Oppression

In class we broke into groups and tried to first define oppression. My group described it as being the opposite of equality and we said that one agency is limited by another. We talked about how someone higher in a hierarchy oppresses someone that is lower in the hierarchy.

When we talked about oppression as a class, we started to become unclear over the difference between discrimination and oppression. The example given of saying that only people with glasses would get A's really cleared the concept up for me. Since wearing glasses is not part of a bigger system in which wearing glasses is discriminated against, the example does not describe oppression but rather just discrimination. The trait that is being considered has to be identifiable outside of the oppressed status. Another misconception that we talked about is that if harm is being done to you that you are being oppressed. This is incorrect because someone must also be benefiting in order to consider this harm to be oppression.

We also talked about in-group/out-group discrimination. When you are a minority and you do something wrong, others will blame the whole group and attribute that particular characteristic to everyone in the group. When you are not a minority and you do something wrong, the whole group does not get blamed or stereotyped. I think it is really difficult not to do this especially in cases where you only know a few people that are a part of the minority and they have a certain trait. I think people often believe misconceptions like this because they have one experience with a certain race in their life and assume that the rest will be the same. People do this all the time, not even just in regards to race. For instance, if one time a person goes to say Olive Garden and they have a bad experience they will assume that Olive Gardens are all going to result in this bad experience (unless they have previously had many good experiences). People really need to be more open minded in this aspect because if not, they will miss out on a lot of good experiences and miss out on getting to know good people.