of slave laws,
“I would characterize the treatment of blacks by whites in their law as defining
blacks as those who had no will” (Williams 1991, 219). That is, the legal chattel
slavery treated black persons as if they were not capable or worthy of living ac-
cording to their own desires, values, and plans, and so as if they were less than
human. By treating people as if they were less than human by virtue of their group
membership, objectification constructs and strengthens stereotypes of those groups
as inferior, as less capable of planning and directing their own lives than those from
privileged social groups.
The sexual objectification of women involves taking women to have a nature that
suits them to be objects for the sexual pleasure of men, that is, to naturally desire to
fulfill men’s wish that they be subordinate to men, to fulfill men’s desires rather than to
seek to know and fulfill their own (Haslanger 2002, 228). When women are treated as
though they have no sexual desires of their own, or as if their desires can be dismissed
because they have no rights to fulfill them, or as if their desires can be manipulated by
coercive offers of promotions and the like, they are objectified. Pornography objec-
tifies women by portraying them as willingly complying with the violent sexual desires
of men. It eroticizes the objectification of women.
Apart from directly objectifying actions, there is also a sense in which our culture
constantly, tacitly sexually objectifies women so commonly as to constitute direct,
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 167

cultural, psychological oppression. Women are sexually objectified in this indirect

sense when as a gender they are taken to be the representatives of sex and sexual
passivity, for example, when goods are marketed to men by displaying women as
objects of adornment or sexual pleasure, or through beauty pageants and pompon
squads. Law objectifies women when it requires them to be the sex that is to be
primarily the servant of the unborn, when, for instance, fetal protection laws are
enforced against women but drug treatment programs for pregnant women or pre-
natal care is not available. This is especially the case when men’s actions that risk
harm to fetuses, say men’s consumption of drug’s or alcohol, are not illegal or even
considered problematic enough to warrant further research. Abortion laws, which
enforce pregnancy in unwilling women, also objectify in this way (Cudd 1990).’

2.2. Cultural Sources

2.2.1. TRADITION AND CONVENTION
Oppression, as I hope is clear by this point, is not a momentary event but rather a
long-term process, consisting of many events against a historical background of still
previous events. It exists in the historical facts of systematic social domination of
social groups by other social groups, which, like Rome, could not be built in a day.
Traditions and conventions are social institutions, which I defined in chapter 2 as
constraints that specify behavior in specific recurrent situations, that are tacitly,
commonly known by some nontrivial subset of society, and that are either self-policed
or policed by some external authority Oppressive conditions are maintained as tra-
ditions and conventions that constrain persons’ thought and behavior according to
the social groups in which they are categorized and categorize themselves. Although
communitarians, among others, have helped us to see the many valuable aspects of
traditions for persons, tradition and the social conventions that make them up are
among the most powerful indirect forces of oppression. Tradition can be defined as
the set of beliefs and values, rituals, and practices, formal and informal, explicit and
implicit, that are held by and constitute a culture. Traditions are typically followed
unquestioningly. They are only questioned when they are in danger of being dis-
carded. Like paradigms in periods of normal science, traditions constitute the back-
ground social meanings within which persons can act in meaningful ways. Because
tradition constitutes social meaning, though, it is the vehicle by which oppressive
beliefs and desires are formed. Oppressive beliefs are those according to which
some persons are judged to be of lower worth because of their group membership.
Kernohan (1998, ch. 1) explains how traditions can give rise to pervasive
oppressive beliefs in his discussion of what he terms “cultural oppression.” Our
beliefs about value come largely given to us by our culture. That is, we learn them as
small children when we are not in a position to question them, from our parents
and other significant adults, who in their turn learned them from their parents
and others, and so forth. This is not to say that we cannot question those values and
beliefs, but only to a degree. Although we can question our values, we cannot
question all of them at once, or even all of them eventually taken one by one.
Furthermore, we rarely have reason to question the values we have. The background
168 Forces of Oppression

beliefs we have are the shared meanings of our culture, and they allow us to for-
mulate the beliefs and desires against which some of the beliefs and desires can be
understood and questioned.®
People learn values and beliefs not only through explicit tellings but also
through the implicit signs of whom is to be valued, for what and how. One of the
ways that we learn values from our culture is through the distribution of goods in
society. “People will learn the ethical meaning of goods—what their values are and
to whom they are appropriate—on a case-by-case basis from their cultural envi-
ronment” (Kernohan 1998, 64). Thus, members of economically deprived social
groups will be seen as of lower value. What does economic deprivation have to do
with tradition? Many of the mechanisms of deprivation that we examined in chapter
5 can be seen as policing a traditional division of labor, such as slavery, discrimi-
nation, segregation, and harassment. Another way we learn values from our culture
is through the status that is accorded to various occupations. Religious traditions
that keep women out of the priesthood, the clergy, or the rabbinate, and so on, and
thereby keep them from some of the highest status occupations of the culture teach
us that women are less worthy than men. Since cultures transmit values through
tradition that individuals find unavoidable, those values often include unequally
valuing persons according to the social group to which they are seen as belonging.
Convention refers specifically to regularities in behavior that exist to solve a
particular, social interaction problem for a culture, and, because the solutions are
common knowledge, they are stable regularities. In the language of game theory,
conventions solve coordination problems, which are situations in which there are
several possible ways to coordinate peoples’ interests, but everyone has to choose the
same solution in order for everyone to be satisfied to some degree.” Many traditions
are conventions, but traditions need not be even that rational, in that there may be
no problem that a particular aspect of a tradition solves. The important thing to see
about convention here is that the coordination problem that is solved may be what is
called a “mixed motive” game. That is, it may be that one solution benefits part of
the society more than another solution. When conventions are regularly and typi-
cally skewed to advantage one social group and disadvantage another, they are
oppressive. Yet it may seem churlish, not to mention futile because of their stability,
to complain about any one of them. Consider the expectation that when men and
women are in a car together men usually drive, or the traditional marriage proposal
that has men asking women and women only agreeing or refusing. There are many
examples of mixed motive coordination problems solved in favor of men in the
conventional relations of men and women. For instance, the sexual double standard
according to which women are supposed to be “chaste and modest” as Hume put it,
and men can be open about sexual desires and their fulfillment, could be seen as a
convention that solves the problem of determining (genetic) parenthood. But an-
other conventional solution would be for both sexes to be chaste and modest. Still
another would be for there to be a conventional agreement on social parenthood,
and not to be concerned about the genetic contributions. Traditions often involve
conventional aspects, such as traditional clothing of women, which is typically un-
comfortable and mobility-reducing. Clothing style is conventional in that many
other styles and forms are possible but one set is adopted in order to solve the
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 169

problem of group identification and to serve the purpose of recognizing specific

occasions acknowledged by the group as important. Deviations from clothing con-
ventions for both genders are policed by both men and women. In most cultures the
conventions for women are more constraining physically and involve either nearly
total coverage of the body or are sexually revealing and even enhancing. In either
case the clothing conventions of women reinforce sexual objectification by either
coding women as already possessed and thus forbidden sexual objects or as available
objects for casual consumption of men. Individuals participate in the conventions
one at a time against the background of given conventions and traditions upheld by
the others. No one wants to risk being the only one to violate it for fear of social
ostracism. But the greater the conformity to the convention, the more difficult it is
for any one member to break the convention. Persons in subordinate groups fear
breaking conventions even more than those in dominant groups, since the subor-
dinates already are close to ostracism. Even oppressive conventions are stable and
policed by the oppressed themselves.
Tradition and convention explain the stability of oppressive social institutions.
Tradition forms the background against which our actions have meaning and thus
can only be questioned at the margins and one at a time. When a culture values a
social group higher than another, its traditions often reflect that and code that social
group as less worthy. Conventional arrangements are often systematically skewed in
favor of one social group and against the interests of another. Since the existence of a
convention can be seen as an improvement on there being no convention at all for
even the disfavored group, and since conventions are commonly known, they are
very difficult to destruct and reconstruct in favor of another group.

2.2.2. RELIGION

Religion is a form of tradition, by far the most pervasive (within individuals and
societies) and important for most persons. Religion is consciously self-justifying, for it
purports to offer reasons for following its prescribed traditions, either by reference to
divine inspiration or maintenance of the “chosen” group identity. Religion not only
helps to make oppression acceptable to both the oppressed and the oppressor groups,
in some cases it constitutes oppression by aligning one social group with the sacred and
another with the profane. It works both subconsciously and consciously to reinforce
the material forces of oppression. There are religious groups that do not cooperate
with existing forms of oppression, but they are few. Most religions form a substantial
bulwark in the oppression of women, by distinguishing sharply between the religious
value of men and women and permitting or even requiring their differential roles and
treatment. Some religions actively proclaim social inequalities of groups, such as the
Hindu caste system. Many religions sustain existing racial or ethnic divides that
permit the in-group/out-group distinctions that we discussed in chapter 3. Distin-
guishing among groups of persons is an internal activity of nearly all religions. Perhaps
the most basic of these are the distinctions between the believers and the nonbe-
lievers, the enlightened and the unenlightened, the chosen and the damned.
Thai Buddhism, for example, constructs distinctions through its assertion that
everyone must repay the karmic debt accumulated in past lives with suffering in this
170 Forces of Oppression

life. This in turn justifies the mistreatment of some social groups, since it can be said
that their members are members of those groups in order to repay their karmic debt.
In Thailand this is a convenient way for brothel owners and pimps to keep their
prostitutes in line. Such beliefs encourage girls who are sex slaves to turn inward, as
they realize that they must have committed terrible sins in a past life to deserve
their enslavement and abuse. Their religion urges them to accept this suffering to
come to terms with it, and to reconcile themselves to their fate (Bales 1999, 62).
Religion is a powerful source of tradition and meaning, and thus it can serve to
keep even very brutal systems of oppression in line, by making those who suffer as
well as those who are privileged believe that God has chosen them for their fates.
Often, religion is a limited force for good as well as evil. In Mauritania, Kevin Bales
argues that “Religion serves both to protect slaves [in Mauritania] and to keep them
in bondage” (Bales 1999, 85). On the one hand the Koran requires the slaveholder
to show kindness to his slaves, but on the other hand it permits him to rape his
female slaves. Although the Koran says that only persons captured in holy wars may
be kept as slaves, and then only until they convert to Islam, Mauritania, which is
nominally Muslim and uses Sharia as its official legal system, enforces slaveholder’s
claims on their slaves. So ingrained is slavery in their way of life that “[flor many
older slaves, freedom is a dismal prospect. Deeply believing that God wants and
expects them to be loyal to their masters, they reject freedom as wrong, even
traitorous. To struggle for liberty, in their view, is to upset God’s natural order and
puts one’s very soul at risk” (Bales 1999, 108).
The support that religion gives to oppression is not limited to slavery. Religion is
an important force for constructing and justifying family life and the roles of women
and men within the family. Marriage is, in most cultures, a religious event first, and
only secondarily a civil status. Marriage vows in Christianity require women to
“honor and obey” their husbands, while not requiring obedience of husbands to
wives. Muslim rules for women and men are also asymmetric and unequal, giving
men the dominant status in public affairs. In Judaism, in all but the Reformed sect,
women and men are likewise prescribed separate roles, and women are unable to
serve as rabbis. No major religion of the world, in all of its branches, treats men and
women equally. Religions typically forbid homosexual unions and the power of re-
ligion to enforce this restriction can be seen in the current debate in the United
States over gay marriage. Even when termed “civil union” many persons use religious
arguments to oppose this legal status, despite the undeniable fact that the Consti-
tution (absent a specific amendment to the contrary) mandates its adoption as a
matter of equal treatment under the law demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment.

2.2.3. IDEOLOGY
By ideology I mean to refer to political, social, and scientific theories that purport to
offer rationalizations of tradition and convention. To be an objectionable ideology a
theory must be either false, exaggerated, or carried beyond its intended domain of
application, and it must be widely believed. Ideology is perpetrated by persons who
have an interest in maintaining the tradition or convention that the ideology up-
holds, and they may or may not believe the theory. These theories make traditions
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 171

and conventions more difficult to change by giving them the force of moral or
rational norm. The stereotypes created and maintained by those traditions and
conventions are then that much more difficult to overcome. Living in a way that
defies the stereotype that is upheld by ideology labels one immoral or irrational.
Ideology directly reinforces stereotypes because they are cognitive structures, and
hence influenced by the force of persuasion, which is what ideology offers.
One of the most potent ideologies is patriotism, in which persons come to
believe that their nation is superior to all others, even if that means reading evidence
through rose-colored glasses, or ignoring it altogether. People in the United States
may be among the guiltiest of this, believing in what has been called “American
exceptionalism,” which refers to the common belief that the United States is es-
pecially moral, respectful of human rights, and deserving of its place as the only
military superpower in the world (Lipset 1996). With this belief it is easy for many
American citizens to justify actions against other nations and peoples that would, if
undertaken by foreign nations, count as unjustified human rights abuses or violations
of international treaties and war crimes. Writers and intellectuals who deny
American exceptionalism and try to expose such abuses for what they are often find
themselves branded as extremists, as not quite rational, or perhaps even as disloyal.
Worse, such ideology rationalizes sending soldiers to carry out these immoral com-
mands. Soldiers have often been, and are today, from the working class or from
economically deprived backgrounds, having chosen that occupation from among a
small set of options. In believing the ideology, they accept their missions even when
the mission is unjust and they are unjustly coerced into undertaking it.
Science is an important source of ideology in the modern world, though of
course it would be a wild exaggeration to say that all science is ideology. An
example of ideological science comes from the “economics of the family.” Even
though “economics” comes from the Greek oikonomikos, meaning of or pertaining to
household management, the family has been much neglected by economic theory in
the past. Today we still see textbooks in which the family is overlooked in lists of
important social institutions because it is seen as a natural formation rather than a
social construct. In the history of the discipline we can see two basic models of the
family: the “household as individual (and father as head of it)” model, and recently,
under the influence of feminist economics and the women’s movement generally,
the “competing-but-unequal-agent model.” The first of these we can trace at least
to Hobbes, but perhaps is best summarized by the words of the early nineteenth-
century economist James Mill.

One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably
included in those of other individuals may be struck off without inconvenience. In
this light may be viewed all children, up to a certain age, whose interests are
involved in those of their parents. In this light also, women may be regarded, the
interests of almost all of whom is involved either in that of their fathers or in that of
their husbands. (Folbre and Hartmann 1988, 188)

This model assumes that women are under the protection of sovereign men, either
husbands or fathers, and that men would provide this protection without undue
selfishness. Men naturally care for their wives and children; there is no need to
172 Forces of Oppression

consider the constraints that structure this care and concern. This model made
attention to the family unnecessary theoretically; economic theory could assume
that the only individuals there were may or may not come attached with wife and
family, but that would be irrelevant data to the theory. Modeling the economy of the
household would be like modeling the economy of the individual—uninteresting.
For economics to even consider families as institutions goes against that ideo-
logical notion. In the 1960s economic theory began to take a look at the family with
what is called the “new home economics.” The 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics was
awarded to the founder of the new home economics, Gary Becker of the University of
Chicago, “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide
range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.” Becker’s
motivation was to try to apply economic theory to all sorts of areas of behavior that
had been overlooked by mainstream economics: crime, animal behavior, and drug
use, to name some others. Becker (1991) uses the same basic model of the family as
Hobbes and Mill, however. He models the family as acting to maximize total utility
(i.e., as an individual), with an altruistic head of the family. He first endows each
member of the family with an individual utility function that she or he tries to
maximize. Then he shows, in what he terms the “Rotten Kid Theorem,” that if there
is an altruistic family member, by which he means a member whose utility function
has other family member’s utilities as arguments, then it is rational for the selfish
members of the family to act to maximize total family utility as well. Thus, rational
families have male heads who lead by example, persuading their naturally selfish
charges to do what is in the best interest of the family as a whole.
Well, there is no arguing with mathematics. Somewhat concealed by the
mathematics, however, are three other critical assumptions. (1) wealth or control of
income is unequally distributed so that the altruist is able to redistribute income to
maximize his utility function (I use “his” here because Becker quite explicitly as-
sumes that the altruist is the father); (2) the egoists in the family (including the
altruist’s wife) have no better option than the one that the altruist gives them, such
as leaving the family; (3) the use of the pejorative term “altruist” presumes that his
utility function ought to be maximized, without regard to what he wants; the
“altruist” might think it in the best interests of the family to move a thousand miles
away, and that counts as altruistic simply because it is the aim of the one in control
of the wealth and income of the family. Becker thus understands the family as an
altruistic institution led by a benevolent dictator. In such a situation, there is no
need for the intrusion of law, since there is no competition for resources. The
father’s paternalistic wishes are to be fulfilled; the legal status quo of the 1960s is
justified; inequality within the family is not an issue. Becker speculates, then, that
marriage must have evolved as a deal to protect women, a stunning rationalization
of that oppressive institution.
The justification is false, however, and a part of an ideology of families. Becker’s
analysis thus makes the following mistakes. First, like economists before him, he
continues in the androcentric view that intra-family economics is uninteresting.
There are no separate preferences being considered here, and no outside options that
could constitute a strategic threat to the “altruist’s” aims. Once the differences in
preferences between various members of the family are considered, however, it is
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 173

possible to reveal the oppressive nature of the institution. Second, he makes the
sexist assumption that the “head of the family” is male and altruistic, while the other
spouse is female and, like the children, egoistic. Third, he fails to model the full range
of options for the spouses by assuming that they cannot leave the family, and this
reinforces his sexist assumption that families maximize a single utility function,
which reinforces the androcentric idea that what happens within families is devoid of
economic interest. We can see how great his errors are in modeling by testing his
conclusions against empirical experience. His conclusion that marriage is a deal to
protect women is refuted by the empirical evidence that women have been exploited
and oppressed by marriage, for instance, by long-standing and even legally sanc-
tioned spousal abuse, the fact that married women were until relatively recently
prohibited from owning property, unequal divorce laws, and countless other laws and
norms that constitute the double standard for married men and women. If marriage
was any kind of protection of women, then it was the kind that organized criminals
offer to legitimate businesses.!°
I do not mean to suggest that all science is ideology. Indeed, science can be
used to debunk the ideology of those purported scientific theories that are infected.
Stephen Jay Gould’s (1996) work on intelligence studies is an excellent example of
this. It is enough for my thesis in this section to show that some science is ideology
that supports oppressive social institutions. Theories about rocks and lizards are far
less likely to be ideological—to be false and useful to maintaining oppressive social
dominance relations—than those about persons, cultures, or social interaction.
Scientists police themselves to some degree by checking each others’ theories and
attempting to remain critical about evidence that is presented in favor of theories.
But scientists come to their work with preconceived ideas about persons and cul-
tures, and it may not occur to them that these prejudices have infected their
theories. Scientific theories can therefore stand for a time, sometimes generations,
as the wisdom of the age, yet be mere rationalizations of the oppressive social
institutions to which scientists, like others in their cultures, are blind.

2.2.4. CULTURAL DOMINATION

An important source of psychological harm for some oppressed groups in multicul-

tural societies is the fact that they must constantly struggle for the recognition of
their cultural uniqueness. As I argued above, culture and tradition make actions
meaningful, and provide the social context in which one’s values and beliefs are
formed. Because they are the essential meaning creating and stabilizing forces in
persons’ lives, and because each culture creates different meanings that are not easily
interchanged, each person’s own culture is important to her. In the midst of con-
flicting cultural norms, values, and beliefs, an individual can find his values and
beliefs challenged or contradicted. This becomes problematic when one’s own cul-
turally instilled beliefs and values are consistently condemned or sacrificed for a
different, perhaps majority, cultural belief and value system. Consider, for instance,
the way that the traditional academic schedule in the United States is constructed
around the Christian calendar of holidays. Jewish and Muslim students and faculty
will find that the days that they find sacred are not recognized as special, although
174 Forces of Oppression

the Christian holidays are given special treatment.'! This sends a message of lesser
social concern for the Jews and Muslims. In some cultures the dominant religion may
even be state sanctioned, allowing legal discrimination against minority cultures.
Legal discrimination is a very insulting challenge to one’s culture and sends a mes- 9 ~~
sage of inferiority and disdain.
There are three kinds of problems that we can classify as cultural domination,
and different cultural minorities may suffer from one or more of them. One is the
problem of recognition, which occurs when a cultural minority is not seen as a sub-
culture in its own right. The second type of problem is a lack of accommodation, which
occurs when the minority’s legitimate needs are overlooked and unfilled. The third
kind of problem is a lack of respect, which occurs when the minority is denied some
rights allowed to the majority because they are considered less worthy than the
majority. In the example of religious minorities just given, the problem of recognition
may still be in play for Jews and certainly for Muslims in many places in the United
States, and the problems of accommodation and respect are present whenever they
are not permitted to set aside their holidays from normal work and school life.
The phenomenon of “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 1980), which refers to
the fact that the dominant, straight society takes as a default assumption that people
will have or seek heterosexual partners, is an important example of all three of these
problems of cultural domination. Compulsory heterosexuality is a kind of false uni-
versalism, which is taking the characteristics of the majority or the dominant to be
true of everyone (DeBruin 1998), or what psychologists refer to as the “false con-
sensus effect” (Fiske and Taylor 1991, ch. 3). Successful false universalizing requires
that a group have the social influence necessary to make their false attributions the
default assumptions in major social institutions, such as the law, the construction of
buildings and public spaces, or the development and marketing of goods. Compulsory
heterosexuality results in insults great and small to homosexuals, who find them-
selves having to explain their “unusual sexual proclivities” to strangers in order to get
health care, health insurance (indeed, if they can get it), an apartment or a home, or “.
just a room for the night. It is a lack of recognition when people fail to see a gay couple
as a couple, but it is a failure to accommodate if public institutions fail to make
available services that gay persons or couples need. Of course they may even be seen
as not entitled to equal protection of the law and may be discriminated against in
many ways that would not happen if they were not dominated by the heterosexual
community. The case of sexual minorities might seem quite different from that of
religious minorities, in that some argue that it is a chosen lifestyle that is not worthy
of equal respect and concern. But a similar mistake has been made concerning
religious minorities over the years: that they believe in false gods and ought to be
pressured into changing those beliefs, or at least, that their beliefs are not worthy of
equal respect. Sexual minorities have been accused of both false beliefs and unworthy
values. While I will not take on the project here of a full defense of sexual freedom, I
will assert that freedom of conscience is involved in both issues, and that at root equal
respect for persons requires that persons be allowed freedom of conscience (Cornell
1998). Thus in both cases cultural domination is an unjust harm to the minorities.
A final example that will further illuminate the extent of the problem of cultural
domination is the situation of the Deaf in hearing society. The Deaf suffer mainly
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 175

from the problems of accommodation and recognition. Communications technolo-

gies have been developed for speaking rather than signing persons, and the need to
accommodate the Deaf by facilitating signing persons is often resented or considered
to be a kind of charity, rather than a right of persons whose needs were sacrificed to
meet the desires of the majority hearing. The recognition problem for the Deaf has
been in their being recognized as a competent community in their own right, rather
than as a number of unconnected, disabled individuals. The Deaf maintain that their
way of life is not a lesser form of human life to that of the hearing, absent discrim-
ination and artificially constructed barriers. They hold that their difference from
hearing folks is just a difference, not an inferiority, and they need not be patronized
by the hearing. This conflict came to a head in 1988 when a search was held for the
presidency of Gallaudet University, the only Deaf university in the United States.
Until that time the presidency had always been held by a hearing person, but the
students and faculty of the school lobbied for a Deaf president. They argued that it
was time that the Deaf community be led by one of its own. When a hearing
president was named, they organized protests and sit-ins, and finally prevailed when
the just-named president resigned and a Deaf person was installed (Sacks 19809,
ch. 3). Although the Deaf won that battle, they continue to struggle for recognition
as a community, and living among the hearing their needs and interests are often
sacrificed for those of the majority, sometimes in ways that are unjustly harmful.

2.3. Summary
In this section I have explored seven direct psychological forces of oppression: terror
and trauma, humiliation and degradation, objectification, tradition and convention,
teligion, ideology, and cultural domination. Each such force harms individuals who
are members of oppressed groups by robbing them of the material and psychological
wherewithal to successfully compete in the marketplace and keep themselves safe
from further harm. Some of these direct forces that immediately harm individuals
with face-to-face discriminatory treatment I have labeled “point sources,” in contrast
to those I labeled “cultural forces” that form the background of social meaning
against which social grouping, stereotyping, and discrimination is possible.
The applications of psychological forces of oppression are social or political
problems that require solutions more extensive than mere compensation to indi-
viduals who are directly harmed. Since the entire group is harmed, rectification has to
be aimed at the entire group. Elimination of terror and trauma requires concerted
effort, but can be successfully done by a society with the will to enact and enforce
sufficient legal protections. Countering degradation requires that the worth of the
group be raised, and though it may not be too difficult to mandate equal protection of
the law, it is difficult to change the minds of people who have degraded or been
degraded that the judgment of relative worth was wrong. Likewise countering ob-
jectification and the cultural forces of psychological oppression is similarly difficult
because it requires this change of mind. Since the harm is inflicted by a social
practice, it is more deeply entrenched than individual instances of criminal behavior,
passionate transgressions, or momentary lapses. The very background of cultural
meaning must change to make the despised group acceptable, no longer associated
176 Forces of Oppression

with negative stereotypes, or no longer considered a social group at all. But were the
external, intentionally inflicted psychological harms the only ones, it would be
possible to directly confront them, countering hate speech and prejudice with pos-
itive speech and counter images. However, oppression often causes its victims to
conform to the pressures in ways that cannot be so readily confronted. In the next
section I examine these indirect psychological forces, which are harder to counter,
since they go beyond the wrongdoing by others and consist in the cooperation of the
oppressed themselves. :

3. Indirect Psychological Forces

Indirect psychological harms occur when the beliefs and values of the privileged or
oppressor groups are subconsciously accepted by the subordinate and assimilated into
their self-concept or value/belief scheme. Indirect forces thus work through the
psychology of the oppressed to mold them and co-opt them to result in choices and
decisions that harm the oppressed while benefiting the privileged. In this section I
discuss three such forces. The first force is that of shame and low self-esteem, which
are the emotive and cognitive forces involved in seeing oneself as of less worth than
others. The second is the cognitive process of false consciousness, which is a cog-
nitive process of coming to believe in an ideology that oppresses oneself. The third is
deformed desire, which is the combined affective and cognitive process of value
formation, in which the oppressed come to desire that which is oppressive to them.
They are all self-inflicted wounds, but wounds that have been inflicted with the
weapon that society provides the oppressed. They are difficult to avoid and over-
come, because once one is under the sway of these forces, one may not recognize that
they exist at all. Furthermore, once recognized, they often hold sway over one’s
beliefs and desires despite one’s best efforts to rid oneself of them.

3.1. Shame and Low Self-esteem

I discussed above the ways that humiliating and degrading actions can directly
oppress through actions intended to shame and lower the self-esteem of oppressed
persons. Shame is experienced by persons who feel themselves to be lacking or
unworthy. It can be experienced by individuals for reasons entirely due to their
individual circumstances, appropriately or inappropriately. Shame is not the same as
guilt, which accompanies the belief that one has done something wrong, whereas
shame accompanies the belief that one is not good enough in some respect, either
in one’s own eyes or the eyes of others. Oppressed persons may feel shame for the
entirely externally imposed reason that they have less status because of their so-
cial group membership. Oppressed persons are frequently harmed precisely by a
message of inferiority, even if they do not really believe that they are inferior. But
shame and guilt often come together, for one may feel morally responsible for one’s
shortcomings. Shame can permeate one’s psyche, becoming internalized, echoing
within the oppressed person’s psychology either because of trauma or because the
person deeply identifies with their social group status in a way that lowers their sense
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 177

of self-esteem. When shame and low self-esteem are internalized they can be con-
sidered indirect psychological forces.
According to Herman, shame and self-doubt are typical psychological reactions
to traumatic events. “Shame is a response to helplessness, the violation of bodily
integrity, and the indignity suffered in the eyes of another person. Doubt reflects the
inability to maintain one’s own separate point of view while remaining in connection
with others” (Herman 1992, 53). As we have seen, the traumatized individual
continues to relive the experience of trauma and often to judge harshly her reaction
to the experience. But the situation is rigged against the individual who was the
victim of violence; her choices in the circumstance are coerced, and even though
she survived, the fact that she was traumatized means that she was unsuccessful
in deterring the violence. “Traumatic events by definition, thwart initiative and
overwhelm individual competence. No matter how brave and resourceful the victim
may have been, her actions were insufficient to ward off disaster. In the aftermath of
traumatic events, as survivors review and judge their own conduct, feelings of guilt
and inferiority are practically universal” (Herman 1992, 53). Thus, shame, guilt, and
a lower sense of self-esteem typically follow on traumatic events.
Since trauma is a common experience for the oppressed, the shame that is
consequent on trauma is common, as well. Oppressed persons who are not the
direct victims of trauma also feel shame because of their social group status. Sandra
Bartky writes about how shame is a pervasive emotion for women. Women and
other oppressed persons, she claims, feel a “pervasive sense of personal inadequacy”
(Bartky 1990, 85). To be shamed in front of someone is to recognize that one is as
the Other sees one and to identify (to some extent, at least) with the values of the
Other. Oppressed persons are sent the message in the myriad ways that they are
harmed that they are inferior in the eyes of the privileged. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
poignantly illustrates this phenomenon in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and
drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen
curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast
majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of
poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue
twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old
daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been ad-
vertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that
Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority be-
ginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her
personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; ... when
you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and
“colored”; ...when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that
you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to
expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are
forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand
why we find it difficult to wait. (King, Jr. 1964)

Conditions of material and economic oppression often cause women and cul-
tural minorities to feel shame and lowered self-esteem. Feeling shame and lowered
178 Forces of Oppression

self-esteem then drains one of confidence and assertiveness, which handicaps one in
a competitive marketplace. Thus, shame and low self-esteem are harms, and they
are caused by unjust conditions, and so constitute oppressive forces. But the ma-
terial conditions of oppression are not in themselves sufficient causes of these
feelings of shame and low self-esteem. In order to generate them, the oppressed
must also somehow assimilate the common knowledge conditions of their oppres-
sive cultures, according to which they are inferior or less worthy of equal dignity and
respect. The question then arisés: can such assimilation be resisted? And if so, how?
These questions I take up in the final two chapters of this book. In the next section,
we will see how oppressive cultures generate these false beliefs in the individuals of
the culture, oppressed and privileged alike.

3.2. False Consciousness

False consciousness is the belief in objectionable ideology and, when it is believed by
those who are oppressed by that ideology, it is an indirect force of psychological
oppression. “False consciousness” has been used to refer to beliefs held by members
of privileged groups that rationalize and support their dominance, beliefs and desires
held by members of oppressed groups that support their subordination, and beliefs
held generally about the nature of social relations, which support the status quo
relations (Meyerson 1991). I shall use the term to discuss the belief formation
phenomena, saving the phenomena of desire formation for the following section.
False consciousness, as I shall use the term, refers to beliefs that are false and that are
formed under conditions of oppression that support the maintenance of the op-
pression. To label a belief a matter of false consciousness, then, is to challenge it on
three grounds: (1) its falsity, (2) its origin, and (3) its implications for oppressive
social relations. While a belief’s being false must count against it, one might object
that neither the origins of a belief nor their implications matter; we must face the
truth no matter what the origin of our belief in it or its implications. Indeed, to ar-
gue that the origins count against a belief is to commit the genetic fallacy. I will argue,
on the contrary, that certain origins for and implications of beliefs give us reason to
reject them, even if we cannot conclusively show that they are false, and this holds
specifically in the case of the belief formation processes that result in false con-
sciousness.
Consider a list of false beliefs that support oppressive relations of subordination
and domination.
* women’s place is in the home
* black men are more prone to commit violence than white men
* women are more nurturing than men
* disabled persons are asexual
¢ Arabs are terrorists
¢ rich persons deserve their wealth
Notice first that they each support the status quo in the sense that if they are
generally believed in a society, they will support undignified or disrespectful treat-
ment of some individuals consequent on their social group status. Second, these are
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 179

beliefs that are often held by members of both the groups whose dominance and
whose subordination they justify. This has led some theorists to argue that at least
some members of the dominant group hold these beliefs because they are motivated
to do so (Meyerson 1991, ch. 2). The argument goes like this: people are motivated
to think well of themselves and to minimize their beliefs that they have done wrong;
receiving undeserved privilege at the cost of others’ undeserved harm makes one
believe that one has done wrong; however, a belief that one’s privilege is deserved, or
that another’s harm is justified, minimizes the belief that one has done wrong.
Hence, members of dominant groups are motivated to believe that their privileges
are deserved or that the members of subordinate groups deserve their harms.
The question then arises, how do we show that their motivation is the cause of
the belief rather than just a happy coincidence for them? To answer this question,
we first note that the members of the subordinate groups have no such motivation,
unless purely for dissonance reduction. Could all the members of the dominant
group just coincidentally have these convenient false beliefs? That seems unlikely,
and in any case would be no explanation of the origin of the beliefs. Further-
more, one must note that the dominant group of society—at least some of their
members—are those who have the most ability to mold common social beliefs. In
modern capitalist society they own the media and the companies that employ
people, and run the schools that educate people; in socialist societies they are the
political elite who have the power over the media, employment, and education;
in traditional societies they run the religions and the tribal councils. They have the
power to shape opinion. The answer must be, at least in part, that while some mem-
bers of the dominant group are passive receptors of the beliefs, some have sought
to construct and perpetuate these ideological beliefs through their greater ability to
shape public opinion.
It may be objected that people are unlikely to believe patently false things,
especially if they can see that they are being manipulated into doing so. Further-
more, false beliefs must be easy to counter with evidence. False consciousness is
about tendencies, propensities, proclivities of groups of persons, that is, false con-
scious beliefs are all about constructing stereotypes. But as we have seen, stereo-
types may have a root in some reality and still be false as stated. They can be vague
claims that bend in the face of counterevidence and snap back into place when the
evidence is no longer directly in view. Even more insidious, though, is the fact that
dominant groups sometimes have the power to make a vague false stereotype be-
come approximately true by using legal, financial, political, or religious power to
coerce a subordinate group into behaving in a way that fits the stereotype. Consider
the case of Lisa in chapter 5, who chose to stay home with the kids in the face of the
gender wage gap. Or take the false belief cited above that black men are more prone
to violence than white men. It flies in the face of the evidence that most wars
worldwide are perpetrated by white men. But it is supported by sensational media
coverage of inner city street crime, where black men are often perpetrators, in part
created by drug laws that have been particularly targeted at black illegal drug use.
Because these beliefs are backed only by evidence that has been created by op-
pression, and not by any clear evidence of about persons’ immutable “natures,” they
are to be rejected and resisted as false consciousness.
180 Forces of Oppression

We have been over this ground before: in chapter 3 I discussed how stereo-
types are formed despite their untruth and how they support out-group formation
and thus oppression. In section 2 of this chapter I discussed ideology and how
false beliefs can be perpetrated when they support the status quo of oppression.
False consciousness has a special place in the maintenance of oppression, however,
because when the oppressed themselves believe false things, which support their
place in the social hierarchy, they have additional reason not to resist their op-
pression or not to even recognize it. For, oppression must be undeserved harm, and
false consciousness causes them to believe that their place is deserved. In the next
section we see how undeserved harm can even be transformed into preferred
treatment.

3.3. Deformed Desires

Although we (especially we liberals) tend to think that it is good if persons get what
they desire, sometimes persons desire what is not good for them. They might do this
because they are ill informed of the true nature of what they desire (the liquid in the
cup is gasoline, not ginger ale), or because they do not fully understand the conse-
quences of satisfying their desire (as motivates the saying “be careful what you wish
for”). People might also wish for things that are bad for them because they are in the
grip of an addiction or because they have a momentarily weak will. Finally, people
might desire things that they have been somehow duped or beguiled into desiring.
What is wrong with such desires is the way in which, or the circumstances under
which, they were formed. For example, Macbeth’s desire to wash his hands was a
neurotic desire that he developed as a consequence of murdering Duncan. Desires
are formed in a social context that makes the desired objects or states meaningful to
the one who desires them. Sometimes the social context is oppressive and makes
things seem desirable when they would not be so under circumstances of social
equality. These problematic desires, which I shall call deformed desires, have been
recognized by preference theorists, political theorists, and feminist theorists. They
are also known as adaptive or deformed preferences.
Deformed desires are problematic for political theories that hold that the goodness
or degree of freedom of a society depends to at least some extent on the degree to
which persons’ desires are satisfied. Deformed desires, when they can be shown to be
deformed by the constraints placed on persons by virtue of their social group mem-
bership, constitute oppression in my theory because it measures harm by the degree
to which person’s lives are constrained through their social group membership. Jon
Elster (1983b) defines an adaptive preference (another term for deformed desire) as
a preference that has been formed without one’s control or awareness, by a causal
mechanism that is not of one’s own choosing. Adaptive preferences have a typical “fox
and grapes” structure, that is, if the grapes are out of the agent’s reach, the agent’s
preferences, if they are like the fox’s, will turn against the grapes, the agent declaring
them sour anyway. The sour grapes phenomenon is familiar to us all: after I found out
that eating scallops would make me violently ill, I found that I had no taste for them;
my discovery that there was no organized football league that admitted members of my
gender, I desired to watch the game less. Not all adaptive preferences are bad for the
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 181

agent herself, since they do allow the agent to get more welfare from her feasible set of
options. There are less innocent examples of this phenomenon, though. Those ad-
aptations that are made to adjust to unjust conditions of material deprivation or
psychological harm consequent on social group membership are oppressive. If one’s
preferences adapt to oppressive circumstances, then one’s desires turn away from
goods and even needs that, absent those conditions, they would want.'? Oppressed
persons come to see their conditions of oppression as the limits within which they want
to live.
A closely related form of adaptive preference formation is the habituation of
preference (Sunstein 1993; Sen 1995). Not only do persons tend to become content
with whatever they see as their lot in life, they also become accustomed to great
privilege and are greatly affected for the worse should they be deprived of this
privilege, however unfair it might be (Branscombe 1998). In an oppressive situation
in which some suffer great deprivation and others enjoy great privilege, states of
affairs in which things are more fairly distributed will not be preferred by the
oppressed and will be greatly dispreferred by the privileged. Girls and women are
encouraged by multiple sources to think of the kind of work that oppresses them as
the work that they ought, by nature, by sentiment, and even by God, to do. All of
these sources have powerful effects on emotions, making it likely that women’s
preferences will favor their oppressive condition. It is not that they will prefer
oppression to justice, or subordination to equality, rather they will prefer the kinds
of social roles that tend to subordinate them, make them less able to choose, or give
them fewer choices to make. These sources also suggest to women, and to men, that
it is not social oppression at work, but rather nature (or the supernatural) that puts
women in their place. As John Stuart Mill noted in The Subjection of Women, the
oppression of women is the one kind of oppression that is maintained in part by the
affections of the oppressed for the privileged class. Many religions, at least the past
and current interpretations of them, insist that women’s place is in the domestic
sphere, and most prohibit them from becoming religious leaders.'* Religion also
powerfully engages the emotions, and so affects preferences. But social decisions
made from such habituated preferences compromise autonomy, equality, dignity,
and diversity. Thus, we should be wary of individuals’ preferences that reinforce
oppression, even when they are sincerely expressed by oppressed individuals.
In a recent article, Anita Superson (2005) gives a number of examples of
typical ways that women’s preferences have been molded under oppressive patri-
archal cultures. The first example, which is Thomas Hill’s (1991), is the deferential
wife, who defers to her husband’s preferences and needs, placing his and their
children’s preferences above her own needs because of a belief that her proper role
is to serve him. The second example (Stevens, 1993) is the marianismo woman, who
is the counterpart of the machismo man, who believes women are morally and
spiritually superior but that women should be submissive to men and that their
superiority lies in their self-denial and self-sacrifice. Thus, marianismo women prefer
their men to have more of what they want rather than the women’s own (first
order) preferences to be satisfied. The third example is the right-wing woman, who
“adopts traditional lifestyle either because of religious or anti-abortion views, or
because she believes she has few or no economic and social options” (Superson
182 Forces of Oppression

2005, 1). Another example would be African women who force their daughters to
undergo genital surgery because they think that it makes them more beautiful and
more acceptable to men who might otherwise choose not to marry them. In each
of these cases the women have desires that, when satisfied, help maintain the
oppressive structures that caused them to have those desires. These desires are
therefore self-reinforcing systems of oppression.
In order to show that satisfaction of deformed desires is harmful, we must show
what is wrong with deformed desires. I will raise three objections to deformed desires.
First, the desires help to maintain oppression because in acting to satisfy these desires,
persons act in ways that harm members of their own social group. The deferential wife
and the marianismo women both fail to accomplish much in their own right, which
lends more credence to stereotypes about women’s incompetence, and they help to
set up expectations in both men and women that other women will behave this way,
and thus they must choose either to fail to meet the expectation or to meet it through
similarly deferential behavior. Thus, the deformed desires are immoral. Second, these
desires are framed by beliefs that are a result of false consciousness. The desirability of
the desires depends crucially on false beliefs. The marianismo’s desires only make
sense against the background beliefs about the moral differences in men’s and
women’s natures, the claim that women are morally superior and more spiritual. But
the belief is either false or has been made true by the oppressive treatment of women.
If all women are morally or spiritually superior to all men, it must be because women
are very seriously constrained in their actions compared to men. Third, deformed
desires harm the one who has them and seeks to satisfy them. This objection, unlike
the other two, depends on there being an objective good which the owner of de-
formed desires does not see, at least at the time that the desire is held. If the objection
is apt, it shows that deformed desires are self-defeating.
Superson lists five features of deformed desires that show that they are harmful to
the one who has them (Superson 2005, 4—5). First, their source contributes to their
deformation, that is, the conditions of oppression cause the victims to have these
desires. The desire of the deferential wife (DW) to defer to her husband’s wishes is
caused by her adaptation to or indoctrination by circumstances in which this is the
best way for her to get some of what she would desire in a world without male
dominance. Since in forming these desires the DW is acting under coercion, she is
harmed. Second, satisfaction of the desires of the nonprivileged benefits the op-
pressive system. This is the point that Marx made about the plight of the working
class under capitalism, that workers constantly enrich the capitalist, making their
ability to lower wages to subsistence and withstand any resistance by workers that
much stronger. Workers desire jobs, but in working for the capitalist they harm
themselves. We already argued that this harms others in the group, but as a member
of the group, this also harms oneself. Third, deformed desires involve deception in the
nonprivileged who believe that when satisfied they and their group will benefit in
some way. Again, since deception is a form of coercion, in forming desires based on
deception, the owner of deformed desires is harmed. Fourth, deformed desires con-
flict with what their bearers may believe “deep down” is good for them. Consider the
excessive materialism that capitalism inspires in persons. When a person who is poor
attempts to satisfy these empty desires by overspending, they may know that deep
 Psychological Harms of Oppression 183

down their actions are not good for them, and yet be unable to resist the temptation
to purchase the cell phone. Although this is not a necessary feature of deformed
desires, when it occurs it is a harm much like the self-inflicted harm of weakness of
will. Fifth, deformed desires are both the cause and the result of their owner’s not
seeing herself as equal in worth to others. Consider the African woman who believes
that to make a woman beautiful one must cut her genitals in ways that are often
extremely harmful to her, or the American woman who desires breast augmentation
surgery to make herself acceptable to men. These women do not expect men to make
similar sacrifices for beauty. Thus, their desires for surgery stem from the belief that
they are unworthy of equal treatment by others. And in desiring these surgical
changes they see themselves as ugly prior to the surgery or as needing to have
undergone these drastic changes to make themselves acceptable after the surgery.
Deformed desires are thus objectionable on three grounds: they are harmful to
others, they are falsely framed, and they are self-defeating. They are formed by
processes that are coercive: indoctrination, manipulation, and adaptation to unfair
social circumstances. They therefore constitute a force of psychological oppression,
and because they originate within the oppressed person, they are indirect forces. All
three such indirect forces: shame, false consciousness, and deformed desires occur as
effects of oppression, but bring about additional problems for resisting oppression.
First, fighting the external, direct forces of oppression is not sufficient. Second,
fighting these forces involves denying some beliefs and desires of the oppressed
themselves, and that is painful, if not harmful. Third, the existence of shame, false
consciousness, and deformed desires among the oppressed makes it more difficult to
argue that there is oppression, since to a casual or unmotivated observer, these
indirect forces can deceive. Shame may look like personal inadequacies or per-
sonality problems in individuals, rather than a pervasive feature of oppression. False
consciousness may masquerade as sincerely held true belief or innocent mistake.
Deformed desires may look like legitimate expressions of individual differences in
taste. The oppressed themselves often deny that they are internalizing oppression,
as if it were an additional fault that they are psychologically weak as well as pos-
sessing whatever inferiority justifies their inferior treatment. It is only when one can
show that there are corresponding external forces of oppression and that these are
self-defeating mental states that it can be shown that oppression exists and has been
so deeply embedded in the psyches of the oppressed themselves. Making this ar-
gument linking external forces with internal ones has taken me the better part of
this book, if Ihave managed to convince at all. Hence I conclude that these indirect
forces of oppression, both material and psychological, are the most damaging and
enduring, and explain how oppression can be so long-standing despite the rough
natural equality of humans.

4. Can We Break the Cycle of Psychological Oppression?

From our analysis of the psychological forces of oppression, particularly the indirect
forces, one might conclude that oppression is inescapable for its victims. Yet,
oppression is by definition unjust, and so requires the just to attempt to overcome it,
184 Forces of Oppression

or at least to put up some resistance to it. How might this be done? In the next
chapter I will address this question in the context of the comprehensive analysis of
oppression that I have offered in this book. Preliminary to that, here are some of the
lessons to be drawn specifically from the social cognitive account of the psychology of
oppression. Direct resistance of the direct forces of oppression would seem clearly to
be required by justice, but without attacking the stereotypes that are self-fulfilling
and that invidiously distinguish among us, this will be like trying to put out the
flames without removing the fuel. From a cognitive standpoint there exist three
courses of action to direct at stereotyping and ideology.' First, we need to attack
existing role schemas and their rationalizations. We might do that, for instance, by
showing how sociobiological explanations of the sexual division of labor depend on
androcentric assumptions and privilege men. Second, since categorizing seems to
be a cognitive requirement for us, let us propose alternative categories for social
groupings that depend more on interest than on accidents of birth, on voluntary
groupings rather than involuntary groups. For if we group by chosen groups, there
may be some possibility to change our grouping should it harm or fail to satisfy us.
Third, we can reveal false consciousness and deformed desires where they exist by
exposing the ways in which assimilating oneself to involuntary in-groups and ac-
centuating the differences with involuntary out-groups is, in at least some cases,
either an assertion of undeserved privilege or a failure to resist one’s own oppression.
Some of the psychological forces of oppression we have discussed in this chapter
can be directly resisted by external efforts, such as by changing and then strictly
enforcing laws and constructing economic incentives to motivate people to behave
contrary to their customs and habits. Countering terrorism and the trauma that it
imposes is not easily done, but by taking a strong stance against these ways of en-
forcing oppression, these forces can be reduced. Likewise, the most destructive of the
ways of humiliating and degrading people, such as through hate speech, group def-
amation, and harassment, can be countered by legal means. But here there is the
potential for conflict with freedoms of speech and assembly, which must be balanced
against the rights of persons not to be psychologically harmed. I will discuss this at
greater length in the last chapter. The other forms of humiliating and degrading
treatment, objectification, social distancing and social distrust, probably cannot be
made illegal for these reasons, and will have to be countered by more subtle social
means. However, if the more blatant and clearly unjust forces of oppression were
ended, such as violence, threats, and economic deprivation, along with terrorism, and
the cultural forces of psychological oppression, these remaining point source forms
of direct psychological oppression would be ineffective. The other cultural forces,
those that work through tradition, religion, ideology, and cultural domination, can be
countered by making clear the ways that they enforce oppression, since that will make
clear the injustice they create. But like stereotypes, they cannot be so easily overcome,
even if the injustice they create is obvious. To counter these deep-seated sources of
cultural meaning will require acts of will by many people throughout the culture
working to change them in the direction of freedom and opposing their oppressive
force. In the next chapter we will see how oppressed groups and their allies in opposing
oppression have, in some cases, been able to resist the forces of oppression to bring
about justice.
 PART III

WE SHALL OVERCOME
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 Resistance and Responsibility

Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputa-

tions or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are
really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s
estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sym-
pathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the conse-
quences.

Susan B. Anthony

esisting oppression is prima facie morally praiseworthy. Even if one is resisting her
Reva oppression and thereby resisting harm to herself, since oppression is a harm
to members of her social group, she is resisting harm to others. But not every reaction
to or action inspired by oppression is resistance. Furthermore, people sometimes
claim that their actions are aimed at resistance when they are really purely self-
interested, vengeful, or misguided antisocial actions. A comprehensive theory of
oppression needs to show us how to overcome or resist it and to be able to distinguish
(and encourage) legitimate resistance from antisocial behavior or special interest
politics. In this chapter I construct a theory of resistance that I claim allows us to
classify reactions to oppression. I then go on to discuss the moral obligations that
persons have to engage in resistance to oppression, given their social standing as
oppressed or privileged persons. Finally, I catalog the various types of resistance
strategies that have been or might be pursued against the forces of oppression that I
discussed in the previous two sections of the book.
A preliminary objection threatens this project of defining resistance from the
outset, however. Some will argue that the theory of oppression I have constructed
shows that resistance is impossible, while others will claim that (on any theory) it is
futile. To those who would claim it is futile, I simply urge them to look at the many
examples of successful resistance, some of which I describe in this chapter. The
more serious objection is the claim that resistance is impossible in my theory of
oppression. A theory of oppression implies that resistance is impossible if persons,
both oppressed and privileged, are constituted by the locus of their social group
memberships. That is, if they cannot understand the world outside of the ways in
which it is given to them externally. The theory of oppression I have presented does
not fall prey to this objection. On my view, oppression (and privilege) consists of

187
188 We Shall Overcome

the inequality of constraints that persons face consequent on social group mem-
bership. But social group membership is externally imposed, and not necessarily
a part of the self-identity of persons. Even when it becomes a part of one’s self-
identity, that requires one to take it on through acts that are, at least at times,
conscious acts of mimicry. Thus, on my account of social groups, one’s self-
identification with a social group is something over and above group membership.
Furthermore, since every person is a member of a number of social groups, some of
which constrain our actions more than others, we can glimpse what the world would
look like from different social perspectives. This leaves the space for one to attempt
to separate oneself ontologically, epistemically, and morally from one’s fellow social
group members or from any particular group membership. To put it simply: we are
individuals who must act within group-based constraints. Resistance is possible be-
cause even though we must take the constraints as given, we can choose to work
against them. We need not fall prey to false consciousness or deformed desires,
though these are understandable responses to oppression (or privilege). Resistance
is possible whenever we think outside our collective boxes and sacrifice our im-
mediate wants for a long-term vision of a better future.

1. A Theory of Resistance to Oppression

I propose three main criteria of adequacy that I claim any theory of resistance to
oppression must meet. First, the theory should correctly classify the cases that
we have clear intuitions on, and then in turn help us to classify the cases for which
we have less clear intuitions. Second, the account of resistance should allow us
to distinguish resistance from mere noncompliance, on one hand, and from self-
deceptive compliance, on the other. Some cases of noncompliance will, of course,
count as resistance, even as paradigm cases of resistance. Imagine, for example, the
Nazi soldier who refuses to comply with his superior’s order to shoot a group of
unarmed civilians because he regards it as a violation of human rights. By “mere
noncompliance” I mean to refer to cases where for reasons (or causes) completely
unrelated to the morality of the command one fails to comply. Suppose, for instance,
the soldier failed to shoot the civilians only because he was distracted by a beautiful
sunset. Further, we would not want to count acts of collaboration as acts of resis-
tance. Third, our account of resistance should, in conjunction with a moral theory,
allow us to distinguish morally good from morally bad from nonmoral cases of re-
sistance, for we use “resistance” to cover all three sorts of actions, even though there
is a connotation of moral praiseworthiness to the term.
An adequate theory of resistance to oppression will allow us to classify the
obvious cases of resistance correctly. Resistance can be undertaken by an individual
or by a group of individuals, and just as I identified two kinds of groups in chapter 2,
there are two corresponding kinds of group resistance. Voluntary group resistance
occurs when there is a planned, intentional resistance by a group, such as the
Freedom Riders in the Civil Rights Movement in the southern United States in the
1960s. Nonvoluntary group resistance occurs when the resistance is undertaken by
many members of an oppressed voluntary group, but without prior planning or
 Resistance and Responsibility 189

intention, although such resistance may lead to voluntary group resistance. Fun-
damentally, resistance is undertaken by individuals in individual or collective acts of
resistance. The aim of the resistance can be either to end oppression of an entire
group or to release an individual from the immediate effects of oppression. Resis-
tance will only result in the end of oppression, however, when taken up by a group
of resisters.
Let us take as test cases for our analysis the following three examples of these
different kinds of resistance to oppression. First, Gandhi’s hunger strike aimed at
removing the British from colonial India. In this case there was a clear aim, the aim
was the end of oppression for an entire group, and a single individual with some
hope of success could undertake the resistance.’ The second case I propose is
African American slave escapes. In this case I suppose that commonly the escaping
individual intended in the first instance to free himself, and only in the second
instance, if at all, to bring about the end of slavery overall. The third case is the
Palestinian Intifada. In this case the aim of the individuals participating might be to
end legal, social, and economic injustice, or it might be to run the Israelis out of
Palestine and the occupied territories altogether, but in any case it is aimed at
eliminating oppression at a group level. In this case, unlike the other two, a single
individual could not hope to succeed acting alone, but only through a concerted
effort of a large percentage of the population. Two cases that we would not want our
theory to classify as resistance to oppression are Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called
Unabomber, who claimed to be resisting the growth of technology, and the scat-
tered men’s movements to resist paying child support, who claim to be resisting the
oppression of men by domestic laws biased in favor of women.
Consider the following rough characterization of resistance to oppression,
which we will proceed to sharpen through an analysis of cases and objections:
An act of “resistance to oppression” is an act that issues from an actual case of
oppression, in the right way.

This seems to be a good start, but the three phrases that are italicized each require
clarification. We would not want to classify just any resistance to coercion as re-
sistance to oppression, since not all coercion is oppressive. Resisting a mugger’s
demand of your wallet is surely not resistance to oppression. In defining resistance to
oppression I shall refer to the four criteria of oppression that I have used throughout
the book. So by “an actual case of oppression” I mean that the resistance has to be to
a case that meets these four criteria (the group, harm, privilege, and coercion cri-
teria) in order to be considered resistance to oppression. Next, the phrase “issues
from” in my definition is obviously too vague. What sort of causation is implied? For
example, would actions that are only accidentally linked to oppression count? Fi-
nally, the phrase, “in the right way,” suggests that only certain sorts of actions that
issue from oppression count. Would a bank robber’s actions issue from oppression if
he were a member of a discriminated-against minority (and hence be excused)? Even
if the oppression created the conditions under which bank robbery seemed to him to
be his only option, we would not want to say that it was a case of resistance to
oppression. Rather, it seems more like giving in to oppression. We need an account of
causation that allows us to distinguish actions caused by one’s experience (as a
190 We Shall Overcome

witness or as a victim) of oppression from actions that are not so caused, and among
those actions that are caused by one’s experience of oppression we need to be able to
distinguish actions that constitute resistance to oppression from those that are either
compliance or otherwise nonresistance. Furthermore, the account ought not rule out
actions by the non-oppressed as cases of resistance; surely Michael Schwerner was a
resister to oppression when he attempted to sign up black voters in the South.” So
the experience of oppression that causes the action need not be of one’s own op-
pression for it to count as resistance.
What does it mean to say that an experience of oppression causes an action?
While it is beyond the scope of this book to defend it, the account of causation that
seems to me correct and applicable here is John Mackie’s (1965) account of causes as
INUS conditions. That is, to say that A caused B is to say that A is an insufficient but
necessary part of a condition that is unnecessary but sufficient to bring about B. And
this is to say that although there may be many combinations of factors that would
bring it about that B, among these combinations there is at least one, say the
conjunction of A and several other factors, that is such that in the absence of A
those other factors could not bring it about that B. For an action of resistance, R, to
count as resistance to oppression, then, it must be that although R might have been
brought about by many different sets of factors, an experience of oppression is a
necessary condition for at least one of these sets, in particular, for the set of factors
that did in fact bring it about that R. Thus, the bank robbery in the case above would
not be a candidate for resistance if the robber’s experience of oppression were not a
necessary factor in the set of factors that cause him to rob the bank. On the other
hand, if it was, then the robbery might in fact be a case of resistance. That depends
now on whether the robbery was a part of a strategy to oppose the oppression or to
work within the constraints oppression has set for the person. In other words, it
depends on the intention of the agent who acts.
Experience of oppression can cause one to act either through the agent’s in-
tentions or subintentionally. In saying that an action can be intentionally caused |
am adopting a Davidsonian account of reasons as causes (Davidson 1980). On this
account, actions are caused by a combination of beliefs and pro-attitudes (i.e.,
desires, wishes, preferences). To say that an action A was intentionally caused is to
say that the agent has a pro-attitude, P, toward some goal or end state, S, the agent
believes that A will bring about S (call this belief B), and this combination of B and
P causes A. So in combination with the INUS account of causes, that is to say that
the B and P are each necessary factors of a jointly sufficient but unnecessary
condition for A. For an experience of oppression to cause an action through the
intentions of the agent is for that experience of oppression to have caused A by
means of a belief or pro-attitude about oppression, i.e., the content of the belief or
pro-attitude must refer to the experience of oppression. For example, the belief
might be “that my people are oppressed” or “that oppression is unjust.” Likewise, a
pro-attitude caused by an experience of oppression might be a wish that oppression
end, or a desire that the oppressor be killed.
An action can be subintentionally caused by oppression, too. Oppression can
affect the formation of beliefs or pro-attitudes without the contents of those beliefs
or pro-attitudes referring to oppression. For example, an experience of oppression
 Resistance and Responsibility 191

might cause someone to kill another by so frustrating the agent that she kills out of
a neurotically exaggerated desire for the other’s death. To say that an action issues
from oppression, then, is to say that the action is, either intentionally or sub-
intentionally, caused by the oppression. This is to say that a belief about or pro-
attitude toward the oppression either refers to or is subconsciously formed by an
experience of oppression, and these beliefs and pro-attitudes formed an insufficient
but necessary part of a sufficient but unnecessary condition for the act.
Now given this analysis of how oppression can cause actions, what is it for the
experience of oppression to cause a resisting action in the right way? Must a person
intend to resist oppression in order to be said to be resisting oppression? Contrary to
the account of Howard McGary (McGary and Lawson 1992), I argue that there has
to be an intention to lessen the oppression, and that the intention to lessen the
oppression has to be a part of the cause of the action. McGary presents an example
of a slave who kills a cruel overseer because the overseer is a rival for a girlfriend’s
affections and not because of his cruelty. While McGary maintains that this is
resistance to oppression, I disagree. In my view, this slave intends murder in order
for a personal goal that is not thwarted by the oppression. He does not intend to end
or relieve or protest oppression and hence cannot be said to be resisting oppression
by killing the overseer. Without requiring that the act be intended as a case of
resistance, we cannot judge the morality of the action as an act of resistance.
McGary claims that we cannot know what others intend, especially if they are dead,
as in the case of African American slaves. But this just means that it will be difficult
to judge in actual historical cases; it conflates the ontological and the epistemo-
logical. McGary objects further that intent “is not sufficient for others to establish
that a person is resisting” (McGary and Lawson 1992, 40). But this just shows that
intent is not a sufficient condition for resistance, a point that I agree with; it does
not show that intention to resist is not a necessary condition for resistance. To be
sure, McGary is more interested in the question of how historians should describe
the events than in how we should judge the actions morally. As I see it, such
considerations counsel us to use the principle of charity in imputing intentions
to victims of oppression, but it does not show that we need not impute intentions
at all.
In what sense does the person acting, in the case of an oppressed person, need
to know about the oppression he suffers in order to be said to be resisting? One
might argue that he needs to know that he suffers from oppression in order for
the resistance to be to the oppression. But it is too strong to require that he know
the theory of oppression that I offer here, or any theory of it for that matter. The
case of the African American slaves illustrates my concern, though many others
would as well. In their case, oppression had persisted for generations and many
individual slaves had the false conscious belief that blacks are inferior to whites, yet
still felt that their treatment by their owner was unjust.’ An adequate account of
resistance should include those who have some vague impression that they are
suffering some injustice of the sort that oppression is, but need not have a clear
conception of any particular theory of oppression or how their case fits it.
Resistance is clearly incompatible with collaboration with the oppressor, and
so we should exclude actions that are nothing more than collaboration, even if
192 We Shall Overcome

the actor thinks that he is resisting. Roger Gottlieb (1990) discusses an example
of this kind of self-deceptive collaboration that seems to the actor to be resistance
in the case of the Judenrat in the ghettoes of Europe during the Nazi occupation.
The Judenrat were the Jewish leaders who organized the ghettoes and the orderly
shipment of Jews to the concentration camps, but rationalized their actions by
saying that if they did not do this then the Nazis would do it in such a way that
even more would be killed. Judgments about whether an act constitutes collab-
oration require care. Short-term collaboration, though, can be part of a long-
term strategy of resistance. Consider the case of Oskar Schindler, who collabo-
rated with the Nazis to the extent of running some factories for them to make it
possible for him to save Jews from the gas chambers by employing them as slave
laborers. If we want to distinguish resistance from self-deceptive collusion with
the oppressor, it has to be possible for the act of resistance to effect the long-term
or overall lessening of oppression, or at least to send a message of revolt to the
oppressors.*
We can see from our test cases that there are two ways that persons can lessen
oppression or send a message of revolt, which we might term “personal” and
“distributive,” where the former attempts to lessen oppression or send a message of
revolt for a single person and the latter attempts to lessen the oppression of or send
a message of revolt for an entire group. We can further divide each of these two
types of resistance into two categories: the resistance can be carried out either by a
single person or through the coordinated or spontaneously coincident actions of a
number of persons. An act of resistance, then, can fall into one of four categories: by
an individual toward the end of lessening oppression or sending a message of revolt
for an individual, by an individual toward the end of lessening oppression or sending
a message of revolt for a whole group, by a group toward the end of lessening
oppression or sending a message of revolt for an individual, or by a group toward the
end of lessening oppression or sending a message of revolt for a group. I can see no
persuasive reason to exclude the personal cases from the account, even when
directed at reducing one’s own oppression; if there can be duties to the self, then
surely this must be one. Individually undertaken actions that are aimed at lessening
the oppression of the person acting will count as resistance to oppression, for
example, a slave who commits suicide to end her slavery.
Since much of the harm of oppression is psychological and has to do with
creating a false and oppressive image of members of oppressed groups, some acts of
resistance will be mainly symbolic or rhetorical. Under these headings I would
include building theories and ideas that reveal oppression, proposing and lobbying
for laws that relieve oppression, and creating counter-images through art and the
public media to counteract oppressive stereotypes and false consciousness. As with
physical acts, these symbolic acts might be aimed at relieving an individual’s or
some small set of individuals’ suffering of oppression or at ending the oppression of
an entire social group.
A person or group resists only when they act in a way that could result in
lessening oppression or sending a message of revolt or outrage to someone. My
account does not categorize as resistance cases where the only ones witnessing the
 Resistance and Responsibility 193

action are incapable of receiving a message of revolt and there is no lessening of

oppression. Such cases are surely rare. It is possible to send a message to oneself of
revolt or outrage and for this message to be illuminating about oneself. So this sort
of case would somehow involve even one’s own inability to see the action as
resistance. Still, one might argue that even if the agent cannot see the action as
tesistance, it might actually be resistance when viewed in the better vision of
hindsight. However, if such cases count as resistance it is difficult to see resistance
as an object of moral praise. Since I am ultimately concerned with the moral duties
to resist, I do not regard this omission as unfortunate.
Whose judgment is to count concerning what is possibly effective in lessening
oppression or sending a message of revolt, however? Because oppression often re-
stricts the education and experience of the oppressed, we do not want to exclude
cases where the person attempting to resist or send a message does so in a way
that is not possibly effective for reasons she could not have known. McGary pro-
poses a “reasonable person” criterion (though in a slightly different context). The
purpose is to rule out cases of self-deception, but not reasonable, or at least un-
derstandable, misjudgments about what might be effective. To implement the cri-
terion we imagine a reasonable person in the same situation. What counts as a
reasonable person cannot be easily described; persons are always situated in a his-
torical context with social norms of what constitutes reasonableness. The reason-
able person criterion has to be sensitive to what persons can be expected to know
given their race or gender or class, and perhaps other social groupings as well.
Furthermore, what counts as a relief of oppression also will be contextually deter-
mined. For a religious person it may be a lessening of oppression just to practice
one’s religion, even at the cost of death. Since oppression involves harm, the
question of whether oppression is lessened turns on whether the harm has been
reduced, lessened, or mitigated. Although this involves subjective elements (since
the harm is experienced by individual subjects), that is not to say that the issue is a
relative one; the oppression either is or is not reduced by the actions. The same can
be said for sending a message of revolt: it involves subjective elements, but it is
ultimately an objective matter whether a message was sent or received. The rea-
sonable person criterion applies the prevailing social norms for determining harm
and the conceivable methods of lessening it in the given situation. Thus, what is
needed is a person who is situated similarly in terms of all the relevant social
groupings to the person whose actions one is judging. The test can be summarized as
follows: Would a reasonable person, who is similarly situated, think the act is not
entirely unlikely to bring about a lessening of oppression or send a message of revolt
or outrage?
My account of resistance in light of these further considerations may be
summarized as follows:
A person P is said to be resisting the oppressive situation S through action A just in
case, given a reasonable person P’ who is situated as P is, the following is true:

1. P’ would regard S as oppressive;

2. P believes S is unjust for someone;
194 We Shall Overcome

3. P’ would judge that A is not unlikely to effect the lessening of oppression or

send a message of revolt or outrage, either for some individual member of
or the entire oppressed group;
4. P intends to lessen the oppression or feeling of injustice or send a message
of revolt through A;
5. The injustice in (2) and the intention in (4) cause P to perform A.

This account allows us to focus on the moral implications of an action that resists
oppression by setting the most stringent requirement on the intentions of the agent.
While it requires that the action be something that could reasonably be expected to
be effective, it makes this judgment of reasonableness from the perspective of the
agent.
On this account the test cases come out right: Gandhi and the escaping slave
are both clearly resisting oppression on this account, since both intended to lessen
oppression, either of a whole group or her own, and could be reasonably expected to
succeed with their chosen course. The Palestinian Intifada is resistance to op-
pression, since a reasonable person in the Palestinian’s situation would think their
actions are not unlikely to be expressive of revolt or outrage, even if they are judged
unlikely to be effective. The Unabomber’s actions are not resistance to oppression
because the growth of technology is not oppressive, even if it was annoying to him.
Furthermore, the actions he undertook—letter bombs sent to individuals with no
real power to stem the growth of technology—could not be expected reasonably
to lessen it or even to protest it because of the incoherence and obscurity of
the message itself. The men’s movements against paying child support are also
not resistance to oppression because men are not, as a group, oppressed by their
treatment by family law. Any one individual man may be the victim of an unjust
decision by a judge but not because men are an oppressed social group. The fact
that the law more often requires men to pay child support and women to have
custody stems from the different roles men and women play as fathers and mothers
and the greater wealth of men as a group. But these differences privilege men and
oppress women, even if there are individual men who wish to play greater roles in
their children’s lives or who have less access to wealth than the default assumptions
made by the law. Thus, the men’s movements are misaimed. If they aimed to end
the oppression of women by sex role differentiation and all that entails (i.e., the
gender wage gap and the resulting coercive expectations of women to be caregivers
and men to be breadwinners), then it would be resistance to oppression and it might
also have the happy result of lessening the harm to individual men who wish for
custody of their children.
This account of resistance to oppression, when supplemented with a moral
theory, allows us to distinguish the morally good cases of resistance, on the one
hand, from the immoral and nonmoral cases on the other. Since oppression is by
definition unjustified, resistance to oppression, as lessening the unjustified harm, is
at least prima facie justified. A reasonable moral theory would require that the act of
resistance has to be proportional to the oppression and aimed at the right persons
(i.e., those who cause or continue the oppression). Thus, terrorism, or violence
aimed at civilians for the purpose of creating terror in a population, would normally
 Resistance and Responsibility 195

not be justified, all things considered. One might object that since, on my account,
oppression is institutional, there may not be any “right persons.” But this is where
my theory of social groups as fundamentally composed of individual persons is crucial.
There may not be any identifiable oppressors, but because institutions are funda-
mentally constituted of persons and patterns of individual behavior, there must be
at least lots of persons who myopically go along with, even if they never really
recognize, an oppressive institution. Those who simply go along with oppression are
surely less culpable than persons who recognize and intentionally perpetuate op-
pression for their own benefit, however, so a resister should treat the former less
harshly. In the next section I discuss the issues of responsibility for resistance to
oppression.

2. Moral Responsibility for Resistance

What are the moral obligations, if any, of persons to resist oppression? This question
must be answered differently for persons who are privileged relative to the oppression
under consideration and those who are oppressed by it. There are two questions to
separate, then. First, what are the moral obligations to resist of the persons who are
privileged by a particular case of oppression? Second, what are the moral obligations
to resist of the persons who are oppressed? An objection that has been raised to even
asking this question is that by focusing on the victims’ obligations I am “blaming the
victim.” This is a serious concern that I will take pains to alleviate by showing how to
avoid wrongful victim-blaming. The first and most important way to do so is to
recognize that the victims are not the only ones who are obligated to resist.

2.1. The Obligations of the Privileged Social Group

Oppression, by definition, implies injustice, and so someone or some entity has at
least a prima facie obligation to end the oppression (Calhoun 1989; May 1992).
Those who commit injustice or immoral acts are, of course, obligated to desist. But
with oppression it is often complicated to discern who is committing the injustice. I
have distinguished between the oppressors and the (merely) privileged. Oppressors
bear full moral responsibility for their part in oppression. To be an oppressor is to
intend to act in order to continue or intensify the oppression of a social group. An
oppressor may be unaware that the injustice that is being committed counts as
oppression, or that the harm falls on a social group, but must be aware that he or she
is acting unjustly and harming someone thereby. To be merely privileged by op-
pression is simply to gain materially or psychologically from it. Privilege comes to
persons because they are members of a social group that benefits from the oppression
that another social group suffers. The privileged need not seek, want, or even notice
their benefits; the benefits are unavoidable for them. A clear example of this was
John Stuart Mill’s renunciation of his oppressive male conjugal rights upon his
marriage to Harriet Taylor (Mill and Mill 1970, 45-46). Although it was a mag-
nanimous and no doubt sincere gesture, it was impossible for him to give up the
196 We Shall Overcome

privileges marriage bestowed upon him for two reasons. First, he was able to appear
magnanimous in giving them up, an ability that she did not have. Second, since the
law did not recognize men’s renouncing their rights, he could at any time in the
future reclaim them, and that right gave him (to use the language of bargaining
theory) a threat position better than hers. Thus, even a feminist such as John Stuart
Mill was privileged, if unwillingly, by the oppression of women.
Oppressois, on any reasonable moral theory, are morally required to desist
and remedy past harm. There‘ are usually several obstacles to motivating oppres-
sors to do so. Sometimes they do not recognize the depth of the harm that they do.
Sometimes they are not moved by the harm that they do because they believe that
the oppressed persons are not their moral equals. Sometimes the oppressors are
simply moral slackers: they recognize the harm and that the persons they are harming
are their equals, but they do not act because they are weak of will or simply im-
moral. The oppressor has to be very clearly and firmly addressed, and I suggest
strategies for doing so in the next section of this chapter.
Privileged non-oppressors are in a more ambiguous moral position than op-
pressors, although their position is less ambiguous than that of the oppressed. Since
they are receiving undeserved benefits through institutions that harm others, the
privileged non-oppressors are morally obligated to resist and attempt to change those
institutions and to renounce privilege when they are capable of doing so. Johr: Stuart
Mill, whose renunciations upon marriage [ have mentioned, acted morally with
respect to his privilege as a man. Not only did he attempt to renounce privilege but
he also worked, through his writings and his actions, to end the oppression of
women. However, Mill also was somewhat blind to other privileges, such as his race
and social class, and could not be seen as acting in an exemplary way with respect to
those systems of privilege.” But did he act immorally with respect to these other
systems of oppression?
To be privileged is to be able to be blind to a system of oppression and the
privileges it grants one (Frye 1983; Bailey 1998). Whites are able to think of
themselves as raceless, for example. But if one is raceless, then it impossible for one’s
race to give one privileges. Thus, being privileged and failing to see privilege
commonly go together. On most moral theories, one cannot be held responsible for
failing to act to end an immoral situation that one does not see. But one might be
able to recognize oppression or unjust harm without recognizing one’s own rele in
that as a privileged recipient of benefits. To see what moral obligations the orivi-
leged non-oppressor has, we will have to separate the obligations with respect to
oppression from those with respect to privilege. A privileged non-oppressor woo
recognizes that there is a system of oppression or that a person is treated unjustly is
obligated to relieve that situation just in the way that anyone who recognizes that
there is an injustice or harm is obligated to help to alleviate it if he or she can do so
without sacrificing something of equal or greater moral significance. A privileged
non-oppressor who also recognizes her privilege is obligated to renounce those
privileges, where possible.
Some ignorance of oppression and privilege is morally blameworthy in itself If a
good case has been made that there is oppression, and that case is generally well
known throughout society, then one is responsible for the knowledge of oppression,
 Resistance and Responsibility 197

and hence also for doing one’s part toward alleviating it. If one also can be held
responsible for the knowledge of one’s privilege, as would certainly be the case for
whites, Americans, men, wealthy, and able-bodied persons with respect to at least
some systems of oppression, then one is obligated to resist the oppression and
renounce privilege where possible. In this sense, perhaps, John Stuart Mill may be
excused somewhat for some of his ignorance of privilege. But I believe that he, of all
people, should have been able to recognize more of the oppressions that privileged
him, because of his keen sense of gender injustice.
Resistance to oppression is never easy, either for the privileged or for the
oppressed. As the quote from Susan B. Anthony that begins this chapter suggests,
resistance means going against the prevailing norms of society. This requires:
courage and commitment and sometimes extracts a serious penalty. Joan Browning,
who, as a young woman protested Jim Crow laws by participating in the Freedom
Ride, writes of how it utterly changed the course of her life because of the social
stigma that her community placed on being seen as a rebel.

Being part of the Freedom Movement was a life-changing experience. In partici-

pating, I lost my only real opportunity for a higher education, and I was alienated
from my church. I experienced a lifelong separation from my large and loving fam-
ily, and was set apart from the world in ways that affected all my relationships and
employment options. For me, and for many other women like me, participation
made us outcasts—women without a home. (Browning et al. 2000, 198)

Browning does not regret her actions, but she writes clearly and honestly about what
they cost her. She was doing what she saw as, and what most people would now see
as, her moral duty. Doing one’s duty in any realm extracts different costs, but it is
important to point out in this book that the expected costs of resistance will sys-
tematically differ with one’s relation to systems of privilege and oppression. The costs
were certainly higher for Browning, a poor, rural, Southern woman, than they were
for the white male college students from the North who were also part of the Civil
Rights Movement but were able to return to their homes after doing their duty
having lost perhaps only a summer’s wages.
This discussion shows the importance of generating general social knowledge of
oppression. For most of the persons who are well-placed and more easily motivated
to end oppression are the privileged non-oppressors. Yet they are also motivated, if
unconsciously, to avoid knowing about their privileges, as we saw in chapter 3.°
Thus, it is important that information about oppression be prominently and con-
vincingly presented so that it is undeniable and inescapable.

2.2. The Obligations of the Oppressed Social Group

It is usually the case that coercion implies no moral responsibility for the coerced
actions and omissions. However, this is not always true.’ Consider the soldier who is
ordered by his superior in battle to kill noncombatants. There are times when we
hold someone morally responsible for actions that they could have omitted only on
pain of death. It is usually the case that when we choose to do something we are held
morally responsible for our action. But this judgment is also defeasible; consider the
198 We Shall Overcome

case of the temporarily insane person who kills her child’s murderer. In cases of
oppression by choice, as we discussed in chapter 4, there is both choice and coercion.
The normal and (morally) problematic choice is to participate in the coercive in-
stitution. Choosing not to participate is a kind of resistance to a social force that,
given the institutional framework, makes the resistance also a sacrifice for the in-
dividual. Hence we must ask: Are the oppressed obligated to engage in resistance?
Our moral intuitions as exhibited in our everyday talk about such situations give
us somewhere to begin. Within a group of workers on strike, those who continue
to work at the factory while the others are on strike are “scabs”; to the strikers they
are doing something hateful. To those outside the group of strikers there may be more
sympathy for those who continue to work, however. In the women’s movement there
is a mixed reaction to women who fill the traditional role of unpaid domestic werke:.
The current rhetoric of the women’s movement says “allow everyone to choose the
way to fulfill her life, whatever that choice might be,” without regard to the con-
sequences women’s individual choices have for other women or how her preferences
might have developed.® But there is a distinct undercurrent that homeworking
unpaid mothers feel that they are somehow doing something that feminists disap-
prove of,” and it seems to be the implication of the analysis of the iazry and Lisa
example of chapter 5. Like all moral intuitions, these require both conceptual and
empirical investigation to justify a judgment. The remainder of this section wil!
attempt to account for these moral intuitions, clarify the confusions, and resolve the
apparent paradox of obligations on the part of the oppressed io resist oppression.
Is resistance by the oppressed ever morally required? If sc, ther. sould we he'd
blameworthy at least some of those victims of oppression who do not choose re-
sistance? For example, we might agree with the judgment oé the strikers who call
those who cross picket lines and continue to work “scabs.” I shall take these two
questions in turn. Whether we actually want to apply socia. sanctions to persons
who fail to resist is another separate moral issue. (Surely those responsible for the
initial oppression have no moral authority to do so.)
It is implausible to suggest that resistance to oppression by the oppressed is
morally required at all times with respect to ali forms of oppression. I say this for two
basic reasons. First, the oppressed may well not understand the oppression they
suffer, for it is often a part of their oppression that it is hidder from them under the
guises of tradition or divine command or the natural order of things. It woud
therefore be even more difficult for them to judge what actiors are tequired of them
to resist their oppression. Second, oppression is such a pervasive condition cf one’s
life that it would be impossible to struggle against all of it at once. The slave couid
resist by escaping, for instance, only when the timing is right, but nearly always
there is some other way that he could resist. He couid refuse to work, try to kill his
master, refuse to eat, and so on. But these actions are mest likely mutuaily
ex-
clusive. Refusing to work or refusing to eat, for example, puts the master on guard
with that slave so that he will not have the opportunity to ve:form the other acts of
resistance. Or, in gathering strength to escape or <o revolt, the slave might need to
eat and appear to acquiesce for a time.
Resistance to oppression does not seem to fit the duty model, for two reasons.
First, the situation that would obligate is coercive. That is, the oppresse
d are
 Resistance and Responsibility 199

unfairly and unavoidably put in their situation, and coercion normally mitigates
moral obligation or responsibility. Of course, it is not true that one is never obli-
gated in an unfair or unavoidable situation. For instance, we have duties to our
parents in most cases even though their being our parents is unavoidable (for us),
and the duties may be somehow unfair (say, one’s siblings refuse to take their turns
in helping them out when they are incapacitated). The second reason that resis-
tance to oppression does not seem to fit the duty model has to do with the forms of
resistance open to oppressed persons. Sometimes the only way to resist is in con-
certed effort with others, and if the others will not act, then one’s own action might
fail to constitute resistance at all. If you are the only worker at the plant who is
willing to strike, then it cannot be a duty for you to strike, since your action will
likely be ineffective even in sending a message of revolt (e.g., if you just look like a
shirker). And if striking (when others strike) is the only course of resistance in this
case, then it cannot be a duty to resist.
If resistance to oppression is not a duty, perhaps resistance goes beyond duty
and is best judged as morally heroic or supererogatory. David Heyd (1982) presents
a reasonable model of supererogation that goes as follows.
An action is supererogatory if and only if all of the following conditions hold.
(1) The action is neither obligatory nor forbidden.
(2) Its omission is not wrong and does not deserve sanction.
(3) It is morally good.'©
(4) It is done voluntarily for the sake of someone else’s good.
One might object that resistance to oppression does not fit this model because it is
aimed at reducing one’s own suffering. I think that this should cause us to rethink the
model to allow for supererogatory actions that are aimed at oneself. But even if we
take the model as it is, resistance to oppression by choice is often aimed at the
elimination of oppression for the whole group, and we could restrict the heroic
actions to those that aim at ending the oppression of a group or some members of an
oppressed group other than oneself.
If resistance to oppression is not strictly a duty, then resistance to oppression is
not obligatory, and surely it is also not forbidden, so condition (1) is satisfied.
Condition (3) is also.satisfied, since to count as a case of resistance to oppression it
has to be intended to reduce oppression, that is, to lessen undeserved harm.
However, resistance to oppression does not meet condition (2) in all kinds of cases,
particularly not in those I termed oppression by choice. (Resistance to other kinds of
oppression would meet condition (2) and so arguably be supererogatory.'!) In op-
pression by choice the alternative to resistance is participation in the oppressive
institution. By participating in an oppressive institution, one lends some strength and
stability to it, perhaps even legitimates it to some degree.'* This point is crucial and
deserves some elaboration. Institutions are coordinated actions of individual people.
Part of what makes institutions so effective at coordinating is they embody the
common knowledge of what people will do in certain types of situations, and this in
turn narrows down the range of choices of actions one is to perform to a manageable
number. This common knowledge becomes stronger and more stable the more
times that the expected actions are performed. So if an oppressive institution
200 We Shall Overcome

requiring the actions of the oppressed to be of a certain sort (e.g., female house-
cleaning, male shirking) is effective in so coordinating actions in a given case, then
it becomes an even greater expectation on the part of others that they will perform
the required actions, as well. One has only two options in such cases: resist or
strengthen the unjust institution. Thus, in cases of oppression by choice failing to
resist harms others.
We are left with the situation where one must do harm whether one resists
or not, and there is no duty other than the general duty to avoid doing (unde-
served) harm. The solution is to do the least undeserved harm. That is, one must
weigh the harm of resisting against the harm produced by not resisting. In many
cases the harm of not resisting is distributive, though the harm of resisting is felt
fully by the individual involved. In calculating these harms one has to also consider
the self-esteem that is lost by harming others through one’s own failure to resist
oppression. In some cases one ought only resist with some sort of symbolic resistance
or protest, which causes one less harm than another form of resistance (Hill 1991;
Harvey 1996). In my view, then, a duty to resist may be uncommon though not
inconceivable. Yet, I do not think it is so uncommon. One important way for the
oppressed to resist is by not themselves enforcing oppressive norms on others in
their group. For example, it is often said that women are each others’ harshest
critics, harshest enforcers of the prevailing oppressive norms of female fashion,
beauty, morality, and sexual double standards. If women were simply to refrain from
criticizing other women who resist those oppressive norms, they would themselves
play a part in resistance. This is a nearly costless'? way of resisting, and thus is
morally required in my view.
One might object that insisting that the oppressed have a duty to resist their
oppression is a case of blaming the victim, in the pejorative sense. J. Harvey (1996)
categorizes the ways in which victims can be blamed in morally objectionable ways.
There are three categories that Harvey mentions that might be relevant to this
analysis of the morality of resistance:
[Category 4]: There was in fact moral harm, but then it is claimed that in accounting
for it, we must look at some crucial contribution from the victim involving some
moral or nonmoral failing.
[Category 5]: There was in fact moral harm and the crucial responsibility of the
actual agent is acknowledged, but then it is claimed that some contribution from the
victim makes the harm more serious than it would otherwise have been, and that
that contribution involves some moral or nonmoral fault of the victim.
[Category 6]: There was some harm, and any responsibility for it by an agent is
acknowledged (including how serious it is), but once the harm has occurred, then
it is claimed that something untoward in the victim’s response makes the ultimate
outcome worse than it would otherwise have been, and that that response in-
volves some moral or nonmoral fault of the victim. (Harvey 1996, 49-51, emphasis
mine)

While I admit that I am victim-blaming in these senses, I think that whether it is

wrong to “blame the victim” in these senses depends first on whether the “claim” in
the italicized phrases in each category is true. That is, Harvey says it is victim-
blaming to claim that the victim either made some contribution to the harm or
 Resistance and Responsibility 201

tesponded in some untoward way that made the outcome worse than it otherwise
would have been. If the claim is false, then these kinds of victim-blaming are mere
rationalizations of the victimization. But if the claim is true, then the victim may,
depending on the relative contributions of the actions to the harm, shoulder some of
the blame for the harm that came about. Just because one is a victim one is not
thereby absolved of all responsibility for the outcome of the situation. Suppose
someone superficially cuts you while carelessly using a sharp scissors in your vicinity.
You are a victim. But that does not mean that if you now refuse to wash the cut or
take care of it in any way (supposing that you have clean water, band-aids, and
neosporin available to you) you can blame the person who cut you when you lose
your hand to gangrene. You are to blame for some of the harm, even though you are a
victim. If the claim is true, there is another way that one could still objectionably
victim-blame: by focusing on the victims’ faults out of all proportion to their relative
contribution to the harm. I take this to be a serious concern and a caution to be
heeded. But we must not therefore shrink from an honest assessment of the full
causal and moral situation.

3. Strategies of Resistance

Now that we have an understanding of what resistance to oppression is and who is

required to undertake it, we can begin to explore effective strategies for overturning
or abolishing oppressive situations. Many of these strategies are treated at great
length by others, and as a philosopher, I do not have much to add to those analyses.
My main concern is to catalog the forms of resistance to see whether there are
effective strategies against each force of oppression that I have discussed in the book.
In the last part of this section I offer one original contribution for constructing a legal
strategy to resist oppression.
In the previous section I argued that the privileged non-oppressors are most
well placed and easily motivated to resist oppression but also the most motivated
consciously or unconsciously to ignore it. I also argued that the oppressed are often
motivated to cooperate with oppressive institutions, in part because they see it as in
their self-interest to do so, and as I argued in chapter 6, they may be under the sway
of false consciousness and deformed desires as a result of their oppression. These
facts imply that the first essential element in successful resistance is raising con-
sciousness about particular cases of oppression and building a moral case against
them. Gloria Steinem, who has done much to raise consciousness about women’s
oppression, writes that “there can be no [major social change] without words and
phrases that first create a dream of change in our heads” (Steinem 1983, 2). This
task, I take it, is both theoretical and rhetorical. The case has to be made that there
is oppression, and it has to be simply and powerfully expressed. In this book I have
made the case for several examples of oppression, but many others have done so as
well, and more simply and powerfully than I have. The theoretical task is not
finished, however. There remains much to be done theoretically to recognize and
interpret particular social interactions and patterns of interactions that reveal social
structures as oppressive. In the previous chapter I listed three specific roles for
202 We Shall Overcome

theory in resisting oppression. First, we need to attack existing oppressive role

schemas and their rationalizations. We might do that, for instance, by showing how
sociobiological explanations of the sexual division of labor depend on androcentric
assumptions and privilege men. Second, we need to propose alternative categories
for social groupings that depend more on interest than on accidents of birth, on
voluntary groupings rather than involuntary groups. Third, I suggested that we can
reveal false consciousness and deformed desires where they exist by exposing the
ways in which assimilating oneself to involuntary in-groups and accentuating the
differences with involuntary out-groups is, in at least some cases, either an assertion
of undeserved privilege or a failure to resist one’s own oppression. But theory
reaches few people and so cannot fight oppression alone.

3.1. Rhetorical and Symbolic Strategies

Rhetoric is both a cognitive and affective strategy that challenges stereotypes of
oppressed groups and the false consciousness that accompanies oppression, and
persuades and motivates change. Rhetorical strategies range widely from purely cool
rational uses of persuasive speech to passionate and creative uses of speech, poetry,
art, photography, film, and theater. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Bir-
mingham Jail” is a sustained explanation and defense of the nonviolent resistance
tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. It contains not only a defense of the actions
but also a sustained argument against the injustices of apartheid and black oppres-
sion. On the other hand, his famous “I Have a Dream” speech is full of the creative
and allegorical imagery that inspired many to recognize oppression and resist it
through his passionate oratorical style. This speech is known to every American
schoolchild and revered by most Americans, even those who did not recognize then
the injustice of apartheid and do not now recognize the continuing legacy of black
oppression. Yet it is such a motivating piece of rhetoric that it has won over the
hearts and minds of Americans enough for all to recognize the justice of King’s cause.
Some of the most effective rhetoric aims to motivate with humor. The Guerilla
Girls are a group of activist feminist artists who stage humorous shows and make
posters and billboards to spread their feminist messages. They often state a fact, but
dress it up in sarcastic language and imagery to catch the attention of the viewer
and yet relay the statistic that underlies their resistance to women’s oppression. For
example, one billboard boldly states that “Even the U.S. Senate is more Progressive
than Hollywood” and has a picture of Sen. Trent Lott’s head on top of an Oscar
trophy. Underneath are two boxes stating: “Female Senators: 14%” and “Female
Directors: 4%.” This is an arresting image, and relays the facts, both of which
clearly, quickly, and inescapably challenge anyone to deny that women are op-
pressed in this society.
Other effective rhetoric is specifically aimed at informing the oppressed about
their unjust condition and motivating them to resist. Paulo Freire’s (1970) work on
teaching the oppressed to read and through it to be politically active is among the
most famous and effective in this regard. The pedagogical strategy stresses dialogue
and equality between teacher and student, modeling both equal relations among
persons and activism to change persons’ lives.
 Resistance and Responsibility 203

Public recognition of resisters and martyrs (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
birthday as a national holiday) and public apologies for past oppression communi-
cate the ideas that resistance to oppression is valuable and honorable. They also
recognize the harms of the oppression and honor the victims of that oppression.
These events can also serve as good occasions on which to reflect on the legacy of
privilege and oppression for social groups that are the descendants of the oppressors
and oppressed. Several nations of the world owe their existence to the genocide or
near genocide of former inhabitants of the same lands. In New Zealand, Australia,
and Canada, in particular, activists of different ethnicities call for the remembrance
of those victims, apologies from the descendants of the oppressors, and reparations
to the people now living who still suffer harm from those acts of oppression.
Apology and reparation movements are less successful in the United States,
despite the obvious crimes of genocide, forcible removal from ancestral lands, mass
kidnapping, murder, and slavery. In the United States the argument has been that
individuals who are now alive bear no moral responsibility for the crimes of their _
ancestors. While this is surely true, it is beside the point. An apology would serve
the rhetorical purpose of resisting the current oppression that is the responsibility of
the privileged citizens. American Indians lack wealth and access to their ancestral
lands, and they are harmed by this. At the same time, non-Indians are far more
likely to own wealth and to have the possibility of owning those very lands because
of the actions of the U.S. government to forcibly remove and kill Indians. Ameri-
cans of any ethnicity cannot decouple the connection with this genocidal past
because the wealth and resources of America are the spoils of those actions.
Likewise, slavery considerably increased the total wealth and power of America, and
therefore implicates all who enjoy that wealth and power today. Granted, the
responsibility of a modern American is not for the original oppression—genocide
and slavery—itself, but rather his or her duty is to resist the continuing oppression
that is a legacy of that original oppression because he or she is benefited by it and
others are harmed by it.'*
The most powerful symbol of protest against oppression remains the protest
march with masses of marchers; the more massive the march, the more effective the
protest. Simply the fact that so many people get the word that there is a march, then
feel moved to show up for the march, taking time out of their daily routines, perhaps
also risking violent treatment by police or counter-demonstrators, persuades others
that there are serious problems that demand attention. The massing of persons may
be effective in part because it threatens less benign future actions if their issues are
not attended to. For example, massive work slow downs or boycotts may be next. Or
perhaps even violent struggle. Massive demonstrations engage the media in the
cause, since they are newsworthy events. This brings more resisters to the cause. Of
course, not all mass demonstrations are resistance to oppression. Dictators can de-
mand that people show up so that they can demonstrate that the government has the
support of the people. People may also mass together to resist progressive social
change, as the yearly protests against the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision
guaranteeing women abortion rights shows. What these mass demonstrations illus-
trate is that all such massive gatherings demand attention and explanation, which
offers the demonstrators the opportunity to make their case to the public.
204 We Shall Overcome

Rhetorical and symbolic strategies are useful, necessary, and appropriate for
every form of oppression that I have discussed in this book. They raise awareness of
oppression on the part of privileged and oppressed persons, as well as others who
might be allies or whose opposition to resistance might otherwise effectively prevent
it. These strategies also motivate resistance and teach people how to resist. They
empower the oppressed with a sense that something can be done and that a future
free of oppression is possible. They embarrass the oppressor and reveal his shameful
conduct to the world. But, as I:have argued throughout, there are powerful material
motives for oppression, and these may not be nullified by the power of the pen or
even mass protest alone. Hence the resister must resort to other means when
thetoric and symbol fail.

3.2. Economic Strategies

As we saw in chapter 5, money is one of the major motivations to oppress. If that
motivation is removed, much oppression will cease. Some economic strategies of
resistance trade on that fact. Workers who are coercively exploited by their em-
ployers can organize work stoppages or strikes to bargain for better wages and con-
ditions of work. They can convince others to join them and effectively shut down an
industry or even a nation. An important example of the power of a group of workers
to bring about change was the Lawrence mill worker strike that coined the phrase
“bread and roses.”
On January 12, 1912, ten thousand woolen textile workers went on strike in
Lawrence, Massachusetts, to protest pay cuts that left them unable to sustain
themselves and their families. The strike was precipitated by a pay cut implemented
by the American Woolen Company when a state law went into effect that reduced
the weekly hours that women could legally work. This law provided an excuse for
employers to capture all the benefits of their recent mechanization by reducing the
wages for the women workers, who comprised most of the labor force. “For weeks
the strikers held out, mobilizing support through rallies and other events that
publicized their plight. By February almost thirty thousand strikers had stopped
virtually all production in Lawrence. By mid-March all four of the strikers’ chief
demands were met” (Dublin and Harney n.d.). This strike was a significant event in
the struggle for unskilled workers, women, and immigrants to achieve a living
wage—a wage that could allow a person to live independently without charity or
government assistance. Of course, success is not automatic. In 1981, for example,
then U.S. President Ronald Reagan fired all of the nation’s air traffic controllers
rather than negotiate their demands with them. Strikers always risk the loss of their
jobs, and: in some cases violent attack, but even strikes that end badly can some-
times serve to raise awareness of oppressive conditions.
Labor unions can pursue other strategies of resistance than simply strikes,
though it is the threat of possible strike that gives weight to the bargaining power of
the union. Unions collectively bargain for wages, benefits, and working conditions
for their workers, which gives them greater power in bargains than each worker
could have alone. While the company collects the power of capital to formulate its
threat point in the bargain, labor unions allow workers to accumulate their power to
 Resistance and Responsibility 205

tefuse to work or to slow work down in order to formulate their threat point.
Furthermore, labor unions politically organize to support politicians whose policy
proposals will further the ability of the workers to raise their threat points by
protecting their ability to strike and to enforce collective bargaining for all workers
in an industry.
Consumers can boycott the goods that are produced by firms that oppress their
workers or in countries that oppress their people. This strategy is particularly del-
icate, however; it can easily be misaimed and end up hurting the victims of op-
pression more than helping them. For example, while it is surely good to boycott
goods made by slave labor, it is less clear that it is a good idea to boycott goods made
by workers who are poorly paid or made by (poorly paid) children (Becker and
Cudd, 2003). The workers may consider the jobs to be the best way out of poverty
that is available to them, and without a further plan to help them, consumers who
boycott their products could be harming more than helping. Consumers have suc-
cessfully boycotted the goods of firms that are oppressing people in other countries.
The Nestlé boycott of 1974-1984 succeeded for a time in convincing that company
not to falsely advertise the value of infant formula in countries where it was clearly
better for women economically and for health reasons to breastfeed their children.
(However, it appears that Nestlé is, as of this writing, again violating World Health
Organization restrictions on marketing their products.) Consumers can also boycott
the provision of inferior goods that enforce their oppression, such as the Mon-
tgomery bus boycott that protested the requirement that blacks sit in the back of
the bus. The city of Montgomery, Alabama, realized that it was too expensive to
continue that particular degrading practice and changed its rules rather than give
up its bus system.!?
Other economic strategies try to increase the economic power of those who are
resisting oppression, in order to equal that of the oppressor or simply to raise the
standard of living of the poor. Collective investment strategies allow persons to pool
their limited funds to concentrate them on a solution to a particular oppressive
problem. In many communities there are growing grass roots funds that are man-
aged by small boards who distribute them to women in need of abortion services,
but unable to get them because they are poor and because state-provided medical
funding for the poor cannot be used for abortions. These funds are a form of
resistance to the oppression of women through denial of abortion services. In many
Third World countries, micro-credit agencies, such as the Grameen Bank, loan
money to the poorest women to allow them to start small businesses to raise
themselves and their families out of poverty. These agencies seek to become self-
sufficient like other banks by recovering the loans with interest and then loaning
the money to new poor clients. These banks attempt to eradicate poverty by em-
powering women to develop and use their own skills.
Other forms of development assistance by first world nations and intergov-
ernmental agencies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the Agency for International Development are more ambiguously resistant to
oppression. On the one hand, these agencies claim to aim at the eradication of
world poverty, but, on the other hand, they have been spectacularly unsuccessful for
the amount of investment, and many scholars and activists accuse them of having
206 We Shall Overcome

neo-colonial aims to keep the Third World relatively poor in order to provide cheap
labor for the benefit of the First World. Since I addressed this charge in chapter 5, I
will not belabor it here. These agencies can be important agents of resistance to
poverty and the oppression of workers by helping people build schools and economic
infrastructure in their countries that will enable them to resist being exploited by
multinational corporations that seek to bid down the wages of workers to the lowest
possible level. If that level is raised throughout the world, then an equalizing of
world wages is inevitable. Of course, this will come at the expense of the privileged,
who will have to compete for jobs with Third World workers, a fact that is bound to
unleash a backlash that must also be resisted.
Economic strategies of resistance are primarily useful for resisting oppression by
capitalist firms who seek to exploit workers through their greater bargaining power
and the oppressive conditions of poverty. Through collective investment and micro-
credit, poor persons can be empowered to resist other forms of oppression that are
not directly economic. For example, a woman who is able to feed her children with
her own labor can refuse to put up with an abusive husband or refuse to sell her girls
into prostitution. She can send her children to school and provide them with tools
to resist exploitation and oppression. A person who is able to labor his way out of
abject poverty can hope for a better future and come to expect to be treated by
others with dignity and respect.

3.3. Armed Struggle

Nonviolent strategies of resistance, such as those just mentioned, have often worked
to bring about positive social and political change. Massive nonviolent actions have
brought about the end of apartheid in the United States and South Africa, the end of
colonial oppression in India, suffrage for women in England, the United States, and
many other countries. Recent examples of “people power” have brought down op-
pressive Communist regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and overthrown
dictators like Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia. However, when
oppression is ongoing, massive, and violent, armed struggle is sometimes required to
resist it. There exists a large literature on the morality of waging armed struggle or
war; in philosophy it has long been known as “just war theory.” If we view oppression
of social groups as on a par morally with violent aggression by one nation on an-
other—and I see no reason why we should not—then the just war arguments apply
straightforwardly. I will not rehearse that literature, which dates back to the very
beginnings of philosophy in the East as well as the West, here, but simply sketch the
direction that one must go in applying the arguments.
Three basic principles of just war theory apply when deciding whether to apply
force or resist nonviolently and how to apply the force. First, the force must be
applied against the oppressors and not the innocent. Second, the force must be
proportional to the violence that is being resisted. Third, violence should be the last
resort and used only when it is likely to be successful. Most just war theorists hold
that as long as one is a noncombatant one is among the innocent. The problem with
this way of stating things, however, is that oppressors and innocents are not ex-
haustive categories. The privileged may be noncombatants and yet blameworthy for
 Resistance and Responsibility 207

their participation in oppression. Yet the point of armed struggle as resistance to

oppression is not to punish but to bring an end to oppression. One might argue that
violence applied to the merely privileged could serve to bring about negotiations
to end oppression and thus be an effective strategy. But this line of reasoning is
not consistent with the second principle, that the violence of the struggle be pro-
portional to the violence being resisted. Since the merely privileged are not violent,
by hypothesis, they cannot be attacked if we are to remain consistent with the
second principle. Furthermore, many of the oppressors are not violent either. The
employer who discriminates and segregates acts oppressively but does not thereby
do violence. Thus, to be consistent with the second principle we have to exclude
both the merely privileged and the nonviolent oppressors as targets of armed in-
tervention.
Why should we hope that the oppressed and their allies will accept the two
principles stated above if they preclude action against many oppressors? There are
two reasons. First, these are moral principles that can be independently justified.
Second, because by adhering to them resisters to oppression have the best chance of
bringing about a future of peace and justice after the violent oppression has been
stopped. If nonviolent oppressors are attacked, they may reason that a violent reply
on their part is justified as self-defense. Furthermore, if the nonviolent oppressors
are working within the legal system of a state, such as a state that enforces liberal
capitalism and allows discrimination, prohibits labor unions, or fails to provide a just
social minimum, then they are likely to be defended by the state with force against
resistive armed struggle. Unless the resisters apply enough violent force to overcome
the state forces, they will likely fail and their use of force be seen as unjustified.
Indeed anyone who holds that the second principle of just war is reasonable will
agree that use of force against nonviolent oppressors is unjustified. If the resisters are
able to overthrow state forces, then they will have the enormous task of nation-
building ahead of them, a task that will be made more difficult by the fact that they
have come to power through the questionable use of force. Hence, in my view,
resisters should, both morally and pragmatically speaking, use nonviolent methods
when opposing nonviolent oppressors.
Just war theory justifies violence to oppose violent oppressive force when it can
be successful in bringing about positive change. The Algerian resistance to French
colonialism that Franz Fanon reported on is among the best examples of successful
violent resistance. Clearly violence made the French occupation very costly, and
the costs soon outweighed the benefits of maintaining the colonial presence. Fanon
argued that the guerilla war waged by the Algerians had other good social and
psychological effects on the oppressed. First, it united the people in resistance to the
French, making possible the subsequent task of nation-building. Second, since
women fought alongside the men, Fanon argued that women’s place was elevated in
the formerly traditional Muslim society. Sadly we have seen the reintroduction of
Muslim-inspired oppression of women in recent years in Algeria. Most importantly,
according to Fanon, the people of Algeria regained a sense of self-respect that they
did not have under colonial rule. Fighting for their freedom gave them pride and the
sense that they could take care of themselves and shape the world as they wished, _
without the permission or aid of the European power.
208 We Shall Overcome

Violent resistance may be justified as a response to violent oppression, but it

may not always be prudent. If the violence is extremely unlikely to overcome the
violent oppressors, it may be better to resist nonviolently raising the consciousness
of the privileged and bringing them in as allies in the cause. Violent resistance, when
it has little chance to overcome the violent, may be more like a suicide mission.
When the violent oppressor is the nominally legitimate state power, unsuccessful
violent resistance be seen by the privileged as even justifying the oppressive treat-
ment by those in power. In early twentieth-century America, consciousness rais-
ing by people like Walter White and Ida Wells-Barnett to lynching was far more
effective than any violent resistance that blacks could have offered. They were
significantly outnumbered and less well armed, and to fight back would have con-
firmed the stereotype of blacks as violent, justifying harsh treatment of blacks in the
minds of the privileged whites. The violent riots in the wake of the acquittal in 1993
of police who beat Rodney King was seen by many outside the black community of
Los Angeles as justifying the typical treatment of blacks by the Los Angeles Police
Department.
An important category of violent resistance to violent oppression is humani-
tarian intervention by the international community to stop genocide, aggressive
wars by states on weaker neighbors, or massive human rights violations. In De-
cember 2001 the U.N.—appointed International Commission on Intervention and
State Sovereignty (ICISS) issued a report entitled “The Responsibility to Protect,”
in which it examined the “right of humanitarian intervention” (International De-
velopment Research Centre 2001). The term “right” here is a misnomer, since it is
rather the duty and responsibility of the international community to intervene when
a state is unwilling or unable to avert serious harms to its people. But it is a revealing
one, since military incursions undertaken for less savory political reasons are often
defended on the grounds of the right of humanitarian intervention. Furthermore,
intervention is sometimes not undertaken when it should be because no state sees
its political interests promoted by intervening. Nevertheless, humanitarian inter-
vention is sometimes morally required to stop oppression. The report sets out
conditions under which intervention is justified and required. First there must be a
“just cause,” which is the state’s inability or unwillingness to protect its people from
mass terror, genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, or forced expulsion. Second, the
intervening military force must have the right intention, in particular, the intention
to prevent those forms of violent oppression. Third, military intervention has to be
the last resort, undertaken only after other means have been attempted to prevent
catastrophe. Fourth, the force used is to be the minimal force necessary to secure
human protection. Fifth, there has to be a reasonable chance of halting the op-
pression and the expected consequences of the military action have to be less than
that of not intervening militarily.
Of who is military intervention required? The report names the United Nations
as the only body that can authorize humanitarian intervention and claims that
nations have a duty to provide troops when requested by the United Nations. While
this sounds like a good solution in theory, in practice the United Nations sometimes
cannot act because of the veto power of the members of the Security Council, and it
cannot prevent unauthorized actions undertaken in the name of humanitarian
 Resistance and Responsibility 209

intervention by the lone superpower. While the United Nations has the mandate
from its member nations, in the abstract at least, to secure international peace,
order, and human rights, nations find it difficult to act because of internal politics,
and many deny an obligation to do so. Thomas Pogge (2002) has argued that
nations and individuals who benefit from the existence of an international order
that is stabilized by the United Nations owe their support to the United Nations in
carrying out its mandate. This argument parallels my argument that the privileged
are morally required to resist oppression. The Universal Declaration of Human
Rights Article 22 states: “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social
security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-
operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of
the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free
development of his personality.” As I read this, following Pogge, this implies that
indeed there is an obligation of those who live in relatively free, economically
secure, human rights respecting nations to act together to secure such freedom,
security, and rights for all. But in both the individual case and the international
case, there may be too many oppressions for any one individual or one body to resist.
This does not show that there is no obligation. It merely shows that the obligation is
imperfect, at worst. Both individuals and the United Nations should deliberate
about how best to use their resources to relieve as much suffering as possible.

3.4. Legal Strategies to End Oppression within States

A legitimate state must maintain a monopoly on the use of violence within that state.
When mobs and individuals take the prerogative to use violence, oppression inev-
itably results. The first step one can take to end oppression is to demand that the state
legislate and enforce strict laws against violence. When the state is ineffective in
curtailing violent oppression, a group can argue that the state is failing to enforce
internationally recognized human rights as set out in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, or other conventions endorsed by the U.N. High Commission on
Human Rights.
The most destructive of the ways of humiliating and degrading people, such as
through hate speech, group defamation, and harassment, can be resisted by legal
means. However, law in contemporary liberal societies has only gone part way
toward remedying the problems of recognized, oppressed groups. These societies
have made one-on-one, direct violence and discrimination illegal, but still can be
criticized for making the prosecution of some characteristic offenses against op-
pressed persons too difficult. Women are a prime example of how law fails in this
way, and instead makes women who attempt to prosecute vulnerable to victim-
blaming questions that compromise their cases. Why don’t battered women just
leave their spouses? How can they claim that they are acting in self-defense when
they kill their sleeping husbands? Laws that restrict abortion rights seem to ask: why
didn’t the unwillingly pregnant woman use contraception or refrain from inter-
course? When a woman charges rape, it is asked why she was where she could be in
harm’s way, rather than why the streets (or fraternity house) is not safe. Or consider
the experience of Anita Hill. Many asked why did she not simply tell Clarence
210 We Shall Overcome

Thomas to stop harassing her or resign (perhaps while threatening to sue if he did
not write her an excellent recommendation) or at least not follow him from one job
to another.
The perspective which the law currently takes on interactions between persons
is one from which these seem like reasonable questions. Two theses characterize this
perspective, which together constitute what I call the equal individual perspective.
The first, the individual actor thesis, claims that crimes are committed by one person
against another, and not by social group members against members of other social
eroups.!’ The second, the level field thesis, is the idea that criminal offenses are an
upset in the existing balance of power between two people. Individuals are assumed
to be equally situated with respect to social or political power, and crimes occur
when one uses force or fraud to upset the balance of power between them. A social
balance exists when persons are able to interact civilly, and when there are disputes,
they are able to come to a resolution of disputes fairly (and privately), to the
satisfaction of both parties, through the use of reason. “Social imbalance” happens
when one party is able to take advantage of the other without the other’s consent.
Using economic power, that is, private wealth, to exploit or outbid another is not
considered a disruption of the social balance, unless the bidding explicitly involves
the political or judicial process (e.g., by selling votes or political influence). What
counts as force or fraud changes over time and across societies that share our
concept of law.!8 For instance, it may once have been acceptable to engage in a
gunfight as long as both persons have guns and are facing each other prepared to
fight, while now that is illegal. Furthermore, on the equal individual perspective a
crime must directly affect the victim to affect him at all. If one’s own person or
property is not directly attacked, then one is not legally harmed. In particular, group
defamation or group harm do not constitute legal harm.!?
The equal individual perspective is not explicitly or consciously sexist, racist,
ableist, or in any other way biased in favor of a privileged group and against an
oppressed one. It does not denigrate women, suggest that they are less worthy of
dignity and respect, or forcibly confine them to the domestic sphere. Against the
background of social and political inequality of men and women, however, it is
androcentric.”° That is, it takes the physical facts of maleness and the social facts of
manhood and puts them at the center of human experience, while confining the
physical facts of femaleness and the social facts of womanhood to the periphery, as if
they were less central, less important, or deviant.’' The equal individual perspective
ignores two features of the power relations between men and women that feminists
recognize and deem highly unjust. First, it ignores the possibility that men as a group
and women as a group are not socially and politically equally situated, especially
with respect to sexual matters (MacKinnon 1987, ch. 2). Men have physical,
economic, and traditional social advantages that they can use to bargain for, coerce,
or physically enforce the traditional gender division of labor or even force sex.
Second, the equal individual perspective fails to recognize the harms done to
women as a group by crimes committed against individual women that further
entrench the gender imbalance of social and political power. That is, when men
commit crimes against women, such as sexual assault or spousal battery, they
demonstrate their dominance not only to their victims, but to other men and
 Resistance and Responsibility 211

women, as well (Cudd 1990). Men as a group thereby establish a reputation as the
dominant sex whenever individual crimes are committed by women against men,
and men as a group gain by this reputation, whether or not any particular individual
man wishes to gain from it (Friedman and May 1985).
Women (and oppressed groups generally) are therefore at a disadvantage before
the law when it is interpreted through the equal individual perspective. They are
taken to have powers to resist or repel harms by others that, as a group, they lack,
and hence individual women are often blamed for the fact that they are victimized.
Recognizing gender-based group power inequality allows us to discern a systematic
form of victim-blaming that is impossible to recognize from the equal individual
perspective. In this form, problems suffered by victims are seen as private and
individually remediable, rather than as a function of the social arrangements of
the entire community.”? Because the equal individual perspective conceals gender
inequality and sanctions illegitimate victim-blaming, feminist jurisprudence must
reject the equal individual perspective in order to transform the law from a victim-
blaming platform. The equal individual perspective similarly conceals other forms of
inequality that are the result of oppression. For example, so-called “right to work”
laws that restrict the ability of unions to organize treat workers as if their choices
about whether to join or not join a union were as simple as choosing between vanilla
and chocolate ice cream. They ignore the important imbalance of power between
nonunionized workers as a group and their capitalist employers.
If the equal individual perspective fails adequately to reveal and resist op-
pression, what is the proper perspective? The proper perspective must recognize
social and political inequalities and how they make some individual persons vul-
nerable to attack by others, but more specific to the goal of resisting oppression, it
must recognize that there exist social and political inequalities that affect whole
groups of persons, specifically systematically disempowered groups.
To begin to see what this perspective needs to be, let us ask why the status quo for
women and men cannot be considered to be social and political equality. In what
sense is there not a level playing field for men and women, and how does the law
privilege men when it assumes that there is? Catharine MacKinnon has argued that
we cannot neatly separate rape from normal”? heterosexual sex, since both may
involve force and violence (MacKinnon 1983). Force and violence are eroticized in
our culture, and as men are on average physically larger and stronger than women, it is
to their advantage as a group to be able normally to use force in intimate sexual
encounters. Besides, it is men’s use of force and violence that is erotic, not women’s
(at least, not normally). Since force is an ever-present aspect of normal sex, proving
rape (i.e., forced sex) requires proving that the lack of consent was in some way
extraordinary, and that the rapist knew it, and that that supposed knowledge pene-
trated his male desires and privileges so that he really, really knew it. Thus, by
assuming that women and men are in a position of equal power in sexual relations (i.e.,
that force and violence are equally available to and desirable by and for both), and
therefore that the normality of force by men on women is consensual or natural, the
law makes rapes by men of women a crime that is very difficult to prove (Estrich 1987).
As she suggests, MacKinnon’s critique of the androcentrism of heterosexual
sexuality can be generalized to many other nonsexual aspects of our lives:
212 We Shall Overcome

Men’s physiology defines most sports, their needs define auto and health insur-
ance coverage, their socially designed biographies define workplace expectations
and successful career patterns, their perspectives and concerns define quality in
scholarship, their experiences and obsessions define merit, their objectification of
life defines art, their military service defines citizenship, their presence defines
family, their inability to get along with each other—their wars and rulerships—
defines history, their image defines god, and their genitals define sex. (MacKinnon
1987, 36)"4
The concept of work is androcentric, in that what counts as work is what one gets
paid for, and women have traditionally been confined to laboring for no wages. So
domestic labor goes unrecognized, unless it is paid for,’ and when it is paid for, since
it is done by women who have few outside options, it is paid little.2° What men do is
regarded as more difficult, or more onerous, or more competitive (Bergmann 1986,
88). Since work is androcentrically conceived, the workplace is androcentrically
organized. The normal working day runs past the school day, so that primary parents
of school age children, most of whom still are women, cannot be fully integrated in
the workplace (Folbre 1994). Pregnancy and breast feeding are often treated more
like an optional vacation than a normal, if temporary, condition of life.2” Time taken
out of the paid workforce is viewed as a lack of serious commitment to work rather
than as time to refresh and rejuvenate one’s entire life, including one’s work life
(Mincer and Polachek 1974). The forms of sexual interaction and sexual banter
tolerated in the workplace conform to the desires and concerns of men, not women
(Schultz 1991, 137-140). Women who complain about any of these androcentric
aspects of the workplace are then held in contempt as wanting special treatment for
what are perceived as their weaknesses.
The legal concept of self-defense is androcentric. Self-defense constitutes a legal
justification for homicide when the killer has the reasonable belief that she was
threatened by the deceased with immediate, unjustified danger to her life, and the
force she used was necessary to repel the threat (Dressler 1995, 199). The legal
concept of self-defense thus rules out defensive pre-emptive strikes. Hence, it either
confers an advantage on the physically stronger, or it takes persons to be roughly
equal in their abilities to use force just powerful enough to counteract that of an
attacker. But when the attacker is a man who uses his fists or other nonlethal
weapons, a woman cannot normally expect that she can fend off an attack unless she
has in a premeditated way armed herself with lethal weapons. Yet if she responds
with lethal force, she cannot justify it legally, since it could be claimed that he did not
attempt to apply lethal force—he may only be using his fists. Thus, the law seems to
confer an advantage on the male batterer (Schneider 1986, 589). One might respond
that if a woman expects that she will be beaten by a man in the future, she must
simply escape. The core of a self-defense claim is that the force used is necessary to
repel an immediate threat to one’s person (Dressler 1995, 199). Yet, in some cases
pre-emptive strikes are the only recourse for a battered spouse to defend herself. For
example, if her husband traps her, by holding her hostage, by threatening to kill her if
she attempts to flee, or to harm or take her children if she leaves. In tuling out
defensive pre-emptive strikes by battered women, the legal requirements of self-
defense are androcentric. Battered women who kill their batterers are forced to seek
 Resistance and Responsibility 213

an excuse rather than a justification—and this difference is critical—by appealing to

the so-called “battered woman syndrome” defense to explain why they did not
escape. Forcing women to seek an excuse when they ought to be entitled to a
justification is a form of victim-blaming, since it portrays them as mere victims—
indeed, as victims of a syndrome, not of a battering spouse—rather than as legitimate
resisters (Maguigan 1991; Downs 1996).
The laws and legal arguments concerning abortion can also be shown to lead to
victim-blaming. Contraception does not meet the needs of women to completely
control their reproduction. The only form that is completely controlled by women,
sterilization, is irreversible. Other forms require more or less tolerance and partic-
ipation by male partners.”° The pill is highly reliable, except when one is taking
antibiotics, but many women cannot safely take it because of side effects.”” Other
forms have a higher failure rate, can be seen and felt by her partner, and disrupt the
spontaneity of sexual intimacy. Given these facts about contraception, intercourse
often runs the risk of pregnancy. Then perhaps women should simply abandon
intercourse. But men as a group control sex and demand intercourse. Although
women as a group could, conceivably, band together to change norms of sexuality so
that men accept contraception, or even abandon sex with men altogether, this
raises a free rider problem for women. Individual women who choose to abandon
intercourse would lose men for whom they would otherwise compete successfully to
other individual women who “give men what they want.” Furthermore, most
women, whether or not because of a cultural artifact, enjoy intercourse. So the
individual solution that many women choose is to run the risk of pregnancy, then
use abortion as a backup.
Meanwhile, the abortion debate rages in sexist and androcentric terms.
Abortions are often viewed as for the “convenience” of the pregnant woman,’ as if
being unwilling to give up space in one’s body and undergo the rigors of pregnancy
and labor were matters of mere inconvenience, like having an annoying relative
visiting in one’s home. Even abortion rights supporters feel forced to defend
abortion as a necessary evil. Roe v. Wade is attacked because it carves out specifi-
cally a woman’s right to privacy (as opposed to a married couple’s right, as Griswold
does). Philosophical and religious debates often concern only the status of the fetus
(though not all of its rights, especially if it should become a female person). Such
debates could focus on unwanted pregnancy as a kind of intrusion by a foreign body,
thereby making it a universal experience. We all get invaded by bacteria that make
us sick, and we all are potential victims of abduction and use of our bodies for
purposes that we do not approve. Instead, these debates focus on fetushood in order
to make that the universal human aspect of the abortion question.?’ Women are
thus again on the defensive in their attempts to exercise their legal rights. They are
blamed when contraception does not work, and they are responsible primarily for
the outcome of unwanted pregnancy. While the law officially endows them with
reproductive rights that are parallel to men’s by making abortion a legal option that
is under their control,*” exercising that option is made difficult by the scarcity of
clinics, a scarcity created by legally endorsed harassment,* and legal requirements
designed to make it difficult and expensive to obtain an abortion. Finally, when
sought, abortion brings social shame and the risk of violence.
214 We Shall Overcome

How do these androcentric assumptions in the law lead to victim-blaming?

Consider how unreasonable victim-blaming is for other crimes. For crimes such as
robbery, it is said, it is not normal behavior for one person to give another money or
property without explicit consent given within a structured institutional context. But
in sexual matters, formal consent is not normally expected or required.’ 4 That is,
normal sex in our society is “spontaneous,” and spontaneity conflicts with the open
and rational communication that consent requires. Furthermore, men are normally
expected to be the aggressors, so their behavior is considered normal until proven
otherwise. Women then should rationally expect to meet some sexual aggression in
the workplace, at least in the form of suggestions for sexual intimacy, and women
should expect sexual aggression more generally. Women are therefore expected take
steps to protect themselves against it. Such expectations are rational expectations in
the sense that we can and should predict these behaviors under the current social
arrangements, but they are not rational in the sense that such behaviors are ac-
ceptable or should be accepted in society. The law can make a difference when it
comes to this normative point, and by doing so it can transform the descriptive facts
of the relationship between men and women. Feminists demand that the law be used
to so transform gendered sexual behavior, just as law has been used to curb other
violent behaviors to make life better than the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short” life guaranteed to those in the state of nature.
In each of the examples—rape, sexual harassment, spousal abuse, and abortion—
the androcentrism of the law lies in its failure to recognize that women as a group are
oppressed, and that this biases norms of acceptable behavior in favor of men as a
group. The oppression of women in our society is characterized by reduced and inferior
options and outcomes for women vis-a-vis men.*° Other identities and nonvoluntary
social groups intersect with the group women, of course, and in some cases add to or
relieve the oppression of subgroups of women to some extent. Certain crimes, to
which all women and no men are normally vulnerable, contribute to the reduced
options and outcomes of women vis-a-vis men. These crimes I shall call “crimes
against women.” In the rest of the section I shall use this term to refer only to these
special crimes to which women as a group are particularly vulnerable, even though
women may of course be victims of other crimes, and men can in some instances be
victims of superficially similar crimes that I am calling “crimes against women.”*°
Oppression plays two roles in making women as a group more vulnerable to
crime than men are. First, women are in a socially and politically weak position vis-
a-vis men because of the existence of background oppression. They are more likely
to be raped because of the eroticization of male-on-female violence. They are more
likely to be the victims of male violence, including rape and spousal violence,
because of traditional norms of feminine and wifely submission. And both these
facts lead to the difficulty of proving that they did not somehow seek the treatment
that they got. Second, each act of violence against women reinforces the oppression
of women. When women are victims of male violence they are seen as weaker, more
vulnerable. When men get away with such violence they are seen as more invul-
nerable to women’s defenses. This makes male on female violence more expected,
and thus makes women’s defensiveness against it normative, in the sense of being
required of women. But being defensive to violence requires individual women
 Resistance and Responsibility 215

either to prepare for violent reaction or to restrict their freedom of movement.

Preparing for violent reaction, if pursued by women generally, would raise unac-
ceptably the total level of violence in the culture. Furthermore, it is unlikely that
women would generally pursue this strategy, since it contradicts the gender roles
into which women are socialized. Thus, women are expected to restrict their own
freedom, on pain of being blamed for not doing so when they are victimized.
Since oppression is a general condition of social injustice that is enforced in part
by crimes against women, to achieve justice for all the law must recognize that the
oppression of women is a significant part of the criminal offense involved in crimes
against women. I am suggesting that the law must take the oppressed group per-
spective when it comes to crimes against women.>! Legal recognition would consist
in seeing oppression as an additional, and socially caused, vulnerability of women to
crimes against women and an additional harm done by such crimes. Although the
details of what counts as crimes against other oppressed groups will differ, this
perspective can also be justified with respect to all such groups.
To recall our discussion in chapter 2, what I am suggesting is that the harm
done to individuals qua members of groups be legally recognized as a harm over and
above any harm done to a particular victim. That is, I am talking about group
harm,, not harm done to the groups qua groups themselves (group harm,). What
would the criminal law need to do to explicitly recognize oppression as a harm? We
can ask this question with respect to four aspects of criminal law: (1) what crimes
are to be recognized, (2) enforcement, (3) standards of proof, and (4) punishment.
The women’s movement has made considerable progress in making offenses
against women into crimes, but a few more crimes should be recognized if the
argument here is correct. Sexual harassment ought to be treated by the criminal law
as well as civil law because of its parallels with other crimes against women, spe-
cifically in causing oppressive harm. Oppression ought to be recognized as a part of
crimes against women, but perhaps as a kind of “special circumstance” that
sometimes exists, namely when the victim is a woman and the offender is a man
who has taken advantage of the gender-based imbalance of power.°® By seeing it as
a special circumstance, like the possession of a gun in the course of a drug crime,
say, the law could consistently see crimes against women that happen in a certain
circumstance to be committed by a woman or against a man as a lesser crime. For
example, when a man sexually assaults another man the offender commits the crime
of sexual assault, but not with the special circumstance of oppression, as it would
have been had the immediate victim been a woman.
Even feminists, however, are sometimes unclear about the moral necessity and
practical utility of enforcement of crimes against women. Kathleen Ferraro argued
that the increased enforcement of domestic violence has come through an unholy
coalition comprising feminist domestic violence activists and conservatives who are
interested in maintaining patriarchy, and that the result has been a devolution of the
public discourse of domestic violence (Ferraro 1996). In the 1970s feminist activists
explained women’s victimization as a result of women’s subordinate social position
generally but made little legislative headway. The conservative movement of the
1980s may have helped to bring about greater enforcement of domestic violence laws
but did so by pathologizing the particular families in which it occurred, making it
216 We Shall Overcome

possible to pretend that women’s subordination generally is not a problem; it is just

that there are some pathologically violent men and women. Others have argued that
focusing on domestic violence or other crimes against women generally creates a
culture of victimhood for women (Heberle 1996; Roiphe 1993). Both of these views
are partly accurate, but they are also incomplete. It is not the existence or en-
forcement of crimes against women that is at fault but rather the failure of the law to
recognize the further harm of oppression. Were this to be recognized, then conser-
vatives and. feminists would be forced to split, for conservatives could not consis-
tently agree that there is something unjust about women’s subordination.°” As for
the culture of victimhood, this would be transformed from seeing all women as
potential victims of particular crimes to seeing all women as subject to social in-
justice. What is wrong with seeing oneself as a victim is that one sees oneself as
personally inadequate—it is self-degrading. Seeing oneself as part of a group that has
been subjected to long-standing social injustice takes away the self-degrading aspect
of being a victim.* And if women can see that the law has consistently strengthened
the ability of men (as a group) to oppress women (as a group), as I have argued here,
then requiring the law to reverse course and strengthen women’s ability to fight
oppression will emerge as long overdue justice.
The women’s movement and feminist jurisprudence have made progress in
altering the standards of proof required to convict defendants of crimes against
women (Berger, Searles, and Neumann 1995). More can be done, though. Some-
thing like the reasonable woman standard that has been discussed in sexual ha-
rassment cases must be generalized to all crimes against women. This standard
requires that what is taken to be offensive in hostile environment sexual harassment
cases be determined by what is offensive to a reasonable woman (when the victim is
a woman). Debra DeBruin (1998) provides an excellent defense against the two
main legal arguments courts have made against taking this perspective. The first
objection is that taking the reasonable woman perspective takes the perspective of
only a portion of the community in a situation where the standards of the entire
community ought to apply. DeBruin’s response is to show that because of the
androcentrism (what she calls “false universalism”) of the law and so-called com-
munity standards, an ungendered perspective is impossible, and given the back-
ground of women’s oppression, a masculine standard is unacceptable. The second
objection is that taking the reasonable woman perspective further entrenches sexist
norms about women’s weakness and their need to be protected. To this objection
DeBruin responds by arguing that women do need protection from the serious harm
of sexual harassment, not because women are weak but because the harm is so great
and so commonplace.
While I agree with these responses, much more needs to be said about what a
reasonable woman standard entails. Women’s perspectives on what they find of-
fensive now have been formed under conditions of oppression and are unlikely to be
reasonable in conditions of freedom and equality. As MacKinnon wrote (borrowing
from the nineteenth-century feminist Sarah Grimké) concerning her skepticism
about listening for a women’s “voice” under conditions of oppression: “Take your foot
off our necks, then we will hear in what tongue women speak” (MacKinnon 1987,
91). What the law needs to do is remain flexible on the standards of reasonableness,
 Resistance and Responsibility 217
so that as the oppression of women lessens, the standards of reasonableness change.
Supposing that we can come up with a standard of reasonableness from the per-
spective of women, I propose that the law take this into account in all crimes against
women where standards of reasonableness are required. For instance, the reasonable
woman standard ought to be applied to determine reasonable limits on defense
discovery with respect to the victim’s background or to determine reasonable grounds
for believing a batterer’s threat to use deadly force. Each case of taking the reasonable
woman perspective can be defended on the same grounds that DeBruin suggests:
there is no genderless perspective, and under conditions of oppression of women, the
only just perspective is that of women rather than men, at least where crimes against
women are concerned.
Finally, then, punishments of crimes against women ought to reflect the ad-
ditional wrong of oppression in sentencing. This means that more severe sentences
are to be handed down when the crime was assisted by the special vulnerability of
the oppressed and serves to further reinforce oppression.
Two objections threaten my argument that oppression should be recognized by
the law as a group harm against women. First, one might object that the state has no
particular interest in protecting women as a group against men as a group. Second,
even if the state can be shown to have an interest in ending oppression, one might
object that to punish offenders for the additional harm of oppression, which relies
on social conditions not of their making, is to treat them as mere means to social
ends. I shall take up these objections in turn.
Modern liberalism requires that the state remain neutral among competing
conceptions of the good (Rawls 1993). A liberal might argue that ending women’s
oppression, when this means ending traditional sexual practices and assumptions
about the traditional division of labor in the family, interferes illegitimately with
individuals’ rights to pursue the good.*! Yet, liberalism need not approve of all
conceptions of the good when realizing these conceptions violate liberal human
rights. The right to freedom of religion provides a good example. Religious leaders are
not permitted to trap their less willing members by force in order to maintain a
religious community, even though that community might represent for the other
members the highest good. Likewise, liberalism may not sanction the preservation by
force of traditional gender roles. Yet, this is what the law does when it maintains,
through coercive state power, the gender imbalances that maintain women’s op-
pression. Thus, a state that does not attempt to level the playing field for men and
women sides with the traditional conception of good gender relations, forfeiting its
neutrality. Neutrality requires the state to provide the background legal environment
in which true gender equality can exist. But this requires ending the oppression of
women, because as long as there is oppression there can be no equality. At best we
could have some individual women who manage to attain equal outcomes through
greater efforts than otherwise equally situated individual men expend.
Ending oppression is a legitimate, liberal social goal. Oppression of women, as of
many other groups, is long-standing and pre-dates any crime now committed by a
man against a woman, however. Thus, one might object that punishing crimes
against women more harshly than similar crimes committed against non-oppressed
persons violates one’s moral right to be treated as an end in oneself (Kant 1969, 52).
218 We Shall Overcome

I have three responses to this objection. First, Iwould point out that I have argued
that there is an additional harm involved in crimes against women, namely the
group harm of oppression. Thus, those who commit crimes with the special cir-
cumstance of oppression are thereby committing additional harms. Second, the
crimes against women are accomplished when a man takes advantage of the social
vulnerability of women that results from their oppression. Thus, the perpetrator is
taking advantage of a special kind of vulnerability, one created precisely by the
oppression. There is precedent in the law for more harshly treating offenses that
take advantage of especially vulnerable classes of persons, such as sexual abuse of
children. Third, all of the main justifications of punishment can be shown to allow
punishment to achieve social aims (Murphy and Coleman 1990, 118). There is no
particular problem with either the deterrence theory or the moral education view of
punishment, as neither of them are predicated on any supposed right to be treated
as an end. The retributive theory, which is often linked to Kantian moral theory and
hence a supposed moral right to be treated as an end, generally requires that
punishment be deserved, that is, that punishment be conferred for some moral
wrong committed. If oppression is a moral wrong, then a retributivist can counte-
nance punishment for committing that wrong. Admittedly, oppression would have
to fit within a consistent theory of what counts as a moral wrong worthy of pun-
ishment, that is, of liability. It is beyond the scope of this book to present a complete
theory of liability to punishment, but it is enough for my purposes to point out that
punishment for the wrong of oppression would be consistent with some leading
retributivist theories. Jean Hampton (1991), for instance, claims that punishment is
justified to combat harmful messages of inferiority sent by certain sorts of morally
offensive behavior. A number of prominent retributivists, including Herbert Morris
(1968), Jeffrie Murphy (1979, 221-260), and George Sher (1987), claim that
punishment is justified to rectify an unfair advantage obtained through wrongdoing.
Oppression would engage either of these liability triggers.
It is often said that changes in the law cannot themselves effect social transfor-
mations on the scale that feminists aspire to (Rhode 1989). The kind of evidence that
one cites for this is the lack of social progress that has been made in the United States
despite the enormous legal changes that the women’s movement has brought about
in the past thirty years or the existence of de facto racial segregation in schools
and housing despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Su-
preme Court and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Scholars and activists should now
identify and catalog the important changes these progressive movements have
brought about, learn from the ways that practical application defies progressive social
change, and build theory that aids in completing the transformation. I have argued
here that practical experiences with the law since the first wave of feminist legal
progress challenge us now to forge legal theory that recognizes oppression.

3.5. Resistance to Indirect Economic

and Psychological Force
I have argued throughout this book that the indirect forces of oppression are the
most insidious forces because they are difficult to see and difficult to overturn, and
 Resistance and Responsibility 219

because fighting against them appears to be fighting against the interests of the
oppressed themselves. I argued in chapter 6 that we can reveal false consciousness
and deformed desires where they exist by exposing the ways in which assimilating
oneself to involuntary in-groups and accentuating the differences with involuntary
out-groups is either an assertion of undeserved privilege or a failure to resist one’s
own oppression. Indirect economic force, which I called “oppression by choice,”
coerces the oppressed to choose (given unfairly limited options) to participate in the
situation through which they are oppressed. As I noted in the section on moral
responsibility for resistance, cases of oppression by choice are complicated by the fact
that the oppressed have some real options. That is, another prima facie consideration
comes into play: choice, prima facie, confers responsibility for the chosen action on
the chooser. The oppressed have a real option when they can conceive of and choose
any one of several courses of action, each of which may lead them to be harmed in
some way, differently, but to a comparable degree. Oppressive institutions present
the oppressed with a set of choices that all seem bad: opt in (and suffer the oppression
consequent to that) or opt out (and suffer from being isolated in social life in some
way). I have argued that choosing to opt in and suffer their particular form of
oppression in turn feeds back to maintain that situation for themselves and other
members of their group. The other real options involve considerable vision or per-
sonal sacrifice if they are to choose them over the exploitation situation, and that
fact accounts for the choices of those who are oppressed “by choice.” To put it
another way, the choices that lead them to suffer oppression by choice appear to be,
and may in fact be, individually rational in what David Gauthier (1986) has termed
the “straightforward maximizing” sense.*” The other real options in these situations,
if chosen by many of the oppressed group, might succeed in bringing about social
change so that the group is no longer oppressed, although they require the indi-
viduals choosing this option to make sacrifices, at least in the short term.
In chapter 5 my main example of oppression by choice was women’s choice
between unpaid domestic work in the home and paid work outside the home. Each
individual woman who lives with a (male, able-bodied) partner faces a set of real
choices: sharing equally with her domestic partner the unpaid domestic work, ne-
gotiating with or coercing the partner to do more of the unpaid domestic work, or
doing the majority of the unpaid domestic work, any of which may be while either
working or not working outside the home. I argued that the traditional lot of
women, shouldering the majority of unpaid domestic labor for their patriarchal
families, is a case of oppression by choice. Yet, if women acted together to withhold
unpaid domestic services, they could conceivably bring an end to at least this
economic domination by men, if not oppression of women as a whole. Another
example of oppression by choice comes from the neo-Marxist analysis of the situ-
ation of the worker (Roemer 1988). Consider an exploitative factory environment,
in which workers receive low wages, work long hours in unhealthy conditions, and
their employers reap immense profits, have lots of leisure time, and live in lovely
suburbs. Suppose that workers consider going on strike to force management to
improve conditions. Any one individual worker faces the choice of striking, con-
tinuing to work at that factory, or going elsewhere. To continue to work at that
factory is to continue to be exploited, to be oppressed as a member of the working
220 We Shall Overcome

class. Yet, some individuals may view going on strike as too costly to themselves and
their families, as they risk becoming even poorer. There may or may not be enough
workers willing to strike to make it feasible to do so. Those who cross the picket
lines are “scabs” in the eyes of those who do not.
Resistance to oppression by choice requires the oppressed themselves to give up
their straightforward self-interest, and for others to encourage, perhaps even pres-
sure, them to do so. The case for a duty to strike when others are doing so seems to
me rather compelling in many instances. Here the competing harms are the harm
that would come to the individual and her family from her lack of income as against
the harm of legitimating the company’s claim that their treatment of workers is fair
and hence undermining the strike. While loss of income is serious, in most cases
that harm can be mitigated by the solidarity of strikers and union strike funds,
where they exist. The main point is that all the workers are in the strike together
and all suffer similar fates. While the loss of income is worse for some than others, it
is only a difference in degree of harm, and not a great one at that. So if the strike is a
legitimate case of resistance, which means that it has a reasonable chance of success
as far as a worker can tell, there is a duty to strike, and other workers are justified in
pressuring their fellows to strike or honor the picket lines.
In the kind of domestic case where my analysis applies where there is op-
pression by choice, paid work outside the home is not the straightforward self-
interest maximizing choice for a woman. She would satisfy more of her interests by
staying home and doing domestic work of the family and taking primary care of her
children, if she has any. But in doing so she also reinforces the traditional stereotype
of women as suited best for this kind of work and less well suited for paid work.
Refusing to play the role called for by the traditional stereotype will give her more
power within the family and in public institutions, although it exacts some psychic
and, potentially, material objective costs (one fails to fit in, to do what is expected,
and this makes others angry and potentially violent). But it begins to change the
image of women for men, women, and children, and hence the social expectations
made of the next generation. Failing to refuse strengthens the hold that patriarchal
gender relations has on us all. There is a legitimating feature of women staying
home that is parallel to the strike case, which would weigh on the side of harm to
others in not resisting. That is, doing unpaid domestic work as a woman reinforces
gender norms. It sets an example for her children and others. It may even, if
something like Nancy Chodorow’s analysis of single-sex mothering is correct,
causally effect the psychological differences of gender that perpetuate female sub-
ordination. Thus, it harms other women. Since there is a large number of women
who do work outside the home, she cannot claim that hers would be a useless effort;
on the other hand, since there are so many women now in the paid workforce, it
may also be the case that one free-rider makes no marginal difference. However, I
would argue that we are not yet to that point, that there are indications that the
traditional stereotype is still strong and harmful.* In light of the facts, a woman
who can find paid work has duty to do so, unless there is some compelling reason
why her children need her specific services. There are, in most instances, other ways
of resisting oppression of women; nonetheless, there is a duty for women not to
reinforce the image of woman as domestic slave, but to change it to that of a full
 Resistance and Responsibility 221

stakeholder in family and social resources, and this will often require women to
resist doing unpaid domestic work.

4. Conclusion

This chapter argues that resistance to oppression is possible and morally required,
and it demonstrates that for virtually all different forms of oppression there exist
potentially successful means of resistance. All resistance begins with the recognition
that there are serious injustices that can be addressed, and then must proceed to
mitigate or at least protest the material and psychological harms. Material resistance
through economic strategies such as collective investment and labor organizing
directly empowers the oppressed, while armed struggle, boycotts, and strikes dis-
empower the oppressors. Legal reform is resistance at its most organized, institutional
level. I have argued here that the law should come to recognize the harm of op-
pression explicitly, and that even though this requires recognition of group harm, it is
consistent with—indeed required by— liberalism’s fundamental commitment to
individual rights.
Indirect oppression, as the most insidious forces of oppression, must also be
resisted, even though that sometimes requires the oppressed themselves to act in
ways that they do not prefer and may even see as harmful. I have argued here that
the oppressed have a moral duty to recognize and fight their own oppression be-
cause not resisting is harmful to their fellow oppressed group members. Resisting
oppression requires courage and extracts social penalties, as I have argued. Op-
pressors and privileged persons are morally required to desist and then to help in
resistance efforts, but their work alone will not reverse the indirect economic and
psychological harms of oppression. Whatever the actions of the oppressors, the
oppressed must also tug at their own bootstraps, even when that is painful.
It is tempting to think that when an oppressive regime has been successfully
resisted and overthrown, the work of resistance is over. However, history reeks of
examples of successful resistance to oppression that is replaced by a new oppressive
regime. Think of the Castro dictatorship that followed on the overthrow of Battista,
Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule of formerly Communist Russia, or the Taliban
that replaced the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Think of the abolition of slavery
in the United States that was replaced by racism, apartheid, and poverty for blacks.
Think of the many failures of African national governments that followed the
overthrow of colonial regimes, or the failure the many democratic movements of the
early 1990s on that continent. Successful resistance does not guarantee freedom
from oppression, even the resurgence of the same oppression. Freedom is not simply
the absence of oppression, but a positive condition in its own right. In the final
chapter of this book I will examine the notion of freedom that might be resistant to
resurgence of oppression.
 Fashioning: Freedom

When I walked out of prison that was my mission, to liberate the op-
pressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved.
But I know that this is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free;
we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be
oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first
step on a longer and even more difficult road. For, to be free is not merely
to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances
the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just
beginning.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

1. Oppression, Justice, Freedom

Freedom, in addition to justice, requires overcoming oppression. This book has fo-
cused on the injustice of oppression, its causes, and our duty to overcome it. | argued
that our psychological propensity to categorize, which together with our social nature,
leads to stereotyping. Invidious discrimination based on these stereotypes sets the
stage for oppression. Oppression is caused initially by direct material forces (violence,
economic deprivation) imposed from outside, and then reinforced by internalized,
indirect, material and psychological forces. In chapter 7 1 explored several ways that
particular cases of oppression can be resisted and projected the hope that by strong
resistance any one case of oppression will end. In this concluding chapter I turn from
justice to the question of freedom to consider whether, even if we are able to resist the
injustices of oppression, we may yet not be free. I shall argue, as suggested by the
quote from Nelson Mandela, that freedom requires something more than an end to
any particular case of oppression; full freedom requires that all cases of oppression
end. This claim, whether true or not, raises crucial questions, however. What is the
future of our species with respect to oppression? Are we headed for a state of freedom
in which all cases, not just this case and that case, of oppression will be rare and short-
lived? Or will we forever be plagued by some cases of long-standing oppression?
Some will argue that it is not possible to overcome oppression, given our
psychological makeup, which is largely fixed in its predisposition to categorize and
our strong propensity to form social groups. It seems that overcoming all oppression
requires us to either change our psychological makeup (which I assume is impossible

222
 Fashioning Freedom 223

without ceasing to be us) or to prevent each other from forming close knit social
groups. Even if we were able to overcome our sociality, it is not clear that we would
want to. Everything of value in human life is bound up with its sociality; we cannot
even imagine what life would be like as a solitary species like the bear or the coyote,
for it would be language-less and so beyond our understanding. Our propensity to
form close social bonds seems as fixed as our propensity to categorize. Thus, we must
take the existence of social groups for granted in exploring how oppression is to be
overcome, but we may be able to reinvent them or mold them to suit us. If social
groups will exist, then perhaps we can change our stereotypes and discourage in-
vidious discrimination. That would require the privileged to give up their privileges,
and persons would have to resist the temptation to take advantage of others
through the kind of group level processes that we seem to learn as children: bul-
lying, teasing, peer pressure, and the like. What would motivate such changes?
The history of political philosophy offers us a parallel. In his classic Federalist
Paper #10, James Madison wrote about the danger of factions, by which he meant
groups that share a common interest that is opposed to the rights of others or the
interest of the whole community (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1961, 77-83). He
reasoned that either we could prevent such factions from forming, or we could try to
find a way to prevent factions from succeeding in their “schemes of oppression.” We
cannot prevent factions from forming, Madison noted, without sacrificing freedom,
since that would either require us to ensure that we all have the same interests
(through some sort of brainwashing) or to prevent groups from forming to discuss
their common interests. Thus, the only way we can maintain freedom yet avoid the
oppressive forces of factions is to find a way to prevent them from succeeding in
satisfying their perfidious interests. Madison proposed that a representative de-
mocracy of the sort he had outlined in the proposed U.S. Constitution would be the
solution because it would encourage discussion of general philosophies of govern-
ment rather than particular policy interests if the people were to vote not on issues
but on representatives. The record must be judged as mixed here. But in any event,
we seek to solve a broader social problem. That is, we seek to project not only a
government that will not oppress its citizens, but also a collage of unconnected but
overlapping social groups that will not oppress each other. Like the people that
Madison was trying to lead, the oppressed can reach freedom only by acting with
good faith and good will toward others within a social system that does not reward
them for doing otherwise, but instead rewards them when others are free, as well.
Toward achieving this end, governments may well play a role, but it cannot be the
only force for change without reinstituting oppression through the repression of our
individual and social natures. We must, in effect, reward each other for our freedom.
In the last chapter I looked at a number of ways that particular cases of op-
pression can be resisted. Oppression can be resisted at all levels: by legal means
backed up by coercive force, by groups who attempt to alleviate poverty and invest in
the abilities of the poor, by individuals who refuse their unjust privileges, or oppressed
individuals who refuse to help keep the others in their social groups to the norms that
advantage the oppressors. In this chapter ] take up the question of what a group is to
do when the bonds of oppression are loosened. At that point we embark on the
journey of which Mandela writes, the “longer and even more difficult road,” on which
224 We Shall Overcome

we must learn “to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others,” for
only by this route can true freedom be found. Our problem, however, is that we do not
yet know what that route looks like or where, precisely, it is going. Our only guide is
knowledge that it is our duty not to oppress others and to resist oppression where
possible, and our enhanced ability to recognize oppression when it occurs.
The oppression of women, as has been noted by many, is the longest standing
case of oppression. Women have become accustomed to being the subordinate sex,
and to fashioning their lives within the unequal constraints that societies have
imposed on them for at least most of human history. In doing so, women have in
many ways forfeited their right to freedom. They rarely demand equality with men
and often satisfy themselves with doing better than the next woman or the next
subordinate of their society. This has been the individual’s rational response to her
oppression, after all: attempting to do as well as they can for themselves within
the constraints they are offered, rather than futilely refusing to comply with sexist
norms. Because women have done so well at accommodating themselves to op-
pression, in ways both rational and emotional, ending the oppression of women and
overcoming sexual subordination is the biggest challenge to our hopes for freedom.
For this reason, in what follows I will focus on how women can liberate themselves.
Perhaps our struggle to liberate women, then, will unveil the path to freedom for all.
There are several reasons why women’s path to freedom might be generalizable
to that of other social groups. First, in order to free women, we must learn to change
some of the most deep-seated norms of power and subordination. For, they are both
long-standing and originate in natural inequalities or differences. Second, in order
to change the status of women globally, we will have to learn how to see people
as members of multiple social groups not of their choosing; those in power (men)
will have to allow members of their social groups (“their” women) to claim other
groupings as, at least temporarily, their most important or most threatened aspect of
their identity, and those subordinated (women) will have to learn how to insist on
_it. For it is only if women and men see themselves as part of a gender hierarchy that
cuts across race, class, ethnicity and other groupings, that we can address the
oppression that gender entails. Gender oppression will not go away by ignoring or
denying it, by insisting that there are no women or that women do not have
common interests. Third, in the process of seeking their own liberation, women will
have to forge friendships and alliances across social groups. In coming to see others
as allies despite great differences, we will learn how to be sisters in affirming our
common humanity. Well-intentioned men from different social groups may first join
out of allegiance to their own race or ethnic grouping, but eventually they too will
join this humanistic sorority that stretches across those groups. Then it will be a
short step to seeing all of humanity as united in a struggle for universal freedom.

2. Two Senses of Freedom

Many theorists of freedom, particularly since the influential paper by Isaiah Berlin
(1969), “Two Concepts of Liberty,” have recognized two senses of “freedom.” Berlin
named them “positive” and “negative,” but others have more usefully distinguished
 Fashioning Freedom 225

between “internal” and “external” (Hirschmann 2003). Negative or external free-

dom means something like the absence of interference from outside the person, while
positive or internal freedom means the capacity to seek and attain, provided that
there is no external interference, one’s own good. Positive freedom is often under-
stood as autonomy, the ability to be a self-lawmaker, and this requires that one is not
manipulated by the social structure under which one lives. One’s desires are one’s
own and one’s beliefs are rationally generated. Berlin ultimately rejects the idea of
positive freedom because he thought that to posit a breach of positive freedom one
would have to impose desires on individuals that they do not acknowledge. For
governments to attempt to guarantee positive freedom, then, they would have to
posit a good for their citizens and entice them to seek it, that is, in Rousseau’s famous
phrase, to force their citizens to be free. Berlin, as a liberal, argues that freedom
requires merely imposing no impediments to individuals’ given preferences. Positive
freedom, Berlin concludes, insinuates a totalitarian menace.
In this book I have characterized oppression as being caused by social constraints,
and I have asserted the liberal conviction that individuals are of primary moral
importance. It may appear that my theory of oppression entails only or primarily a
problem of negative or external freedom. But this inference would be too quick. I
have also characterized psychological forces and harms of oppression that clearly work
internally to the person, even while some of them, such as stereotyping, are externally
imposed on the individual. Internal and external freedom cannot be easily distin-
guished; they are inevitably intertwined, just as the social forces of oppression work
together to maintain an effective prison around the oppressed. The distinction that
Berlin drew between negative and positive freedom is not neatly drawn, and his
rejection of positive freedom involves two confusions. First, he failed to see that a
persistent lack of negative freedom for a social group harms the individuals of that
group psychologically, causing them to lack positive freedom, as chapters 3 through 6
have demonstrated. Second, even though the idea that a government might posit an
individual’s good for her raises the specter of totalitarianism, that fact does not vitiate
the claim that an individual’s freedom can be compromised by a lack of vision of
viable alternative options. A person can lack freedom without there being a clear way
for the person to attain freedom in the future.
The first of these confusions suggests that the positive/negative distinction
drawn by Berlin does not do the philosophical work we need it to do. Violations of
negative freedom turn out to result in deeper harms that slide over into the kinds of
harms that violations of positive freedom entail. Violence, for example, results in
post-traumatic stress disorder, which robs victims of their ability to plan a coherent
life. I shall adopt the terms “internal” and “external” freedom, to detach my theory
from Berlin’s distinction and to suggest a connection to my terms “indirect” and
“direct” forces of oppression. As I shall use the terms, internal freedom requires that
there be no indirect forces of oppression imposing on a person, and external freedom
requires freedom from direct forces of oppression. These are necessary, not suff-
cient, conditions for freedom. Recall that the distinction between these two kinds of
oppressive force turns on the contribution of the oppressed individual’s internal
mental processes of belief and desire formation. Indirect forces come about through
the oppressed person’s own psychological mechanisms. Direct forces of oppression
226 We Shall Overcome

begin a vicious cycle that may begin mainly depriving its victims of outer freedom,
but as it continues to traumatize them and their fellow social group members, those
forces cause their victims to relinquish their hopes and dreams for a better future,
which in turn atrophies the ability to imagine a future of freedom. This description
fits women’s lack of freedom under patriarchy, or the global domination of men.
Women have accepted their lesser status in much of the world and work within the
constraints to achieve what they can without questioning or challenging the starting
assumption that sex must impose a hierarchy of status.!
Since the two kinds of oppressive forces often work in concert and reinforce
each other, internal and external freedom often fail together, though this is not
necessarily the case. A person is not free so long as she is the victim of forces of
oppression. As I have argued, indirect forces of oppression are in a sense self-
imposed, even though ultimately caused by external forces. Resisting internal forces
of oppression, as we have seen, requires restraining individuals (in the best case,
individuals restraining themselves) from doing what they want, sometimes ratio-
nally, to do. The goal of achieving freedom thus imposes both social responsibility
and individual responsibility. As 1 argued in chapter 7, those who are most privi-
leged by oppression are surely the most responsible for resisting it. Yet, they are also
often the least motivated, for they have the most to lose. The privileged have even
more to lose than their undeserved privileges if oppression is inevitable and by
releasing some from oppression they risk bringing it upon themselves. Motivation
for ending oppression, then, may only come after the bonds of oppression are loos-
ened by the oppressed themselves, working with the well-intentioned and insightful
privileged who work actively to end oppression. For at this point the possibility of
backlash against the oppressors is great, yet engaging in that backlash risks a con-
tinuing cycle. Thus, it behooves us all to seek a kind of freedom that is freedom for
all if only as defense against catastrophe.
Berlin was correct to worry about the totalitarian menace; formulating someone
else’s desires or beliefs for them is to deny freedom, and even trying to assess others’
true desires and beliefs is fraught with dangers. Yet there is, I believe, a greater
danger in standing idly by while freedom is actively denied. This poses something of
a dilemma, for it seems that because oppression is so intertwined with our existing
social institutions, either we must seek freedom or deny it, and if we seek it we must
have a vision of what we seek, and this entails devising conditions under which
persons will develop autonomous beliefs and desires. In framing those conditions,
we risk totalitarianism. But perhaps that last claim is too extreme. If there is a way
between these horns, then it is, I shall argue, through a gradual process of resistance
to oppression combined with the will and intention not to oppress new or other
social groups. In the next section I sketch out how this process could go.

3. Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Oppression

Since oppression acts through social institutions, the starting point for us must be to
begin by attacking the self-generating cycles that those institutions support. Op-
pression runs a typical sequence: it begins when members of one group violently
 Fashioning Freedom 227

attack individuals in another social group and proceeds as the dominant group wields
economic force on the subordinates. The oppressed respond rationally by choosing
within the constraints that they are offered by the oppressors, and they gradually
accommodate their beliefs and desires to the oppressive conditions that they find
through both rational and nonrational psychological processes. It is at this point in
the process that all the most puzzling and tenacious features of oppression appear.
Direct forces may become less visible as time wears on and generations adopt the
coping mechanisms of their parents; the privileged come to believe that their su-
periority is natural; the oppressed come to believe in their own inferiority, and
become dependent on the dominant social groups for material support and moral
leadership. At this point, oppression cannot be successfully defeated by ending only
the direct forces. Rather, we need to break the link between material deprivation and
dependence of the oppressed social group on others. Achieving freedom then will
require not only breaking the interlocking links of the chain but also setting the
oppressed on a course toward independence.
By independence I do not mean disconnection from others, but rather the
material and psychological preconditions for the ability to form one’s own beliefs
and desires without oppressive constraints. | have argued that the oppressed are
cognitively and emotionally constrained in unjust ways to conform their beliefs and
desires to benefit the dominant. These constraints impose emotive and cognitive
forces of shame and low self-esteem, the cognitive process of false consciousness,
and the cognitive/affective process of deformed desire, causing oppressed persons to
believe ideologies that oppress them and to desire the situations, goods, and ways of
life that keep them subordinate. By molding the oppressed to desire their position
(as well as the privileged to believe they are entitled to theirs), they are made
dependent on the desires of the dominant. This is the sense of dependence that we
must object to. Dependence on others in the form of reliance on their charity, good
will, cooperation, companionship, and good work to make one’s own life better is
not objectionable. Indeed, such dependence is a part of our sociality that makes
human life uniquely wonderful.’
The first step toward freedom, then, is to end direct forces of oppression:
violence, threats of violence, enslavement, and the blatantly unfair economic
practices of invidious wage and hiring discrimination and enforced labor segrega-
tion. For women this would be a radical step. Ending violence would mean ending
violence against women in the forms of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and sexual
slavery. Curtailing direct economic forces would mean ending sex discrimination in
hiring and wages, cracking down on sexual harassment, ending the segregation of
women into lower paid occupations and jobs, and providing equal opportunities for
education and training regardless of sex. But we must recognize that even these
enormous steps will not end oppressive dependence, and that there remains a social
responsibility on the privileged to do more. The personalities, beliefs, desires of the
oppressed and the privileged alike have been formed under conditions of oppression,
after all. Changing those conditions will not immediately change the personalities.
Future generations will be raised by parents and other adults who retain the per-
sonalities of oppressed, oppressor, and privileged. Consider how young women of
today are still attracted to positions of sexual, political, and economic submission,
228 We Shall Overcome

despite the advances in economic opportunity that their mothers’ and grand-
mothers’ generations have made. Young men are often resentful of their loss of
some privilege and even tend to see themselves as victimized by social efforts to end
oppressive practices (Faludi 1999). Psychological progress comes slowly, not only in
individuals, but also generationally. The psychology of freedom will not come to us
in an instant; it is not an immediate result of the psychology of resistance.
The crucial next step toward freedom is to suggest alternative social practices
that would be attractive to a wide variety of persons (not just the oppressed), and yet
would help to break the cycle of dependency on the dominant groups. The privileged
have to be recruited in the struggle for freedom so that they will not resent and resist
change. Large and significant psychological changes will have to be directed also at
the youngest members of society. In the United States, single mothers tend to be
poor and poor single mothers are less able to equip their chiidren and communities
with skills for independence. Low income women tend to need child care in order to
get more education, retain their jobs, or move to better ones (Lee 2004). At the same
time, quality childcare is costly, which means that poor women cannot afford it. Yet
good quality childcare is crucially important to children’s health, well-being, and
development of capacities for freedom from internal oppression. To fight the eco-
nomic forces of poverty for women, by helping make women independent in the
economy, and to develop a future of free citizens, broadly available subsidized child
care should be socially provided.’ This step helps to fashion a free society in a variety
of ways. It addresses (though does not solve) the problems of women’s and poor
persons’ oppression in our society. It helps develop the capacities for autonomy and
independence from domination by the children who receive the good quality care.
Furthermore, it is politically feasible even in a society that is not yet free. It appeals to
large numbers of men and women across racial and class lines, since people every-
where want their children to be well cared for, and for the most part they want other
people’s children to be well cared for, too. Steps such as this one, which have
multiple effects on resisting oppression and developing capacities to internal freedom
approach freedom gradually, through small changes that are popularly and demo-
cratically adopted. They may not be inexpensive, and so the wealthy will have to be
convinced that it is their duty to contribute more for the elimination of oppression.
But they do not intrude upon individuals’ decisions about how to use what wealth
they retain. They make no effort to directly change preferences of any but the
children, whose preferences will be formed by some social process or other, and
clearly good child care is to be preferred to bad by all rational people of good will. Yet
they offer the opportunity for women to take steps toward economic independence,
defeating one of the forces of oppression.
These first two steps, while required by justice, will still not bring about a
widespread psychology of freedom. There will still be those whose interests are best
served by maintaining their position in the existing hierarchy: men who gain eco-
nomically, sexually, or psychologically by asserting their dominance and claiming
that it is natural for them to do so; women who gain economically or psychologically
by selling their sexual subordination, given the current incentives. These people
have to be provided incentives to forego those interests and develop new ones. These
incentives could be carrots or sticks, but carrots are better for co-opting someone to a
 Fashioning Freedom 229

progressive cause, and sticks are unwarranted except as punishment for oppressive,
not simply privilege-seeking, behavior. Men and women should be given incentives
to enter into consensual relations that will enhance women’s freedom as well as
men’s. For instance, small steps that would work through changing incentives to
bring about the social provision of child care would include allowing tax credits to
employers for providing child care at the work site or awarding block grants to
communities for child care centers or for lengthening the school year and the school
day to match the working day.* Larger steps to undermine economic oppression
would include offering scholarship assistance for young women to enter male-dom-
inated professions, tax credits for businesses to hire them or for women to start their
own businesses. We must also work toward a vision of freedom at the same time that
we undermine the forces of oppression, and social incentives for this vision-work
could be offered. Awards might be made available for popular works of art and music
that offer visions of a future without oppression. The legal definition of religion might
be expanded so that groups who seek to articulate notions of freedom can garner the
benefits provided to religions.”
Social change will be resisted not only by those who think they will lose their
privileges but also by those who are rewarded by the current structures of incentives
to continue in their path, even if they do not support its outcome. For example,
many people who pursue research on pharmaceuticals are initially motivated to do
so by their concern to cure illness. Those persons would presumably be most mo-
tivated by research that cures the most disease. Yet they find that the reward
structures for drug development are not connected to the numbers of persons whose
illnesses they can help to cure, but rather to the amount of wealth that ill persons
have. Thomas Pogge (2003) proposes an ingenious solution to the problem of
incentives for drug manufacturers to develop drugs for the diseases that primarily
and disastrously afflict Third World countries. He proposes a transnational orga-
nization that would collect revenues from drug sales and use them to reward in-
ventor firms in proportion to the impact that their inventions have on the global
disease burden. The point of doing this is to realign the incentive structures away
from just trying to cure the diseases that are relatively trivial in terms of numbers
and effects but strike rich persons toward curing the diseases that are life-threat-
ening for masses of persons. The interest of inventor firms and generic drug man-
ufacturers would then come together, and drugs of great significance would be made
in great quantities, reaping financial rewards for both types of firms. “Inventor firms
would want their inventions to be widely copied, mass produced, and sold as cheaply
as possible, as these would magnify the impact of these health inventions” (Pogge
2003, 23). This solution requires governmental intervention on behalf of ending
oppression (in this case the severe human rights violation of poverty, as argued by
Pogge), but the mechanism works through an incentive that makes both the agents
of change and the oppressed better off.° This is an example of how incentives can be
structured to bring together the interests of many in solving problems of oppression.
This third step goes beyond the direct social provision of resources to imagine
how society might restructure incentives to bring about envisioned alternative so-
cial practices that enhance freedom. Such incentives work through individuals’ free
choices, rather than through the imposition of beliefs or preferences, and go beyond
230 We Shall Overcome

and improve upon the direct social provision of goods in three ways. First, offering
incentives to behave in certain ways is more likely to change beliefs and desires than
the previous step (direct social provision to the oppressed) in fashioning freedom.
Second, as economists often argue with respect to markets for goods (or bads)
subject to externalities (and hence free rider problems), giving incentives for socially
beneficial behavior and then allowing individuals to choose the actions that are in
their interest is the most efficient way to solve the problem of free riding. A
standard example of this is the market for pollution, in which firms are allotted
pollution rights that they can trade in the market. The alternative is to put an
absolute prohibition on pollution above a certain threshold for each firm. The
market solution, it has been argued, works better, by giving firms incentives to
innovate where possible and not to cheat, since when they cannot innovate they
can still run their business legally by buying the pollution credits from other firms
(Varian 1994). The model relies on there being good information about the existing
levels of pollution, and since firms have little incentive to provide this information,
they have to be monitored by government agencies. The analogy between pollution
and oppressive social norms has already been made. What I am arguing here is that
there is also an analogy between market-based solutions to pollution problems and
incentive-based solutions to changing oppressive social norins. By giving persons
incentives to act in ways counter to oppressive social norms, they will choose to do
so, and perhaps choose to do so in better ways than could have been devised from
those farther removed from the problem. Third, socially structured incentives in-
directly change beliefs and desires, in that they entice persons to do things that will
enhance their independence. Just as there can be indirect forces of oppression, 1 am
suggesting that there can be indirect forces of freedom enhancement. Joshua Co-
hen’s discussion of the nction of a social ethos and its connection to social insti-
tutions supports my claim. By social ethos, a term he takes from G. A. Cohen, he
means “socially widespread preferences and attitudes about the kinds of rewards :t is
acceptable to insist on, and, associated with those preferences and attitudes, a sense
about the ways of life that are attractive, exciting, good, and worthy of pursuit”
(Cohen 2001, 365). Cohen argues that it is at least plausible that the choice of
social institutions causally affects the social ethos, so that, within a Rawlsian
framework we can expect justice to require social institutions that instill an ethos
conducive to freedom from oppression. If this substantive assumption holds, then
people will be led by social institutions that they accept to develop the preferences
and attitudes necessary for freedom—not by direct intervention in their lives but by
the constitutive shaping of their personalities that must occur through one set of
social institutions or another (Cohen 2001, 384).
One might object that such indirect forces are coercive because they manip-
ulate people—indeed, they are specifically designed to manipulate people. But this
is just where they differ from indirect forces of oppression. They are not coercive
because they do not fit the definition of coercion I argued for in chapter 5: “An
institution (economic system, legal system, or norm) is coercive if the institution
unfairly limits the choices of some group of persons relative to other groups in
society.” That is, these incentives do not, by hypothesis, unjcirly limit choices. It is
important to reiterate here a point made in the earlier discussion of coercion. I am
 Fashioning Freedom 231

using coercion in the moralized sense, that is, coercion is lack of choice relative to a
set of choices that is deemed fair or moral by some background moral theory. That
background moral theory has not been elaborated in this book, and I will not set out
to do that now in the final pages of the work. I have in mind a liberal contractarian
view of the sort developed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, or the more
libertarian version of David Gauthier in Morals by Agreement. The claim that any
particular incentive structure that is proposed to take this third step in fashioning
freedom is noncoercive stands or falls on the claim that the social institution it seeks
to counteract is oppressive. But that claim itself relies on the background moral
theory that I am assuming in this book.
A liberal like Berlin might argue that these incentives amount to just the kind
of preference re-education project that portends the slide to totalitarianism. But I
think that this is not the case, and that a liberal can defend structuring social
incentives through government intervention (as well as private incentive provi-
sion), or through international quasi-governing institutions. The key to the argu-
ment is to see that the government must structure incentives in favor of some set of
conditions. It may structure incentives either to maintain the privileges of some
social groups or to shift the benefits to others. What makes a totalitarian state evil is
that it structures incentives for persons to be coerced into doing what they do not
wish, absent that coercion, to do. If a set of incentives do not coerce, then they
cannot be part of a totalitarian evil. It is not open to the libertarian to respond by
arguing that any set of incentives is totalitarian, since there will be a social structure
of incentives regardless. The only argument is over the source and the direction of
the incentives.

4. Two Serious Problems for Social Engineering

I have argued that engineering social incentives to change people’s beliefs about and
preferences for oppressive social norms is not coercive, and that this forestalls Berlin’s
totalitarian menace objection. There remain two serious problems with social en-
gineering projects that must be addressed. I shall call the first of these problems the
problem of unintended consequences and the second the communitarian menace.

4.1. The Problem of Unintended Consequences

One of the basic lessons of the history of macroeconomic policy is that social projects
always have unintended consequences (some negative and some positive). There is
little reason to doubt that providing incentives for persons to change social norms in
the direction of enhancing freedom will sometimes go awry. Consider the record of
the World Bank, which has as its main mission to fight poverty by helping people to
help themselves.’ Many well-intended programs have resulted in benign failures or
worse. International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have had similar ex-
periences (Walley 2004/5). National governments that have tried fiscal or monetary
policies have sometimes brought about the reverse of their intended consequences.
Sometimes the unintended consequences have been beneficial, such as the building
232 We Shall Overcome

of a railroad in Tanzania that was intended for what we can now see as an unrealistic
at best goal, but has resulted in encouraging a thriving trading route.

The planners of TAZARA [Tanzania’s national railway] were not expecting any
such transformation when they initiated the project in the late 1960s. They
imagined a grand national railway owned by the state that would be used for large-
scale regional shipments of copper and other goods from Zambia—a project that
would rival Egypt’s recently completed, Soviet-funded Aswan Dam. Their primary
goal was not to promote rural economic development or improve the lives of rural
producers by connecting local markets. But that has been TAZARA’s real impact.
(Monson 2004/5)

What examples like these tell us is that large-scale social change is to some degree
unpredictable and fraught with dangers of making things worse (or better). Yet, just as
we cannot shy away from trying to make change in the face of the possibility of
totalitarianism, so we cannot shy away from trying to find freedom in the face of failure.
What we must do is try to characterize the ways that socially provided incentive
structures can fail and try to foresee problems of the same kind from our proposals.
Three kinds of problems are generalizable. First, when incentives are offered
and awarded on a competitive basis, then there are incentives for corruption and
gaming the system. In many development projects in the Third World, for example,
the local government is the intermediary between NGOs and the people in need.
It is then easy for the local government officials to skim off a portion of the aid.
Another way aid is siphoned off is by apparently legitimate local businesses that
supply their services or goods at higher rates than would be required by the market.
Corruption and gaming often go in concert, since opening the market to competitor
firms should reduce the rents that the businesses can charge to zero. But if the
government prohibits or places obstacles in the way of competitor firms, then the
system can be successfully gamed. Second, there are incentives for shirking and
cheating. This sort of problem arises when there are set rules with incentives for
adhering to them and no objective and accurate way of determining compliance.
For example, if there are set-asides for minority-owned businesses, but no effective
oversight to determine which businesses are minority-owned, then persons from the
dominant community can set up businesses that only appear to be minority-owned
in order to capture the set-aside. To avoid such problems, incentives should be
structured so that either there is little opportunity for cheating or little incentive for
it. Third, there may be rent-seeking behavior that relies on an exogenously de-
termined market failure that is ignored by the NGO (Young 2005; Ackerly 2005).
For example, micro-credit organizations that make loans to women sometimes fail
to benefit those women because the loans are not structured in a way that prevents
their male relations from capturing that benefit. In Pakistan, the Grameen Bank
often loans money to women who buy rickshaws that have to be operated by their
husbands because of the background social norms about what labor women may or
may not perform and whom they may work with. The social norm creates a market
failure, in the sense that women do not have the freedom to enter the market.
Husbands are able effectively to take ownership of the rickshaw and make their
wives dependent on them and vulnerable to desertion, violence, and deprivation.
 Fashioning Freedom 233

Avoiding such problems is possible by making certain restrictions on the loans to

prevent women from getting into a position to be exploited. This requires close
attention to how social norms interact to create incentive structures.
What would be some of the potential unintended consequences of the in-
centive structures that might be proposed to enhance freedom? It seems unlikely
that there can be any general answer to that question, beyond the concerns for
creating incentives for corruption, cheating, shirking, or rent-seeking. But there is
one more kind of bad unintended consequence that can occur with incentives for
freedom enhancement. Resistance to oppression is likely to raise backlash on the
part of the persons who are losing their privileges (Superson and Cudd 2002, 3-16).
Loss of privilege is part and parcel of the end of oppression, though, so it is not
possible to avoid the loss of privilege. Individuals must be convinced, then, that
they are being compensated for their loss of privileges. In the final section of this
chapter I shall complete the argument that the freedom of all is good for all. This
argument, if it were generally understood and accepted, would be sufficient to
rationally motivate. But because privilege is so difficult emotionally to forego, there
need to be appeals at a more emotional and immediate level in order to motivate
people even to consider that argument. In some ways the women’s movement has
been successful at this. Men who are fathers of daughters, or who have sisters or
other loved ones who are women, can often be convinced that some loss of privilege
to men generally is a worthwhile cost to bear for the benefits of seeing the women
they love gain opportunities and succeed. It is commonplace (though sadly not
exceptionless) among my female peers that their fathers told them that “they could
be anything” when they grew up. And while this was not quite true (professional
athletics was almost out of the question but for tennis players and golfers, and there
has still never been a female U.S. president), many of these fathers thought that
women should have equal opportunity to succeed and perhaps even fought for
women’s access to equal employment opportunities. Yet it is also the case that
progress has been marked by backlash periods. Now, for example, in the United
States there is a serious backlash against the Title IX requirements of equal funding
for women’s and men’s educational opportunities when it comes to funding of
athletics, despite the fact that this law has been responsible for a ninefold increase
in the participation of women in college sports (Brady 2002). While many men see
opportunities for their daughters as clearly a good, others (indeed, sometimes the
very same men) resent the loss of men’s nearly exclusive privilege to playing sports
as endangered by having to share the resources for providing opportunities for
women. The example nonetheless illustrates how incentives for oppressed indi-
viduals to break out of existing oppressive social norms can also appeal to members
of privileged groups who have something to lose by that breach. Looking for these
alliances, as well as appealing to the sense of justice and good will of the privileged
helps to forestall backlash, but does not completely eradicate it.

4.2. The Communitarian Menace

My fundamental political and moral orientation in this book is liberal. That is, I take
the individual to be primary morally and ontologically. Thus, I insist that social
234 We Shall Overcome

policies preserve liberal civil rights. Any social policy that is aimed at disrupting one
form of oppression must not be unjust in this liberal framework. The communitarian
menace is the looming problem that preference re-education might be so successful
that it would result in a homogenization of society. Perhaps if the homogenization
were complete, this would not be a serious problem, since it might result in social
unity and cohesion that would be equally satisfying to each member. But the fact is
that there will always be dissidents and persons who just do not fit the social norms,
yet who are themselves decent persons.® In a homogeneous community they will
suffer from ostracization. This threatens the individual, then, in a way that is not
oppression, but still a violation of the principle of liberalism. It prioritizes the com-
munity’s needs and interests over that of the individual. If individuals are going to
differ over deeply important matters like sexual preference, religious belief, aesthetic
tastes, or philosophical views, or more low-brow matters such as tastes in sports, food,
or how their homes should be decorated, then it is best for them if there are a variety
of lifestyles from which they can choose. John Stuart Mill wrote eloquently about the
value to individuals of living in a society with a variety of experiments in living (Mill
1978, ch. 3). If a society is so homogenous that it does not contain a variety of
flourishing experiments in living, then it will not be hospitable for individuals.
Although I take the communitarian menace seriously in general, I do not believe
that the incentive-based preference transformation program that I recommend is
likely to lead to homogenization of preference or belief. While the incentives will
cause individuals to change their behavior to accommodate those incentives, if the
incentives act as they are supposed to and enhance freedom, then they are more
likely to expand the variety of experiments in living rather than contract them. Still,
this concern suggests that something needs to be done to forestall homogenization
and its danger of intolerance for diversity. Namely, there must be a background
understanding of the advantages of and social support for the value of diversity and
tolerance.
Perhaps the greater concern with homogenization, however, comes from the
worry that persons who have lived under conditions of oppression will lack the
imagination for coming up with diverse lifestyles. Drucilla Cornell’s (1998) work on
freedom and liberalism helps to illuminate the ways in which society can encourage
a variety of experiments in living by supporting the imaginary domain. For Cornell,
the imaginary domain is the psychic space that allows a free play of sexual fantasy.
She argues that this freedom to explore one’s sexual life in imagination lies at the
very foundation of self-respect. Although I agree that persons who are constructed
under the current oppressions are unable fully to conceive the possibilities for
liberation, if we expand the notion to encompass the whole realm of human ex-
pression, not only sex but also work, thought, feeling, art, and religion, the imag-
inary domain offers a glimpse of freedom for individuals. Under conditions of severe
enough oppression, persons may be unable to conceive any alternative world at all.
But when the bonds of oppression have been loosened to some degree, we can
imagine life that is different from what we have known, institutions that are less
oppressive.” We cannot simply design a future society and take the optimal steps to
bring it about. We must be careful what we wish for, as our wishes may unwittingly
be for further oppression. Yet, we must continue to wish and strive to make our
 Fashioning Freedom 235

visions reality. The imaginary domain is our capacity to imagine other ways of being,
apart from the social norms that now constrain us.!° The imaginary domain is the
repository from which alternative conceptions of norms and social structures might
arise. We are able to imagine them because each of us have different social group
memberships, allowing most of us to experience at once privilege and oppression
with respect to one or another of them, and giving us experiences of social groups
with different ways of life. As I shall argue, the society that succeeds in supporting
diversity and tolerance will reap the greatest benefits of freedom, while ensuring the
lasting freedom of each individual.

5. The Social Union of Social Unions:

Enhancing the Freedom of Others

In examining how oppression happens and how it maintains itself through genera-
tions, I have assumed that each person seeks a short-term to medium-term maxi-
mum of preference satisfaction, and their interests in the short to medium term
account in large part for their behavior. Yet, if freedom is to be possible, it will be
necessary for at least some persons to look beyond their short- to medium-term
interests and work toward a transformation of society that may be costly over that
horizon. What would motivate persons to do this? I have tried to suggest ways that
well-intentioned persons can argue, cajole, or bribe their fellows to join them in
resisting oppression and seeking gradual enhancements of freedom. At the very least,
though, a philosopher should offer a rational argument that would appeal to persons
to work toward these ends. I conclude this book with an argument for the claim that
the freedom of all is good for each. This claim may seem problematic in two ways.
First, it appears to conflict with the argument I have developed throughout that a
primary reason that persons, both privileged and oppressed, participate in oppressive
social institutions is because it is in their interest to do so. The conflict in this case is
merely apparent. One’s long-term interest can conflict with one’s short- to medium-
term interest, with the latter motivating behavior. Indeed, that is one way of ex-
plaining the existence of akratic behavior. Second, it may appear problematic in that
it is utopian to think that we can reach freedom. In the previous chapter and in the
first parts of this chapter I have tried to describe how we might make social trans-
formations that lead to freedom. At this point I am only trying to argue for the
rationality for each of seeking freedom for all.
In A Theory ofJustice, John Rawls provides the outlines of the argument. Rawls
argues that humans tend to obey a basic generalization of psychology, which he calls
the Aristotelian Principle. The principle states: “Other things equal, human beings
enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and
this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its com-
plexity” (Rawls 1971, 426). This principle posits a basic motivational principle that
seems to be born out by our everyday experiences. As we grow and mature we often
seek out new challenges, and we take pleasure in developing our capacities to enjoy
them. Our love of sport, art, craft-making, reading, decorating our homes, cooking
food, entertaining our friends, and a thousand other occupations and enjoyments
236 We Shall Overcome

testify to the validity of the principle. The second premise of the argument is
supplied by the fact, noted by philosophers from Aristotle to Marx to Rawls that
humans are deeply social creatures. As Rawls explains it, “Humans have in fact
shared final ends and they value their common institutions as good in themselves.
We need one another as partners in ways of life that are engaged in for their own
sake, and the successes and enjoyments of others are necessary for and comple-
mentary to our own good” (Rawls 1971, 522-523). Humans must join and coop-
erate with others to carry out projects large and small. Over time our projects
deepen in complexity and nuance. The opportunities and ways of life that any
individual may choose from are bequeathed by previous generations who themselves
built upon those they inherited from and built in cooperation with others. In par-
ticipating in these projects our achievements are made possible by the achievements
of others. The social units that humans form Rawls (following Humboldt) calls
“social unions.”
The Aristotelian Principle suggests then that individuals find pleasure in the
achievements of their social unions, which also means that they find pleasure in the
achievements of others in those groups. At its best, participating in social unions
effects a transformation of individual psychology that avoids envy and expands our
concern for others. Marcia Homiak writes that through shared activity, we

expand our conception of who we are, thereby making us more continuously active
and providing us with more continuous pleasure. When, as members of shared
activities, we begin to see ourselves as part of a larger enterprise, our perception of
who we are and of what we can do expands to cover the activities of others who are
fulfilling other parts of the overall task. (Homiak 1985, 104)

Furthermore, we come to see that by expanding our circle of concern to others who
were once excluded we can increase our pleasure.'!
This idea of finding pleasure in each other’s achievements and coming to
identify with them is an extremely attractive idea for a political philosopher. Rawls,
for instance, argues that the well-ordered society is the “social union of social
unions,” that is, that the society that is structured by his two principles of justice
exemplifies this admirable virtue of each taking pleasure in the achievements, the
flourishing, of others. I take it that this is true of the society of free persons, which is
not only free of current oppressions, but whose members seek to free all persons of
oppression. For in such a society the individuals are able to seek their own good
with good will toward others as well. They seek to encourage diversity and enhance
the freedom of others. They take pleasure in and identify with the accomplishments
of others. And further, they come to see their own freedom as connected to that of
the others.
We can, I believe, take steps toward a free society because we are able to
transform ourselves—make ourselves better—through good willed participation in
social unions that are gradually transformed by increasing freedom. A concrete
example of how enhancing women’s freedom enhances the pleasure of others comes
in the achievements of Mia Hamm. She was born in the United States in 1972, the
very year that Title IX, which outlawed sex discrimination by federally funded
educational institutions, became law. Mia Hamm retired in December 2004 as the
 Fashioning Freedom 237

most prolific scorer—male or female—in the history of international soccer. At the

time of her retirement she was one of the most recognizable people on earth and is a
shining example of what determination, hard work, ferocious competitiveness, and
athletic talent can produce. But her achievement was an achievement of the social
unions of soccer and of democratic society more generally. Mia Hamm’s achieve-
ments were made possible by a history of soccer players who developed the sport
through developing rules and practices of fair play and a game that could highlight
and refine certain human abilities and skills, fans who made it popular, and in her
case, a long history of women who fought for women’s opportunities in sport. More
importantly, through taking pleasure in the achievements of Mia Hamm we are able
to see how the inclusion of a formerly excluded group (women) from a cherished
activity (soccer) makes us all better off. Her achievements were made possible only
by these social unions, as well as her natural talents, and in turn they have brought
the world much pleasure. We are better for having international women’s soccer
because Mia Hamm was able to showcase her talents in it. Moreover, we take pride
in the very progress of society that allowed Mia Hamm to shine. We can clearly see
in this case, as we can see in thousands of other less spectacular cases that we
experience closer to home, the enhanced freedom of women has made the world
better for all.
In enjoying the achievements of others, we experience freedom from what Marx
called the alienation of man from man. We gain valuable information about alter-
native ways of life that others pursue with interest and devotion. This in turn
develops our own capacities, our imaginary domains, which allow each of us the
psychic space to enhance our freedom and take pleasure in it. In learning the value of
diversity and tolerance, we become motivated to end oppression and privilege, both
our own and others. This transformation is not easy; it requires moral character to
resist the enticements of privilege or accommodation (Homiak 1991). But at least we
can now see that it is rational to seek the freedom of others as well as ourselves. For,
to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and
enhances the freedom of others.
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 Appendix

his appendix presents a simple game theoretic model of the Larry-Lisa situation. I
model their decision first as a two-period noncooperative game as follows. Each
of the two must choose a strategy, either M (market work) or H (home work) for
each of the two periods, so that each has four possible strategies for the whole game:
HH, HM, MH, or MM. Let d, be the payoff for either one choosing H in the first
period, d, the payoff for choosing H in the second period. Let w be the wage rate for
men in the first period of work, p the promotion rate (p<1) for a period of work
experience, so that (1+ p)w is the wage rate for the second period of work. Let g be
the gender wage gap (g<1), so that gw is the wage rate for women in the first period
of work and (1+p)gw for a second period of work.
Now I state some assumptions. Suppose that both Larry’s and Lisa’s preferences
are such that w>d,>gw > d,. That is, suppose that they value one parent staying
home in the first period (say when their children are o—5 years old) higher than the
gender gap discounted wages, but less than the full men’s wages. Also suppose that
the second period payoff for domestic work is not as valuable as the gender gap
wages (say because the children are in school and their care can be combined with
full-time work). Suppose further that Larry and Lisa need to have some income in
each period, so that at least one of them must choose M for each period if they are
together, and both would have to choose M for each period if they were to split up.
Suppose for the moment that they simply wish to maximize the overall payoff (an
assumption that I will relax shortly). Then the payoff matrix in figure A.1 represents
their feasible options (nf=not feasible). The equilibrium strategy pair given the
above assumption about the relative payoff components is either MMHM or
MMMM depending on whether the promotion bonus makes up for the wage gap,
specifically whether p is greater than, less than, or equal to (d, — gw)/gw.
Now suppose that we relax the assumption that they wish to maximize the
overall payoff, and instead use the Nash bargaining solution to determine the payoffs
to each spouse depending on their outside options in each period. Now if we ask

239
240 Appendix

HH HM MH MM

HH PIN ee
Cararor
[a | aewseenow |
HM
MH
MM d, +d2+(2+p)w

FIGURE A.1

whether Lisa will choose HM or MM, we need to ask what her payoffs will be in the
relevant boxes. Consider the first period bargain. Then the payoffs she receives will
be either (gw + d,)/2 for H or gw for M, while Larry receives w + (gw + d,)/2 if she
chooses H or w if she chooses M. Graphically the choice looks like figure A.2.
If we assume then that she chooses HM, their respective payoffs in period two
will be gw + pw/2 for her and w+ pw/2 for him and their total payoffs would be
gw + (pw+gw+d,)/2 for her and 2w + (pw + gw+d,)/2.
Now one might ask whether she would reconsider after seeing how her payoffs
will suffer in the second period based on her first period choice not to get work
experience. In the second period if she has worked in the first period her outside
option is to earn (1 +p)gw, and this raises her bargaining power somewhat. So
she earns (1 + p)gw, but then the assumption is that she has only earned gw for the
first period, which is less than she earns if she chooses H in the first period. Her
total payoff is (2+ p)gw, while Larry’s is (2+ p)w. Thus, her ultimate decision,

Larry

wtdl

wt+(gw+dl)/2

VN

gw w+dl Lisa
FIGURE A.2
 Appendix 241

assuming she is planning ahead, depends on whether (2+ p)gw is greater than
gw + (pw + gw+d,)/2. Under at least some assumptions about the wage gap, the
promotion bonus, and the strength of their preferences for their children to stay
home and be cared for by one of them, she will choose HM as her strategy.
However, it could be rational for her to choose MM under some assumptions about
those values. For some values, it is individually rational for her to choose MM, even
though that lowers their overall payoff. Namely when p<(d, - gw)/gw and
(2+ p)gw > gw+ (pw+ gw+d,)/2.
It is interesting to note, then, that it would be in Larry’s strategic interest to
exaggerate his preferences for one parent to care for the children at home (i.e., d,),
since he does better in the bargain in the second period, and overall, if she stays
home with the children in the first period. At the same time it is not in her strategic
interest to misrepresent her preferences about the care of children, since her payoff
depends on her true preference.
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 Notes

Preface
1. Two recent books may appear to be exceptions to this claim. Harvey (1999) is clearly
analytic in style, but not comprehensive, in that it addresses only those cases of “civilized
oppression,” that is, those not involving violence or serious economic deprivation. O’Connor
(2002), on the other hand, focuses on the linguistic practices that contribute to the con-
struction of oppression, neglecting the material manifestations of oppression.
2. There are exceptions here: justification of civil disobedience, and by implication, any
violations of his theory of justice.

1. Oppression: The Fundamental Injustice of Social Institutions

1. Namely, we should blame those persons who continue to benefit from the unjust
actions of their ancestors, while the ancestors of the victims continue to suffer uncompen-
sated from the original offences. I shall take up issues of responsibility in chapter 7.
2. Wollstonecraft (1989, 43). Compare with her use of “subjection,” throughout, and
“enslave,” p. 32.
3. This reading is consistent with that of Barbalet (1983, 83-85) and Elster (1985, 100).
See also Schacht (1994, ch. 2).
4. Of course one might respond that women are themselves a class. But this redefinition
of class is not open to Marx, who claims that the economic base of society determines the
ideological superstructure. Either women do not constitute a class, in which case women’s
oppression is not explained by the Marxist account of oppression, or women do constitute a
class, in which case sexual domination is equally basic in the explanation of the ideological
superstructure of society.
5. See Okin (1979, 226-230) for an insightful elaboration of this claim.
6. Haslanger (2004a) argues very effectively for the claim that the primary source of
oppression is institutional. See esp. pp. 104-107.
7. In Cudd (2005) I argue in greater detail for a set of criteria of adequacy that applies
to explanatory theories of normative concepts, of which oppression is a prime example.
8. I do not mean to suggest that individuals cannot overcome oppression in the sense of
living a meaningful life in spite of or in the face of oppression, or that individuals cannot resist

243
244 Notes to Pages 26-36

oppression. By “overcome oppression” here | mean end oppression. Not even Ghandi or
Martin Luther King, Jr., could be said to have ended oppression on their own; it was their
ability to lead masses to protest the oppression that changed the world.
9. This is to counter the tendency in scholarship on oppression to focus too much on
single groups and in doing so to exacerbate the problems of other oppressed groups. Consider,
for example, Paulo Friere’s conception of oppression as “castration,” which he thinks is the
ultimate form of dehumanization, or the signs carried by the Memphis Sanitation Workers in
the fateful strike of 1968 that read: “I! AM A MAN.”

2. Social Groups and Institutional Constraints

1. Van Fraassen (1980, ch. 5) presents a nice summary of the pragmatic approach to
explanation.
2. This is why the proposed “theory of everything” in physics is misnamed; although the
theory is supposed to unite the four basic forces in nature, it will surely be silent on questions
such as “how do we raise the level of employment without causing inflation?”
3. Kincaid (1994) presents an argument for looking for the microstructure of social
phenomena.
4. Elster (1983a) was the first to distinguish these three types of social explanation.
5. This is true of Durkheimian sociology and the semiotic school of anthropology. See,
for example, Hanson (1975).
6. Folbre (1994, ch. 2) offers possible sociobiological accounts of oppression based on
gender, sexual preference, race, and class. However, she notes that such discussions are
“speculative (if not foolhardy)” (74). She then proceeds to offer explanations of both
women’s subordination and relative equality. Likewise she discusses how sociobiological ex-
planations might account for the origins of oppression or the absence of oppression for
different races, classes, and homosexuals. But such speculations are too general to be useful,
then, in any one case. At most we can conclude that the existence of oppression within a
society has to be compatible with its survival, for a time at least, given its cultural and
biological environment.
7. Note that not all feminist scholars accept that women are oppressed in all societies.
See, for instance, Omolade (1980).
8. See Davidson (1980, p. 79) for a famous example of how intentional explanations
can go awry for such reasons.
9. Gilbert (1989, ch. 3), for example, argues against what she calls the “society-
dependence thesis”: that meaningful behavior is society dependent. She construes this as
implying the transcendental claim that meaningful behavior is inconceivable without society.
I merely mean to make the weaker claim that the meaningfulness of human behavior is in fact
due to its social nature. Gilbert is willing to grant that the group languages that we speak are
essentially social.
10. The term “ascriptive” is sometimes used for “nonvoluntary” by sociologists. Folbre
(1994) uses the term “given groups.”
11. May (1987) recognizes this defect and tries to remedy it by suggesting that the
relations among individuals that constitute their grouphood may simply consist in their being
treated similarly by others by virtue of some attribute that they share with other individuals.
While this accounts for nonvoluntary social groups, it makes the theory no longer internalist
but externalist and strains the use of the term “relation.”
12. Elster (1985) offers an externalist account of class, which is one kind of social group:
“A class is a group of people who by virtue of what they possess are compelled to engage in
the same activities if they want to make the best use of their endowments” (p. 331).
 Notes to Pages 38-45 245

13. It is not quite precise to say that she requires that there actually be com-
mon knowledge of joint readiness for appropriate uses of “we.” To recognize that this is an
idealization that in practice could never be fulfilled by actual persons, Gilbert requires only
that the “smooth reasoner counterparts” of the persons included in P, i.e., the ideal coun-
terparts of the persons who are just like them but have infinite time and perfect reasoning
capacity, have common knowledge.
14. Tuomela (1995) also presents a theory of social groups that encompasses only what I
am calling voluntary social groups. His theory is similar to Gilbert’s in that it is an internalist
theory, that is, it takes the intentions of the members to be decisive for group membership.
15. Interestingly, Gilbert does not refer to Gould’s, DeGeorge’s, or May’s accounts of
social groups.
16. This argument is due to Schelling (1971). See also Schelling (1978).
17. For a compatible view of the role of rational choice theory in structural explanations
of behavior, see Satz and Ferejohn (1994).
18. Roger Shiner raised this objection to me.
19. The example was originally used by Michael Bayles (1974).
20. Laurence Thomas, a black Jewish philosophy professor at Syracuse University, tells
the story of being in an elevator in Jerusalem with a white American woman whom he did not
know. When he got into the elevator with her she looked at him nervously and clutched her
purse, despite the fact that he was well dressed, thus obviously professional and upper-middle
class, and in an expensive hotel in Israel—hardly matching even the stereotype of a street
thug except by his skin color. In Thomas (1990) he writes about this incident and the
conversation that he then engaged her in.
21. | am referring here to Thomas Kuhn's (1970) discussion of the misperception of
anomalous scientific results as experimental mistakes rather than true counterexamples to a
theory.
22. She treats this subject at greater length in (Young 1997, 1999).
23. This condition prevents an objection raised by Tuomela (1995) from telling against
my theory of nonvoluntary social groups. There he considers as a sufficient criterion for
grouphood [a set of persons who] “are defined by others as belonging to the group” (212). His
objection to this is that some persons could define an arbitrary set of persons, and this would
not count as a social group “unless trivially, circularly, the social collective here is already
presupposed to be a social group” (213). But although this is another conceivable externalist
account of social groups, it is not mine, and Tuomela has not envisioned the sort of theory I
offer here.
24. Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique (1963), wrote about “the problem that has
no name,” by which she was referring to a series of similar psychological, sexual, and material
problems that many middle-class white women in the 1950s faced, but that no one had ever
seen as systematic oppression. It may be that women recognized some other common con-
straints enough to see themselves as a social group at the time, however. An example of a
social group that has only very recently been named and become conscious of itself as a social
group may be bisexuals. The point is not, of course, that there were not persons who were
sexually attracted to both sexes before this consciousness, but rather, that they did not see
themselves as having common interests as a result of common constraints (e.g., rejection by
both homosexual and heterosexual communities) that formed the basis for grouphood.
25. My view of the continuum of voluntariness of social groups goes something like this.
On the far end of the nonvoluntary scale we have NVSGs whose members lack self-con-
sciousness of their grouphood and there is no social consciousness, then moving on toward
greater voluntariness we have NVSGs whose members are self-conscious of their grouphood,
then NVSGs whose members self-identify or take pride in their group membership, then
246 Notes to Pages 47-58

NVSGs whose members can rather easily pass in society, so that they need not face the
common constraints unless they consciously choose not to pass, then voluntary social groups
(VSGs) that are vestiges of formerly NVSGs (such as the Irish Americans discussed in the
text), then VSGs whose members bear little costs of membership, and finally on the extreme
voluntary end of the continuum we have VSGs with high costs of memberships and low costs
of non-membership (e.g., being a female U.S. Marine), so that one has to really want to be a
member to do so. ;
26. It is worth noting that Gilbert, too, thinks that her account of social groups rules out
methodological individualism or what she terms “strong analytic individualism.” See Gilbert
(1989, 434-435).
27. Connolly (1976) uses the John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women analysis of
women’s willing participation in their own oppression to argue for the need to postulate what
he calls “reference groups,” which are social groups in much the same sense as my nonvol-
untary groups. Gilbert (1989) also rejects methodological individualism because voluntary
social groups bring into being the irreducible concept of the plural subject. I think that she is
right and that the refutation of methodological individualism is overdetermined.
28. Spelman (1988, ch. 5) draws here on the work of Davis (1981). I believe that it is a
misinterpretation of Davis to read her as endorsing this objection, however.
29. According to a Briefing Paper published in January 1997 by the Institute for
Women’s Policy Research, Washington, D.C., “The Wage Gap: Women’s and Men's Earn-
ings,” the wage gap between black men and women 18 years and older, by educational level
for 1995 was: high school men $19,514 to women $14,473 (74%); college graduates men
$36,026 to women $25,577 (71%); and postgraduates men $41,777 to women $35,222
(84%).
30. For an excellent critique of Spelman’s antiessentialist claims using recent empirical
evidence of the similarity of women’s oppression across races and cultures, see Okin (1994).
31. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research statistics, updated in January 1997,
report average median earnings as follows: white men $32,172, white women $22,911, African
American men $24,428, African American women $20,665. Thus in percentage terms the
female/male wage gap for whites is 71.2 percent, for African Americans is 84.6 percent; the
African American/white wage gap for men is 75.9 percent, and for women is 90.2 percent.
32. I thank Richard DeGeorge for raising this objection and providing this example.
33. Jones (1999) distinguishes and explicates two senses of group harm. My sense of
group harm, matches, I think, his term “corporate group harm,” though I do not draw his
distinction between collective and corporate groups in the way he does.

3. Psychological Mechanisms of Oppression

1. Note that there is no discussion of gay men here or how they come to be and little
discussion of lesbians—the existence of homosexuals constitutes something of an embar-
rassment for her theory.
2. Because mothers are of a different sex than boys, they can get pushed into the
Oedipus complex at this early age by the instigation of the mother (Chodorow 1978, 107—
108). Just what she means by this is not clear to me; it sounds like she is referring to
molestation of the boy by the mother, but perhaps she means a fantasy of this somehow
induced by the mother? Fact or fantasy is not significant, though, for psychoanalysis, since it
is the subjective experience of the individual that matters. In any event, were the boy to
come to believe that he had been seduced by his mother, it would cause the boy to be all that
much more distant in his relationships, having had to separate himself from his primary
caregiver even earlier in life for fear of castration by his father.
 Notes to Pages 58-70 247

3. By “direct evidence” I mean tests of the psychological mechanisms postulated by the

theory. I do not include here a set of child development milestones for which there exist
competing coherent explanations, the only sort of empirical evidence Chodorow does offer.
4. Hegel writes: “Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear remains at the
formal stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence. Without the
formative activity [i.e., working for the master], fear remains inward and mute, and con-
sciousness does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness fashions the thing without
the initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centered attitude; for its form or negativity is
not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of
itself as essential being” (Hegel 1807/1977, 119).
5. This term is Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan’s (1985).
6. It should be said that Fanon was not calling for violence for the sake of violence, nor
was he unmindful of the dangers to the violent themselves. Unorganized violence and es-
pecially violence against one’s fellow oppressed is inevitable, insidious, and reflects the
pathologies of oppression, namely, “paranoia; and the associated processes of projection,
rationalization, and dehumanization” (Bulhan 1985, 153). Fanon writes movingly in the last
section of The Wretched of the Earth of the patients on both sides of the Algerian struggle for
independence of the psychological sufferings of men and women who had practiced or
witnessed physical violence. Perhaps he also saw its potential to become a habit.
7. One might think that failing to violently resist oppression is deserving of scorn as an
accomodationist strategy or as not sufficiently radical to end oppression. Hence, the strategy
would not be resistance at all, and violence could be seen as the only possible form of
resistance and so it would not be androcentric to call for it in all cases. While I grant that the
situation of colonialism is unlikely to end through nonviolence, there is a significant coun-
terexample in India, and not all forms of oppression are maintained through violence (in my
more limited sense). To see violence as the only possibility or the only honorable one in the
face of a counterexample is, I must insist, androcentric. I thank John McClendon III for
forcing me to consider this issue further, however.
8. Vicki Hearne’s (1986) analysis of animal training suggests that the reason for drawing
lines and forcing submission at those lines is to give the animal a sense of boundaries that may
not be crossed so that when the need arises those boundaries can be enforced immediately
and effectively, or so that there are boundaries to lean on, to help to circumscribe the
unlimited domain of choice that would otherwise seem present.
9. Specifically she cites Stern (1985).
10. Note that Thomas Hobbes also admitted a role for recognition when he claimed
that “glory” is one of the “three causes of quarrel,” though the third and least of them
(Hobbes 1985, 185).
11. Actually I think that it can be shown to be logically necessary for information
processing, since without categorization there are no connections between ideas and so no
way to process them. But for the purposes of this paper it is enough to claim that categori-
zation is physically necessary, or necessary for the kinds of physical beings that we are.
12. See Fiske and Taylor (1991, 156-160) for a discussion of the conditions under
which people correct their false stereotypic attributions and experimental evidence for them.
13. However, what determines belonging here is a highly theoretical issue, since what
constitutes a group is itself a theoretical issue. One aspect of belonging that is systematically
conflated in the psychological literature is the issue of whether the perceiver herself deter-
mines whether she belongs: Is it her perception that matters? Her commitments? Others’
perceptions of her? In experiments this has to be operationalized in some way and is generally
done by direct assignment of the subjects to a group in a way that makes it clear and common
knowledge to all which group each individual belongs to.
248 Notes to Pages 73-92

14. This further thought was suggested to me by Branscombe in private discussion.

15. See Fiske and Taylor (1991, 122, and 137-139) for a review of the large literature
on the circumstances in which role schemas are disengaged.
16. | thank Beverly Mack for raising this objection.
17. There is a controversy in social cognition theory about whether stereotypes are ever
inaccurate (e.g., see Fiske and Taylor 1991, 341-342). What I mean to claim here, is that
stereotypes do not present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about
individuals, and this can plainly be seen by considering the many “effects” and attribution
errors that I have referred to here that show stereotyping to be a biased and often false
representation of individual attributes.

4. Violence as a Force of Oppression

1. By “intragroup violence” I mean violence between members of the same social group.
Violence may thus be both intragroup and some other type of systematic violence. I mean to
exclude only those cases which are intragroup and not also some other type. For example,
violence between white, middle-aged, heterosexual men of the same socioeconomic class. This
implies that I am excluding domestic violence between same sex partners who are of the
same race and class. Such violence, I contend, would not be a force of oppression. One might
wonder how intragroup could be systematic. An example would be the black-on-black vio-
lence of the inner city—it is systematic in the sense that such crimes occur to the victims
because of institutionally structured facts, in this case the de facto segregation of the inner city.
2. Violence by subordinate groups aimed at dominant groups does not count as op-
pression, on my view, since it is likely intended to erase the oppression or to protest it. If it
were to result in the dominance relations being changed, however, the violence by the first
group against the second could turn into oppression. Just because some act is not a part of
oppression does not entail that it is not immoral, of course.
3. What one nation sees as a war of aggression might appear to another to be a
defensive war. Interventions by third parties appear to some to be defense of an oppressed
minority and to others to be imperialist aggression against a nation’s sovereignty. Further-
more, there may be differences of opinion among the individuals who make up the aggressor
nation as to the motivation or justification of the war. But from the fact that we can mis-
classify a war it does not follow that there is no truth of the matter. In naming a situation
oppressive we take a stand on the facts about the justice or injustice of the cause.
4. According to the FBI crime statistics on murder for 1999, for example, 88% of
murders of women in the United States were committed by men. By contrast only 11% of
murders of men were committed by women (http://www.fbi.gov/uctr/ggcius.htm).
5. Briere (1997, 3), quoting from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis-
orders—IV.
6. Becker, who works with victims of political repression in Chile, argues that there is no
“post” to the ongoing traumatic injuries of his patients, nor is the term “disorder” appropriate,
since his patients are displaying a perfectly normal response to the horrors perpetrated by that
regime. Furthermore, while stress is a psychological concept that implies an intact self
through the duration of the injury, trauma implies a “perceived sense of irreparable tear of the
self and reality” (p. 105). Becker's work with patients suggests that ongoing oppression and
terrorism cause recurring and sometimes ever-present neurotic and even psychotic states that
make life for the patients and their families difficult or nearly impossible to bear.
7. Bartky (1990) discusses the idea that oppressed persons come to internalize an
inferiorized self-image, which then leads to a kind of self-oppression. Brison (2002) discusses
how this is one of the effects of rape on its victims.
 Notes to Pages 92-99 249

8. Neath (1997) documents statistics showing that male violence against women is a
significant cause of disability in women.
9. Darity, Jr. cites Blau and Graham (1990, 321-339) for a study that suggests that
inheritance is the major source of wealth and may account for 75% of the enormous wealth
gap between whites and blacks.
10. Since women cut across race and class groupings, one might be tempted to argue
that women do not suffer from this harm of systematic violence. However, since women
control so little of the world’s wealth, it is also true that women are economically disad-
vantaged as a group.
11. The World Health Organization (2000) lists statistics on rates of intimate partner
violence in table 4.1, p. 90. According to their statistics (which are not precisely comparable
across countries because of differing methodologies), while approximately 22 percent of U.S.
women are victims of domestic physical violence, approximately 58 percent of women in
Turkey are victimized.
12. Statistics cited on American Bar Association Commission on Domestic Violence
website, www.abanet.org/domviol/stats.html, accessed on 9-11-03. This site cites their sta-
tistics from the Bureau of Justice and the American Psychological Association.
13. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, reported on website:
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs, tables 91 and 93.
14. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there were 2.6 million
young people earning high school diplomas or equivalents in 2001, of these just over half were
female. See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/snf_reporto3/table_o6.asp (accessed 9-30-03). The
statistics on casualties in the Vietnam War can be found at www.vietnam_war_outcome.htm
(accessed 9-30-03). The number of total (1959-1975) American casualties is listed as 57,685
killed and 153,303 wounded; there were approximately 2 million Vietnamese killed and 3
million wounded during that time.
15. Evidence for this claim is overwhelming. To cite a few facts supporting it: In much
of the world they are less well nourished, less healthy, and less well educated (Lopez-Claros
and Zahidi 2005). Everywhere they are vulnerable to violence and abuse by men. It has been
estimated that as a result of these facts and the fact that in many places girl babies are
disproportionately aborted or killed, there are one hundred million missing women (Dréze
and Sen 1989). Many more women in the world lack access to education and many more are
illiterate. Jobs that are high paying are much less likely to be held by women. Tedious and
menial work is much more likely to be done by women. Women in the workforce are paid less
than their male counterparts, more often harassed and intimidated on the job, and far more
often are responsible for child care and housework “after work.” Independently of their
participation in the paying workforce, women suffer from domestic violence at much greater
rates, bear primary responsibility for childrearing and housework, and are much more likely to
be sick and poor in their old age. In much of the world women do not have access to safe
abortion, or sometimes even to contraception, further putting women’s health and well-being
at risk. Women everywhere bear almost the full burden of unplanned pregnancies. Women in
many nations of the world lack full formal equality under the law. Where they have it, they
are less likely to be able to access the judicial system and so still lack substantive equality.
And almost nowhere in the world do women hold high government offices at anywhere near
the rates of men.
16. On the injustice of aggression, see Walzer (1992). When a war is justified, it does
not in the first instance constitute a case of oppression. However, wars that conquer a nation,
even if justified, can lead to oppressive imperial or colonial domination. An occupation may
at first be necessary to secure peace and freedom for a conquered people, but experience
shows that occupations can easily go awry.
250 Notes to Pages 102-120

17. I take this argument up more fully in chapter 5.

18. The argument for reparations is peripheral to the issues addressed in this chapter
but still needs to be made. Briefly, my view is that descendants are owed compensation if and
because they belong to the same social groups, since the harms to the ancestors are trans-
mitted psychologically and materially to the descendants, while the privileges to the domi-
nant social groups are still enjoyed by their descendants. Thus, there is no level playing field
for the competition for current social resources between the two groups, and the disadvan-
tage/advantage stems from an injustice.
19. The massive international condemnation of the rapes caused the Japanese military
authorities to outlaw rapes and to institute the infamous “comfort women” program of mass
sexual slavery to service the soldiers on other battlefronts. Perhaps they believed that the
comfort women in some ways compensated for the prohibition on mass rape, although it can
hardly be said that these women were consenting to this “service.” See Chang (2000).
20. Salzman (2000, 63) citing UN Economic and Social Council, Contemporary Forms of
Slavery (Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1995/38 [13 July 1995]).
21. Enloe (2000, ch. 5) analyzes the many layers of this and other cases of soldier rape.
22. See Burg (1997) for a thoughtful discussion of the complexities in labeling this
particular situation a case of genocide.
23. Sex outside marriage is against the law for men, as well, but men are less likely to be
accused, less likely to be convicted, and when convicted, less likely to be harshly punished.
24. Estimates of the number of African slaves are very highly contested and range
between 10 and 28 million, as reported by the BBC. www.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/
1523100.htm (accessed on 9-30-03).
25. Of course, this is only male slaves; all females had to wait until the Nineteenth
Amendment was ratified in 1920 for their right to vote in federal elections.
26. “Lynch-law” originally referred to extra-legal courts, which were so named after
Charles Lynch, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, who sat as magistrate over these
trials. During the American colonial period, the British rule made it difficult to prosecute
crimes efficiently, and petty criminals took advantage of the situation. This caused the colonists
to devise their own courts, which were not legally sanctioned by the Crown (White 1969).
27. White is apparently using these quotation marks to refer to Douglas Freeman, editor
at the time (late 1920s) of the Richmond News-Leader (White 1969, 98-99).
28. This definition is cited on the FBI’s website: www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/civilrights/hate.htm
(accessed 10-1-03).
29. FBI Press Release, Nov. 22, 2004, found on their website www.fbi.gov/pressrel/
pressrelo4/pressrel1 12204.htm.
30. According to the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report, Brazil ranks
sixth worst of the 123 countries for which there is data in terms of its Gini index at 60.7. The
Gini index is a measure of wealth inequality that ranges from o (perfect equality) to 100
(perfect inequality). Brazil is worse on this measure than all of the other countries of all other
continents except Africa.

5. Economic Forces of Oppression

1. Ezorsky (1991) discusses the “disadvantage of being disadvantaged,” by which she
means these reinforcing aspects of oppression.
2. It is important to note that the poverty is chosen by the Amish, but their inequality
is not. Presumably it is not to be economically inferior to others that they choose a simple life,
but that the economic inequality comes along with that choice. If others were to choose
a simple life like theirs, they would not choose to be even poorer in order to remain unequal.
 Notes to Pages 122-135 251

3. Parijs (1995, ch. 1) defines pure capitalism and pure socialism as both requiring this
property of self-ownership in order to avoid devolving into (morally unacceptable) slavery
or collectivism. In this chapter he argues that neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism is
the ideal free society, concluding instead that some elements of each, namely ownership of
the means of production and some level of provision of social services is necessary for real
freedom. I take it that this argument supports my argument that capitalism is not intrinsically
oppressive.
4. This is the basic idea of general equilibrium, a proof of which can be seen in Browning
and Browning (1989, ch. 17) or just about any contemporary microeconomics textbook.
5. This is not to say that capitalism is incompatible with discrimination, of course. But
any other economic system is also compatible with discrimination, and so to indict capitalism
as oppressive because it is compatible with other systems of oppression would lead us to indict
all economic systems.
6. Some public goods provision should also be included in a full account of a clearly
acceptable capitalism. Public goods are goods which are not rival (one person’s consumption
of the good does not reduce another's) and not excludable (no one can be excluded from
consuming the good once it is provided to anyone). Public goods are underprovided in the
market and some will be seen as socially necessary. Strategic defense is an example. I thank
Neal Becker for this addition.
7. Roemer (1988, ch. 6) gives an analytic argument for this claim.
8. Nozick (1974) argues that coercion is a violation of justice; Raz (1986) argues that
coercion is a violation of autonomy. I shall maintain that it can be both or either.
g. Expected utility is just the sum of the products of the utilities of the possible out-
comes and their probabilities of occurring.
10. This is not to deny that some psychological states induced by coercion are objective
harms, by which I mean harms that are intersubjectively verifiable.
11. Elster (1985, 212-213) implies that there are some purposes for which a moralized
theory of coercion or force is necessary, and others for which an empirical theory is adequate.
I-am claiming that a theory of structural oppression requires a moralized account of coercion,
but I would agree with Elster’s pluralist position that an empirical theory may be better for
other purposes.
12. Martin (1993) argues that not only legal rights are recognized only within the
constraints set by background practices but this is also true for theories of moral or human
rights. He writes: “social recognition, an actual and appropriate awareness on the part of
people in society, is a necessary condition of a morally valid claim's being (or becoming) a
moral right” (82).
13. Roth and Sotomayor (1990, ch. 2). The algorithm for producing provably stable
matches is quite precisely and formally described there, and differs slightly from the de-
scription in my text above, in that the side that accepts or rejects is allowed to keep a
proposer engaged while previously rejected proposers make new proposals. The exact details
of the algorithm do not matter for my point, though, which is that the structure of the
normative practice of marriage proposals can systematically disadvantage a group.
14. Barbara Herman (1991, 796) recognizes this distinction between agent-agent co-
ercion and institutional coercion.
15. Hayek articulates these two criticisms in Hayek (1944) chs. 6 and 7.
16. Such a system would tend to retain the status quo in terms of production and
consumption as well as social groups. Innovation may be less likely to occur under such a
system than under capitalism. But this lack of innovation does not constitute oppression and
may be seen as a worthwhile tradeoff to avoid the economic inequality attendant to capi-
talism. I thank Neal Becker for discussion on this point.
252 Notes to Pages 135-149

17. A lack of economic efficiency may, however, entail another kind of injustice, since
it means that someone could be benefited without harming anyone else, and I have ar-
gued elsewhere that fairness requires that such benefits not be denied to persons (Cudd
1996). The difference between this sort of injustice and oppression is that it need not be
group-based.
18. Immigration restrictions may be justified in some cases on grounds similar to the
justification of capitalism, by arguing that the existence of national borders allows for political
and economic organization that increases the wealth and opportunity for even the worst off
outside the borders. It would have to be argued as well that by eliminating such borders there
would be a degradation of political and economic rights for all. But just as capitalism must
provide a guaranteed social minimum to make the argument that it increases the choices of
the worst off, immigration restrictions would have to allow exceptions to provide for the worst
off individuals, especially those in immediate danger of violent death.
19. I am referring her to the theory of “compensating differentials,” which says that
there are jobs whose working conditions are more desirable than others and so will cause
workers to choose those jobs for less pay over otherwise similar jobs (in terms of the amount
of human capital one needs to get the job).
20. Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, Inc., 760 F. Supp. 1486 (M.D. Fla. 1991).
21. Statistics about inequalities between males and females are available in the U.N.
report, The World's Women 2000: Trends and Statistics, available on-line at http://unstats.un.org/
unsd/demographic/products/indwm/unpub.htm.
22. By this | mean that if we compare the social inequalities suffered by almost any
group that contains both men and women, the women in the group will be inferior or
subordinate to the men of that group. This is especially true with respect to economic
inequalities. There are certainly some women who are better off than some men, but con-
sidered as a group, women are less well off than men, and when economically deprived groups
are considered in themselves, the women within them are less well off than the men in them.
23. Think only of the almost legendary status of business leaders like Lee laccoca,
politicians like Jesse Jackson or Barbara Mikulski, and educators like Thomas Sowell.
24. See Bergmann (1986, 9-10, 63-64) for critical explication of this argument, and for
an example of an economics text that argues this, see Fleisher and Knieser (1980, 405-413).
25. Fuchs (1989, 31-32), from Census of Population and Housing, 1980: Public-Use
Microdata 1/100 C-Sample, Bureau of the Census, Washington, D.C., 1983.
26. The most important among these laws is the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which made it
illegal to pay men and women different wages for “equal work on jobs the performance of
which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar
working conditions;” the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in com-
pensation, terms, or conditions on grounds of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and
which provided for the establishment of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to
enforce the act (Schmitz 1996, ch. 1).
27. See Okin (1989, 147), who makes a similar point.
28. Hirschman (1970) argues that the feasibility of exit from a relationship determines
one’s power within a relationship. See also Okin (1989, ch. 7). Formal bargaining theory
supports the claim that the opportunities should the relationship fail determine the share of
goods in the relationship, since the no-agreement outcome plays a crucial role in determining
the outcome of the bargain. Mill in On the Subjection of Women (1988) also recognized that
differences in bargaining power within a marriage would determine what women would
choose to do. See esp. p. 43.
29. Recall here that the model is a rational choice model of behavior. There are surely
many non-rational processes that come into play in making a decision to leave a batterer, and
 Notes to Pages 149-173 253

there may also be threats that the batterer uses to assert his power that I have not factored in.
This was not meant as a complete explanation of why men batter or why women stay with
batterers.
30. In their now well-known sex discrimination lawsuit, Sears tried to defend its actions
on exactly these grounds—that women are poor risks for stability and that they (the women)
did not really want jobs that would force them to make inflexible time commitments. See
Weiner (1985).
31. Mahoney (1995) discusses women’s choices of marital partners in light of this
bargaining situation. She recommends that women marry “down,” that is, that they marry
men who have less bargaining power, whether because they are younger or less well educated,
in order to avoid this outcome.
32. It may be arguable that an initial natural inequality could be the catalyst for the
vicious cycle, though not in any conceivable social arrangement of power. In this case capi-
talism and the importance of access to wealth in order to have power forms the background
that is necessary for the wage gap to play the catalytic role in the cycle.
33- In my home state of Kansas there are on average 26.6 slots in a licensed day care for
every 100 children between the ages of o-5, and in some counties fewer than 20 per 100
children. That leaves parents of 73% of the young children either to share care with others,
find caregivers who are not even minimally qualified as daycare providers, or opt out of the
workforce to care for the children (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2002).

6. Psychological Harms of Oppression

1. Rawls (1971) for instance holds that “the basis for self-esteem” is a “primary good”—
a good that one wants no matter what else one wants.
2. In January 2005, a large number of debates in a variety of media and forums were
waged over statements by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers’s claim that
women are not successful in science in large part because of a genetic inferiority in mathe-
matical ability. While there exist numerous causes and explanations of women’s lack of
success in science, some of which are social and under his direct control, it is quite premature
and ungenerous, if not to say completely unfair, to chalk it up to the one factor over which
none of us have any control.
3. Sadker and Sadker (1994) paint a frightening and depressing picture of sexual ha-
rassment by both boys and teachers against girls in America’s schools today.
4. Of course, as a female academic, | have experienced this personally.
5. This story was related to me by a colleague of mine, who was the victim.
6. Severely cognitively disabled humans and nonhuman animals may also deserve
special treatment on other grounds, but an investigation of that issue is beyond the scope of
this book.
7. It is worth noting that abortion laws objectify women even if one holds that abortion
is, all things considered, immoral. That is, it objectifies women to prohibit them from severing
their ties to a fetus at will by treating them as an object for the use of another.
8. This is a point about the non-foundational nature of our epistemic and moral situ-
ation that has been made in a variety of ways by the likes of Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Neurath, Duhem, Quine, Sellars, just to name some of the major twentieth-century phi-
losophers who have done so.
9. Lewis (1969) is the classic account of conventions as solutions to coordination
games. In Cudd (1990) I expressed some doubts about the overall aims of the account, but
the claim that conventions are solutions to coordination games stands.
10. I owe this analogy to Griffin (1979).
254 Notes to Pages 174-196

11. 1am grateful to Aisha Chaudhri for helping me to see the depth of this problem for
religious minorities in the United States.
12. The term “deformed desires” is used by Superson (2005). Other important treat-
ments of adaptive preference or deformed preference include Elster (1983b); Sen (1995); and
Agarwal (1997).
13. I argued in chapter 5 that women often face incentives through the social structure
to choose ways of life that will further their oppression. The example that I used to illustrate
this was a couple deciding on how to allocate unpaid and paid labor between them, and |
argued that the gender wage gap (or any of a number of other structural incentives) would
make it rational, from a total household perspective at least, for the wife to do the unpaid
domestic labor and the husband to do the paid market labor. But, given the exit options that
this choice would give each of the spouses, the woman’s power to control resources and
outcomes in the marriage and in bargaining over goods would be seriously reduced. Hence,
the oppressive conditions that give rise to the choices would then tend to be reinforced by
those choices. Yet to make an opposite choice might require a degree of power in the
marriage that was already precluded by the relative bargaining positions of men and women.
Women prefer housework against this background of oppression.
14. I do not mean to suggest here that democracy requires religious intolerance
whenever a religion discriminates invidiously against women (or ethnic minorities). At this
point, I am simply illustrating the kinds of undemocratic preference deformations that can
occur under the influence of religion. In the end I think that the only way to have a justifiable
democratic system is to guarantee a set of personal rights that will sometimes conflict with
democratic outcomes. Although freedom of religion will be an important right to protect, a
democratic society ought to exclude religion from the public sphere. This will be a delicate
balance. The details of the balancing process will depend on many local and historical
conditions, and are beyond the scope of this book to discuss.
15. I do not mean to suggest here that attacking oppression in these cerebral, cognitive
ways is the only or the most effective means. My point is that these are the courses of action
that would directly address the oppressive nature of stereotyping itself.

7. Resistance and Responsibility

1. Although in advance it would have been surprising and doubtful to imagine that one
individual could have had such an effect, in fact it happened, and thus there must have been
some reasonable hope of success.
2. Michael Schwermer was a white Civil Rights worker in Mississippi who was murdered
in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan along with two other Civil Rights workers.
3. McGary and Lawson (1992) discuss the case of African American slaves whose
oppression was so long-standing and pervasive that it was as invisible to them as the fact that
humans cannot exceed the speed of light is invisible to us, at least most of the time.
4. Sending a message of revolt may be a way of lessening the effects of oppression by
making the oppressed person feel better. But it might also make the oppression harsher.
Hence we cannot assimilate sending a message of revolt to lessening oppression. Resistance
need not have any hope to lessen oppression to still count as resistance. I owe thanks to Mark
Lance, Julie Maybee, and Russ Shafer-Landau for discussion of this point.
5. In his Autobiography (1873, esp. 79-81), John Stuart Mill briefly discusses his work
with the East India Company and what he learned from that experience. But he does not
discuss the colonial oppression of India that that firm played such a central role in. In this
sense he was blind to his British imperial privilege.
 Notes to Pages 197-203 255

6. Recall Nyla Branscombe’s work on privilege discussed in chapter 3 (Branscombe

1998; Branscombe et al. 1999).
7. Frankfurt (1988) poses the possibility of there being moral obligations on the coerced
to resist, but considers this the less interesting case than the case in which coercion exon-
erates the individual of moral responsibility, and so does not discuss it. Wertheimer (1994)
agrees and suggests a condition similar to mine for situations in which there is some voluntary
choice and exploitation. He writes that “it is plausible to maintain that one is coerced when
the background conditions are unjust” (82, emphasis in text).
8. The situation is more complex than I have acknowledged here. For example, many
women argue that what we should work for is an entire transformation of society such that
whether work is paid or unpaid has no bearing on the life prospects, self-esteem, or self-
determination of the individual. In the interest of the question at issue ] shall ignore this kind
of argument.
9. Evidence for this can easily be seen in letters to the editor of feminist and women’s
magazines such as Ms. or American Baby. Social conservatives would surely disagree with my
examples here, but I think that they could fit some of their own into the category of oppression
by choice. For example, a recent commentator argues that poor minorities who have histori-
cally been discriminated against, for example, African Americans, can choose to pursue a
strategy of self-improvement to get themselves out of poverty rather than relying on govern-
ment handouts. This would involve some initial hardship and risk of failure, but if pursued in
large numbers might forever sever the link between race and poverty (Steele 1990). Another
example that I do not discuss in the text might be gay people who can choose to come out or
remain closeted. They are oppressed through their choice to remain closeted, and choosing to
come out in large numbers might lessen or end the oppression of all, or so one might argue.
10. Heyd adds that the action must be morally good “both because of its intended
consequences and because it has intrinsic moral value.” But the “and” here seems stronger
than is necessary, since one could imagine cases where a good is brought about by unsavory
but not immoral ways, or a kind thing is done to someone that does not have morally
significant consequences.
11. Some, including Baron (1987) and Hale (1991), have argued that “supererogation”
does not refer, in other words, that there are no such things as supererogatory acts. I would
disagree, though this is not the place for a sustained argument against them. In any case,
since I am arguing that resistance to oppression by choice is not supererogatory, their ar-
guments would not nullify my conclusions here. /
12. Calhoun provides a nice discussion of how participation in an oppressive institution
tends to strengthen the institution and even justify it from at least the perspective of stability,
an important aim of social institutions. Thomas Hill, “Symbolic protest and calculated si-
lence” in his (1991) book, also argues that one might associate oneself with an institution just
by refusing to dissociate from it, and that this then lends the institution the honor and
prestige of one’s association.
13. I say “nearly costless” because it may be that one woman gains by criticizing other
women, or at least protects her own position in the social hierarchy. Foregoing that advantage
would be a cost in the sense of an opportunity cost.
14. This seems to implicate the oppressed who are at once harmed by the legacy of
slavery and genocide while being benefited by the collective social goods produced by the
slaves and the stolen wealth. The situation is complicated and some persons may not fit
neatly into the privileged/oppressed categories. The test my account offers to sort persons into
the oppressed category is this: would a similarly situated (in all respects other than the
condition of oppression under consideration) person be better off?
256 Notes to Pages 205-212

15. The Montgomery bus boycott was marked by violence aimed at the protestors, and
remained in effect for over a year before the protestors won the struggle, however.
16. Other such conventions on human rights include: the Convention on the Elimi-
nation of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Slavery Convention, the Forced
Labour Convention, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All
Migrant Workers and Members of ‘Their Families, and the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. A complete list of these and links to texts are available at the following website: http://
www.unhchr.ch/html|/ntlinst.htm.
17. Although the basic concept of criminal offense thus refers to two individuals, it is
obviously often extended to more than two. But it remains individualistic in the sense that
each offending individual is held responsible for harms to each victim, and the crimes are
added up in that manner. So if I rob three people at gunpoint I have committed three crimes,
one against each of my victims.
18. To see that this is the case one need merely consider different societies’ legal
structures governing sexual relations, kinship relations, spousal obligations, or divorce re-
strictions.
19. This seems to be the case in our society, given Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250
(1952). However, it may also be argued that this is not settled law, given the subsequent
decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) (Simon 1995).
20. Androcentrism is assuming that the experiences, biology, and social roles of males or
men are the norm and that of females or women a deviation from the norm. Androcentrism is
to be distinguished from sexism, which is the denigration of one sex or gender. An institution
can thus be androcentric without being sexist.
21. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to argue the point here, I think that it
can be shown that the equal individual perspective is similarly ethnocentric, that is, focused
on the experience of white Americans of European descent and centered on the experience
of the middle class and the able-bodied.
22. This sense of victim-blaming was articulated by Ryan (1976), who was writing about
the failures of the War on Poverty programs to substantially alter the situation of poor blacks
in America.
23. I mean “normal” in the sense of the psychologists, that is, I am not making a
normative judgment about the behavior that I term “normal” but am merely reporting
that the behavior is normative, expected, or acceptable in the culture, while other behav-
iors are less expected or even unacceptable. I mean this sense of “normal” throughout this
section.
24. MacKinnon would not, however, agree that any aspect of our lives that involves
gender is nonsexual. I find that claim reductionistic, though, and so want to separate my view
from it. The point that men dominate women can be made without appeal to sexuality.
Unlike MacKinnon, I think that the sex/gender distinction is a crucial one for feminists to
maintain, for we may look forward to an ungendered future, but sex will be there as long as
we are biological creatures. Since facts about the sexes do not map one-to-one onto facts
about gender, it cannot be that they are the same thing.
25. Domestic labor by homemakers is not part of the accounting of the Gross Domestic
Product, though if done by paid workers it is counted.
26. Women make up about 96 percent of the labor force in private household service,
and in 1999 had a median weekly income for full time work of $244. Source: Labor Force
Statistics from Current Population Survey, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
27. For most employees, time off for pregnancy or infant care must come from unpaid
leave. However, the fact that most employees now can take 12 weeks of unpaid family leave is
 Notes to Pages 213-220 257

a result of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993; prior to this time, only 18 percent of
employees in the private sector could take any form of family leave. Source: Employee
Benefits Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1992, 1996.
28. See http://www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTHCONTROL/contrachoices.htm.
29. See http://www.plannedparenthood.org/BIRTHCONTROL/YOU_AND_PILL.HTM.
30. In an essay entitled, “The Dark Side of Choice,” Gary Bauer invents the following
reasoning as typical of women considering abortion: “If your baby is inconvenient for you, if
this isn’t a good time for you, if the tiny person sucking her thumb, blissfully unaware of
how precarious is her claim to life, is too much trouble for you, no big deal. Just dispose of
her... and go on with your life.” http://www.roevwade.org/s3html.
31. Consider the anti-abortion bumper sticker that reads: “Thank your mother for not
aborting you.”
32. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), struck down the portion of the
Pennsylvania law requiring spousal consent to abortion, leaving it to the discretion of the
woman in cases not otherwise proscribed by law. However, the Court also upheld other
restrictions on the legal right to abortion, such as a waiting period, and parental consent for
minor women provided that there is a possibility for judicial exception.
33. Such laws include required waiting periods, parental notification, and required
“counseling” designed to persuade women not to seek abortions.
34. Antioch College attempted to require consent for each sexual act in its date rape
policy, and it resulted in a nationwide brouhaha. The policy was even ridiculed in a skit on
the television program Saturday Night Live.
35. The United Nations Human Development Index, which rates the quality of life of
persons in that country on a o—1 scale, rates the United States at .976, while when adjusted
for gender disparity in life outcomes for women it is .824. (UNDR 1993).
36. A particularly insightful male rape victim writes about the distinction between the way
that women and men suffer from rape: “The distinction is that while many women and some men
are victimized by rape, all women are oppressed by it, and any victimization of women occurs in a
context of oppression most men simply do not understand” (Searles and Berger 1995, 255).
37. Again, though I shall not argue the points here, the oppressed group perspective
should apply to other crimes that specifically target other oppressed groups and reinforce their
oppression.
38. Note that the special circumstance of oppression might also consistently be applied
to racially based hate crimes, as well. However, this differs from the so-call hate crimes
legislation, which attempts to punish crimes based on their motivation (Freeman and Ka-
miner, 1994). My proposal to legally recognize the harm of oppression would require that
group harm be demonstrated rather than that the motivations of the harm be out of race or
gender or sexual orientation bias.
39. That is, conservatives would be forced either to deny that traditional practices that
subordinate women are unjust or give up the traditional practices because they are unjust, a
move that would make them no longer conservative.
40. There is some evidence to suggest this in the social psychology literature (Bran-
scombe 1998).
41. One might, for example, take this to be an implication of Rawls’s claim that it is
illegitimate to use state power to decide basic questions of justice as one particular com-
prehensive doctrine directs (Rawls 1993, 62).
42. This is not to say that he thinks that being a straightforward maximizer is actually
rational, however.
43. In 1988, for instance, Felicia Schwartz, a professor at the Harvard Business School,
made the headlines with her suggestion that women who wanted to raise children ought to
258 Notes to Pages 226-236

choose what she called the “mommy track,” which would keep women out of the line for
corporate promotion. See also Okin (1989) and Bergmann (1986).

8. Fashioning Freedom
1. This is what is going on, I believe, when women criticize feminists for claiming that
veiling or female circumcision is oppressive. These women ask feminists to concentrate on
what they see as the real issues, such as poverty. But to accept veiling and circumcision is to
accept the hierarchy of sex, and that is forfeiting freedom at a basic level.
2. The importance of connection to others has been described particularly well by
contractarian thinkers. Rawls, as I will discuss shortly, writes that “In a fully just society
persons seek their good in ways peculiar to themselves, and they rely upon their associates to
do things they could not have done, as well as things they might have done but did not... . It
is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be”
(Rawls 1971, 529). Yet contractarians are also quick to insist that shared activities must not
be coerced. David Gauthier, writing about the passage of Rawls just cited, states: “if each
participant is to find shared activity intrinsically valuable, then it must satisfy the standard of
fairness” (Gauthier 1986, 338).
3. An excellent presentation of the argument for and policy plans for providing child
care in America, see Helburn and Bergmann (2002).
4. Or even better, perhaps we could shorten the working day and lengthen the school
day so that they match, but so that wé have more leisure time with our children or other
projects. Joan Williams (2000) writes persuasively that the current norms of the ideal worker
are bad for both men and women, and that the full commodification of carework would lead
to a far worse outcome for individuals and families than reshaping work life altogether. While
I appreciate her concerns over the full commodification model, I worry that there will always
be a wage-based motivation to be the hardest working worker in a capitalist economy, and
hence that attempts to shorten the working day will be thwarted by the collective outcome of
the struggles of each individual to have a competitive advantage over the next.
5. Among the benefits provided to religions I would include not only the tax exemp-
tions of the organizations themselves and tax deductions provided to individuals who con-
tribute to them but also social benefits of respect or the benefits of attention by media to the
leaders and so on. Generally, religions are regarded as having a special corner on morality. Yet
surely those who articulate notions of freedom and seek to achieve them are acting morally
and with vision, perhaps even in ways that religious persons label “spiritual.”
6. This is not to say that there are no losers here. Drug invention resources will be skewed
toward curing more common diseases and away from less common diseases and problems that
are described as lifestyle choices, such as those that Viagra or Cialis are meant to combat.
7. Full mission statement available from the World Bank website, www.worldbank.org.
8. John Rawls (1993) accounts for the existence of deep disagreements over social,
moral, and religious matters by appeal to what he calls the facts of reason.
g. We can do this because we belong to different social groups, some of which are
privileged and some oppressed relative to others. Our multiple identities help us to escape the
paradox of social construction, which Hirschmann describes as the puzzle of: “How can we
ever figure out who ‘we’ are or what ‘we want’ if the language and concepts we must use are
antagonistic to the enterprise we seek to carry out, that is, are themselves barriers to women’s
freedom?” (Hirschmann 2003, 99).
10. Lugones (1990) nicely states the difficulty for theories of oppression that locate
oppression in social structures and that want to recommend liberatory strategies.
11. See also Homiak (1990, esp. 175-176).
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 Index

abortion, 213 capitalism, 15, 102, 121-133, 207, 251n.3

laws prohibiting, 42, 167 moral defense of, 125
adaptive preferences. See deformed desires and strikes, 115
Agency for International Development, 205 transnational, 125
alienation, 12-13, 15 capitalists, 131, 182
of man from man, 237 categorization, 68-71, 74, 81
Allport, Gordon, 70 social, 71, 222
American Indians, 203 theory, 71-73
Amnesty International, 107, 110 causation, 190
androcentrism, 77, 173, 211-212, 256n.20 child care, 258n.3
Hegel’s, 63-64 ‘social provision of, 229
of law, 214 children, 124, 228
apartheid, 206 in brothels, 97
in South Africa, 138 in debt bondage, 136-137
Arendt, Hannah, 165 as laborers, 205
Aristotelian Principle, 235 in slavery, 136-137
Aristotle, 5 and women’s oppression, 148-151
attribution, 68 China, People’s Republic of, 134
error, 73 Chodorow, Nancy, 19, 56-60, 220
autonomy, 129, 225 choice
in capitalism, 131-132
backlash, 206, 226, 233 and coercion, 125-131
Bales, Kevin, 97, 113-114, 161, 170 individually rational, 151
Bartky, Sandra, 19, 177 of marriage partners, 128, 130
battered-woman syndrome, 213 voluntary vs. involuntary, 125, 127
Beauvoir, Simone de, 19 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 252n.26
Becker, Gary, 172 Civil Rights Movement, 188, 197, 202
Bem, Sandra, 74 Civil War, U.S., 111
Berlin, Isaiah, 224-225 class, economic, 40, 121, 132, 139, 243N.4
Branscombe, Nyla, 72-73 Clatterbaugh, Kenneth, 24-25
Browning, Joan, 197 coercion
Brown v. Board of Education, 218 empirical theories of, 126-128
Bulhan, Hussein, 67 institutional, 131
Burke, Edmund, 8 moralized theories of, 126-128

271
272 Index

coherence test, 59 disadvantage, social group related, 72

cognitive misers, 70 discrimination, 123-124, 134-135, 140, 164
cognitive revolution, 68 employment, 140-142, 147-148
Cohen, G. A., 126-128, 230 higher-order, 140
Cohen, Joshua, 230 methodology for measuring, 141
Cold War, 3 occupational, 140
collective action, 42 wage, 142
collective responsibility, 54 distribution theory, 10
collectives, 67 divorce, 17, 149
colonialism, 100—103 domestic labor, 152, 198
of Belgium in Congo, 100 domestic violence, 93-96
of British in India, 101-102, 189 law, 215-216
economic benefits of, 101 and trauma, 162
of France in Chad, 121 Douglass, Frederick, 63-67
vs. neocolonialism, 144 Durkheim, Emile, 35
resistance to, 101
as violence, 89, 91 economic deprivation, 119-121. See also
comfort women, 250n.19 poverty; inequality
commodity fetishism, 14 economics of the family, 171-173
common knowledge, 37-38 economic theory, 33
communitarian menace, 233-235 classical, 22
compensating differentials, 139, 152 institutional, 22
compulsory heterosexuality, 174 macro, 33
conceptual analysis, 4 Marxist, 22
constraints, 28, 79, 135 neoclassical, 20, 138, 141, 145
biological, 32, 41 Elster, Jon, 180
faced by the poor, 120 endurance question, 15, 117, 154, 183
legal rights as, 41 Engels, Friedrich, 9
norms as, 41 equal individual perspective, 210-211
physical, 41 Equal Pay Act of 1963, 252n.26
psychological, 32, 41, 180 ethnic cleansing, 104, 106-107
and resistance, 188 in Kosovo, 106
social, 36, 41-43, 47, 50-51, 54 Eurocentrism, 64
structural, 152 experiments in living, 234
convention, 41 explanation
definition of, 167 adequacy of, 29
and direct psychological oppression, 158, intentional, 31
167-169 intentional vs. subintentional vs.
and tradition, 171 supraintentional, 29
Cornell, Drucilla, 234 rational choice, 32, 37
corruption, 232 sociobiological, 29-30
crimes against women, 214-218 subintentional, 31
cultural domination, 173-175 supraintentional, 30
culture of victimhood, 216 exploitation, 6, 13, 15, 121, 125, 219
externalities, 123-124
Deaf, the, 174-175
DeBruin, Debra, 216-217 factions, 223
Declaration of Independence, 7 Fair Housing Act of 1968, 218
default assumptions, 43-44 fairness, 131
deformed desires, 180-183 false consciousness, 14, 15, 17, 21, 55, 73>
women and, 181-183 178-180, 227
degradation, 158, 163-165 as cognitive process, 80
democracy, 19, 102, 223 false consensus effect, 174
socialist, 135 Fanon, Frantz, 19, 61-63, 161-162, 207
dependence, 227 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 112
 Index 273

Federalist Papers, 7, 223 Harvey, J., 200-201

Fiske, Susan and Shelley Taylor, 70 Haslanger, Sally, 4
Flax, Jane, 58 hate crimes, 112-113
Flew, Anthony, 49 hate speech, 209
Folbre, Nancy, 35, 48, 122, 244n.6 Hayek, Friedrich, 123, 134
frame problem, 43 Hegel, 7, 9, 10-12, 21, 60-63
Fraser, Nancy, 10, 19 Herman, Judith, 159~160, 177
freedom, 128-129, 207, 221-237 Heyd, David, 199
and direct forces of oppression, 225-226 Hill, Thomas, 181
and indirect forces of oppression, historical materialism, 7
225-226 HIV, 97
internal vs. external, 225 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 172, 247N.10
of movement, 72 Hochschild, Adam, 101
positive vs. negative, 224 Hoffman, Curt and Nancy Hurst, 71-72
universal, 224, 235 Holocaust, 19, 113, 165
vision of, 229 Homiak, Marcia, 236-237
Willett’s theory of, 65-66 human capital, 143, 149-150
women’s, 151 formation, 142
Freedom Riders, 188, 197 investments, 139, 141
Freire, Paulo, 202 race and, 152-153
Freud, Sigmund, 18, 56 theory, 139
Friedan, Betty, 245n.24 women and, 144
Frye, Marilyn, 25, 47 human rights, 7, 100
conventions, 256n.16
gaming the system, 232 liberal, 6
Gandhi, 189, 194 Hume, David, 6
Gauthier, David, 219, 231, 258n.2 humiliation, 158, 163-165
gender
division of labor, 210 identity, 44
norms, 17 ideology, 98, 170-173
system, 17 as direct psychological oppression, 158
genocide, 104-106 and science, 173
apologies for, 203 and tradition, 170
of Bosnian Muslims, 106 imaginary domain, 234-235, 237
economic motive of, 106 immigration restrictions, 252n.18
of Native Americans, 105 incentives, 42, 234
Rwandan, 105 to end oppression, 229-231
Germany, 14 to maintain slavery, 65
Gilbert, Margaret, 35, 37-41 material, 78-79
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 18 psychological, 80
Grameen Bank, 205, 232 socially structured, 230, 232
Gramsci, Antonio, 19 income, 41, 143
group harm, 52-54, 246n.33 independence, 227
nonvoluntary, 52 economic, 228
Griinbaum, Adolf, 58 individual actor thesis, 210
guaranteed social minimum, 133 individual as morally primary, 102, 225
Guerilla Girls, 202 individualism
holistic, 37
Hamm, Mia, 236-237 methodological, 28, 46
Hampton, Jean, 218 individualist ontology, 46, 52
harassment, 158, 164, 209 inequality
ethnic, 142 between slave and slaveholder, 136
racial, 142 economic, 119-121, 135, 146
sexual, 139, 142, 164, 215 international, 144, 250n.30
Hartmann, Heidi, 19, 122 legal, 210-211
274 Index

inequality (continued) master-slave dialectic, 60-62

of men and women, 210 May, Larry, 42
opportunity, 142-144 McGary, Howard, 191
and oppression, 153 memory, 74
in-group, 70 men
formation, 155 as beneficiaries of women’s oppression,
heterogeneity, 70 107-108, 130
identification with, 78 as dominant over women, 96, 98
vs. out-group, 70-71 violence against, 94
solidarity, 71 men’s movement, 194
International Monetary Fund (IMF), meritocracy, 133
144-146, 205 micro-credit, 205-206, 232
international trade, 145-146 Mill, John Stuart, 9, 10, 16-17, 21, 24-25,
intervention, 100, 248n.3 181, 195-196, 254n.5
governmental, 124 minimal group experiments, 70-71
humanitarian, 208 monopoly, 124
Iran, 107 monopsony, 124
Iraq, 95, 100
Irish Americans, 44, 77 Nafisi, Azar, 107
Italy, 97 Nash bargaining solution, 239
nation, 99
Japan, 97, 103 neocolonialism, 101-103, 144-146
Jefferson, Thomas, 7 Nicaragua, 100
just war theory, 206-207 Nigeria, 97
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
Kaczynski, Theodore (Unabomber), 231
189, 194 norm, tacit, 39
kernel of truth, 69, 79 norm setter, 46
Kernohan, Andrew, 157 norm taker, 46
Keynes, John Maynard, 42 Nozick, Robert, 122, 127-131
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 177, 202 Nussbaum, Martha, 19
Kozol, Jonathon, 143
Kymlicka, Will, 99 Oakes, Penelope, 70-71, 74
objectification, 158, 164-167
labor unions, 204 sexual, 42, 165-167, 169
level field thesis, 210 and slavery, 166
liberalism, 5, 19, 217, 233-234 of women, 96
primacy of individuals in, 16 Oedipus complex, 57-58, 246n.2
liberal political rights, 7 Okin, Susan Moller, 19, 148
liberal political theory, 6, 52 opportunity, economic, 121
liberty, 95 oppressed group perspective, 215
Locke, John, 6, 124 oppressed groups, 41
lynching, 111-112 blacks, 26
ethnic minorities, 19
MacKinnon, Catharine, 19, 211-212 disabled, 30-31
Madison, James, 7, 223 Jews, 14, 19, 26
Mandela, Nelson, 109-110, 222-223 sexual minorities, 19, 26
Mandelbaum, Maurice, 46 women, 26, 30, 57-58
marriage, 17, 195-196, 252n.28 oppression, definition of, 23, 25, 28, 51-52
bargaining in, 254n.13 objective, 23
market for, 128-129, 131 psychological vs. material, 24
Martin, Rex, 129 subjective vs. objective, 23
Marx, Karl, 7, 9, 10, 12-17, 21, 35, 40, 55, oppression, effects of
115-116, 121-122, 182, 236-237, economic, 151
243n.4 psychological, 62
 Index 275

oppression, forces of, 52 poverty, 120-121, 258n.1

economic, 135-146 vs. inequality, 119
direct, 52, 135, 158-176, 227 power, 148-149, 151
indirect, 52, 135, 146-154, 176-183 bargaining, 149, 152-153
oppression, forms of in sexual relations, 211
arbitrary law, 7 preference, habituation of, 181
civilized, 243n.1 privilege
colonialism, 19, 61 and freedom, 226
cultural domination, 20 loss of, 228
economic exploitation, 6 male, 95, 98
enforced cultural reinterpretation, 8 social group related, 72, 156
political repression, 6 privileged groups, 25, 41, 117
psychological domination, 9 as stress resistant, 160
sexuo-economic, 18 property
unfair taxation, 8 entitlement theory of, 124
oppression, internalized, 62, 183 laws, 17
oppression, origin of, 12, 117 rights, 122
oppression, social knowledge of, 197 prostitution, 96-98
oppression, special circumstance of, 215 and poverty, 151-152
oppression, theories of psychoanalysis, 18, 20
criteria of adequacy for, 20 psychological harm
dehumanization, 24 direct vs. indirect, 156-157
distribution, 10, 16, 19 group based vs. individual, 155
economic, 56 objective vs. subjective, 156
inequality, 24 of oppression, 155-184
psychoanalytic, 22, 56-60 point source vs. cultural, 157
psychological, 55-81 punishment
recognition, 10, 22, 60-68 of crimes against women, 217-218
scientific, 22 of slaves, 64
social force, 22
sociobiological, 244n.6 racism, 3, 123
oppression as self maintaining, 79-81, 182. rape, 93-96, 209, 211 248n.7, 257n.36.
See also vicious cycle of oppression See also sexual assault
oppression by choice, 146-154 of Bosnian Muslims, 103
resistance to, 220-221 of Nanking women, 103
out-group, 70 and trauma, 162
homogeneity, 70 as weapon of war, 103-104
polarization, 70 rationality, 15
solidarity, 71 Rawls, John, 231, 233-236, 258n.2
reasonable woman standard, 216-217
Palestinian Intifada, 95, 189, 194 recognition, 247n.10
patriarchy, 226 demand for, 10
people power, 206 and minority cultures, 173
perception, 68, 74 as primary motivation, 61, 67
Pettit, Philip, 37 struggle for, 11
Piper, Adrian, 140 theory (see oppression, theories of)
Plato, 5 redistribution, demand for, 10
Pogge, Thomas, 229 Reiman, Jeffrey, 127, 131
political imprisonment, 109 religion, 44, 169-170, 258n.5
pornography, 162 as direct psychological oppression, 158
and objectification, 166 and freedom, 229, 254n.14
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and gender, 170
159-160 and homosexuality, 170
complex, 161 and slavery, 170
and freedom, 225 religious fundamentalism, 108
276 Index

reparations, 203, 250n.18 self

resistance and social identity, 71, 76
Algerian, 207 Willett’s theory of, 65-66
vs. collaboration, 191 self-defense, 110, 212
definition of, 193-194 self-identity theory, 73, 77
individual vs. collective, 189 self-oppression, 248n.7
intentional vs. subintentional, self-ownership, 122, 133
190-191 separate spheres, 16, 18
and intentions, 191 serfdom, 121-122
moral vs. non-moral, 188 seriality, 44
vs. non-compliance, 188 sex/gender distinction, 256n.24
by non-oppressed, 180 sexism, 3, 123, 139, 256n.20
as sending message of revolt, 192 sex roles, 18
violent, 208 sexual assault, 72, 93-96. See also rape
resistance, strategies of, 201-221 sex work, 137. See also prostitution
armed struggle, 206-209 Shalom, Stephen, 103
boycotts, 205 shame, 158, 163-165, 176-178, 213, 227
collective investment, 205 and cultural minorities, 177
economic, 204-206 and women, 177
legal, 209-218 shirking, 232
protest march, 203 Skrypnek, Berna and Mark Snyder, 75
rhetorical and symbolic, 202-204 slavery, 16, 64
resistance, theory of, 188-195 in Africa, 113-114
resistance to oppression, 117, 184, American, 108-109, 254n.3
187-221 beneficiaries of, 109
resonance test, 58, 67 in Brazil, 114
respect, 139 of colonized people, 102
responsibility, 135 as economic oppression, 136-137
and choice, 147 as economic system, 108, 121
responsibility for resistance, 195-201 illegal, 113-115
of oppressed, 197-201 legal, 108-109
privilege and 195-197, 201 reparations for, 102
rights, 129 and resistance, 191
legal, 41 sexual, 96-98
property, 129-130 in Southeast Asia, 113
Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards, 142 and trauma, 161
Roemer, John, 125 social closure strategies, 139-140
Roe v. Wade, 203, 213 social cognitive theory, 22, 77
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5-6, 11, 21 social creativity strategies, 72-73
social distancing, 158, 164-165
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 35, 44 social distrust, 164-165
Satz, Debra and John Ferejohn, 37 social ethos, 230
schemas, 74-75, 78 social facts, 33, 41, 47-48, 51
for gender, 75 social group norms, 46
self-fulfilling nature, 79 social groups, 23-24, 28-29, 33-50, 73,
for social roles, 74-75, 79 79, 81, 134, 222
theory, 74-76 accidental, 34
Schotter, Andrew, 50 causal role of, 34
segregation definition of, 43
as caused by harassment, 142 nonvoluntary, 40-50, 131, 245-246n.25
de facto vs. de jure, 137-138 ontological reducibility of, 46
in housing, 218 ontology of, 49
racial, 42, 152 poor as, 120
in schools, 218 positive distinctiveness of, 73
in workforce, 77, 137-140 statistical identification of, 49
 Index 277

voluntary, 37-41, 45-46, 245-246n.25 structuralism, 46

workers as, 116 suicide, 160
social groups, theories of as resistance, 192
compatibilist, 36 supererogation, 199, 255n.I1
externalist, 36 Superson, Anita, 181-183
Gilbert’s 39 symbolic activity, 155
intentionalist, 35
internalist, 35 tacit knowledge, 51
structuralist, 35 tactile sociality, 66
social identity theory, 71-73 Tajfel, Henri, 70-71, 74
social institutions, 20, 29, 51-52, 129-130 Taliban, 3, 95, 221
economic, 119 Tanzania, 232
fair, 131 taxation, 124-125
stability of, 169 Taylor, Harriet, 25, 195-196
socialism, 122, 132, 133-136 terror, 158-163
vs. capitalism, 134 Thailand, 97, 170
definition of, 251n.3 Thomas, Laurence, 245n.20
vs. serfdom, 133 threat of violence
social learning theory, 60 credible, 91
social mores, 21 definition of, go
social practices, 129 explicit vs. implicit, go
social rewards and penalties, 43 objective vs. subjective, 91
social threat situation, 90-92, 96, 117 in slavery, 114
social union, 235-237 tacit, 92, 117
Soviet Union, 97, 134 Title IX, 236
invasion of Afghanistan, 100 Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald, 138
Spelman, Elizabeth, 47 torture, 109-110
state of nature, 7 totalitarianism, 100, 226, 231
states, 99 totalitarian menace, 225-226
status, 41, 139, 151, 156 tradition, 98, 198
Steele, Claude, 80 and cultural oppression, 167
Steinem, Gloria, 201 as direct psychological oppression, 158,
stereotype formation, social cognitive 167-169
theories of, 68-77 and economic deprivation, 167
stereotypes, 155 trafficking of women, 96-98
accuracy of, 78, 248n.17 trauma, 158-163, 248n.6
of Asians, 42 effects of, 177
of disabled persons, 164-165 prolonged, 160
evidential basis for, 69 and threats, 160
and false consciousness, 179 and violence, 160
function of, 69 and women, 162-163
of Jews, 42
of minorities, 70 unintended consequences, 231-233
as self-fulfilling, 79 United Nations (U.N.), 104, 208-209
of welfare mom, 76 United States (U.S.)
of women, 42, 95, 150, 162, 165 economic dominance of, 116
stereotyping as cognitive process, 56, 81 imperialism, 100
strikes, 115 and lynchings, 111-112
and duty, 220 number of slaves in, 137
and resistance, 198, 204 segregation laws in, 107
and Ronald Reagan, 204 universal human cognitive mechanisms, 78
and strikebreaking, 115-116 U.S. Constitution, 223
in West Virginia, 115 Fifteenth Amendment, 108
structural adjustment policies (SAPs), 145 Fourteenth Amendment, 108
structural force, 127 Nineteenth Amendment, 250n.25
278 Index

vector force model, 47-48 weakness of will, 183

veil of ignorance, 131 wealth, 41, 93, 228, 249n.9
vicious cycle of oppression, 144, 150, as power, 149
153, 160 welfare minimum, 124
breaking the, 226-231 welfare rights, 124
victim-blaming, 195, 200-201, 209, 211, Wells-Barnett, Ida, 111, 208
213-214 Wertheimer, Alan, 126
Vietnam War, 100 White, Walter, 111, 208
violence Willett, Cynthia, 19, 56, 63-67
against gays and lesbians, 89 Williams, Patricia, 166
against women, 89, 93-96, 156, 227, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 8, 18
249Nn.11 women
cultural, 62 and breast augmentation surgery, 183
definition of, 86-90 conventional expectations of, 168
descriptive vs. normative account of, 88 as earning less than men, 141
economic, 62 economic oppression of, 147-153
as erotic, 211 and freedom, 224
as force of oppression, 88 and freedom of movement, 211
and harassment, 142 and genital surgery, 182
material effects of, 92-93 lack of access to education, 144
non-state sponsored, 89 and law, 209-218
and oppression, 116-118 missing, 249N.15
psychological, 62 as oppressed, 86, 107, 223
psychological effects of, 92 and poverty, 228
puzzle of enduring, 85 as reinforcing oppression, 200
puzzle of hidden, 86 in sports, 233, 236-237
racial, 89-95 violence against, 86, 93-96, 214-218
and slavery, 136 work
state sponsored, 89, 106-110 as androcentric, 212
systematic, 94, 98, 116 domestic, 139, 219-220
systematic vs. random, 88 paid vs. unpaid, 149-150
war as, 89 workers, 131, 182, 206, 219
violent crime, 87 World Bank, 205
World Trade Organization (WTO),
wage contract, 125 145-146
wage gap, 138, 147
gender, 138-139, 147, 151, 179 Young, Iris Marion, 19, 25, 44
racial, 138-139, 147
Waldron, Jeremy, 124 Zimmerman, David, 128-129
 sds ‘ome

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 Avian: Oppression presents a new, integrated theory of social oppression, which tackles
the fundamental question that no theory of oppression has satisfactorily answered: if there is
no natural hierarchy among humans, why are some cases of oppression so persistent? Cudd
argues that the explanation lies in the coercive co-opting of the oppressed to join in their
own oppression. This answer sets the stage for analysis throughout the book, as it explores
the questions of how and why the oppressed join in their oppression. Cudd argues that
Oppression is an institutionally structured harm perpetrated on social groups by other
groups using direct and indirect material, economic, and psychological force. Among the
most important and insidious of the indirect forces is an economic force that operates
through oppressed persons’ own rational choices. This force constitutes the central feature of
analysis, and the book argues that this force is especially insidious because it conceals the
fact of oppression from the oppressed and from others who would be sympathetic to their
plight. The oppressed come to believe that they suffer personal failings and this belief
appears to absolve society from responsibility.
While on Cudd’s view oppression is grounded in material exploitation and physical dep-
rivation, it cannot be long sustained without corresponding psychological forces. Cudd
examines the direct and indirect psychological forces that generate and sustain oppression.
She discusses strategies that groups have used to resist oppression and argues that all persons
have a moral responsibility to resist in some way. In the concluding chapter Cudd proposes
a concept of freedom that would be possible for humans in a world that is actively opposing
oppression, arguing that freedom for each individual is only possible when we achieve
freedom
for all others.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann E. Cudd grew up in Ohio and received her BA from Swarthmore College and her
MA in Economics and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. She now
teaches philosophy and is Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Kansas. She is
past president of the Society for Analytical Feminism. Professor Cudd lives in Lawrence,
Kansas, with her husband and three sons.

Cover design: Ed Atkeson/Berg Design

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Cover art: Leopold Fleming, copy after Rembrandt ISBN 978-0-19-518744-1
Abraham Casting out Hagar and Ishmael © Sterling and
Francine Clark Art InstiruteWéilliamstown, Massachusetts

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