Five thousand CVs, identical but for the name, and a gap worth eight years of experience.
Oppression
Systematic disadvantage imposed on a group, produced by structures rather than requiring anyone to intend it.
- Theme
- Society, politics and power
- Tradition
- Modern
- Term fixed
- 1990
In plain terms
Look closely at one wire of a birdcage and you cannot see why it would confine anything. Step back and the arrangement of all of them explains the bird.
That is Marilyn Frye's image, and it names the central difficulty. Each individual barrier can be explained away - this hiring decision, this remark, this policy - and none of them looks like oppression on its own. The pattern is only visible in aggregate, which means the people inside it can see it and the people examining any single instance cannot.
And it does not require anyone to want it. A structure can produce systematic disadvantage while every person acting within it behaves reasonably by their own lights, which is why demanding a culprit before accepting that something is happening is a way of never accepting it.
As a philosopher would put it
Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference identifies five faces: exploitation, the transfer of the results of one group's labour to another; marginalisation, exclusion from useful participation; powerlessness, lacking authority over one's own work; cultural imperialism, having a dominant group's experience universalised so that one's own becomes deviant; and violence, systematic and socially tolerated.
The structural claim is the philosophically distinctive one. Oppression is a matter of institutions, norms and accumulated practice rather than of individual malice, which explains persistence after formal prohibition and explains why removing prejudiced individuals changes outcomes less than expected.
Crenshaw's intersectionality adds that positions compound rather than adding: the situation of someone at the intersection of two axes is not the sum of two disadvantages and is frequently invisible to frameworks built around either alone. Young's later work on political responsibility develops the corresponding account of what is owed by those who participate in a structure without having designed it.
Where you meet it
In 2001 and 2002 Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent about five thousand fabricated CVs in response to help-wanted advertisements in Boston and Chicago newspapers.
The CVs were identical apart from the name at the top. Applications with names common among white Americans received a callback roughly one in ten times; those with names common among African Americans received one roughly one in fifteen. The gap was equivalent to about eight additional years of experience, and improving a CV's quality raised callbacks substantially for one group and barely at all for the other.
No individual employer can be identified as the cause, and the study was not designed to accuse any of them. The design isolates a pattern that only exists at the level of thousands of decisions, each made by someone with reasons they could state. The method has since been replicated many times across countries and job markets, and it is the clearest available demonstration of a structural effect with no identifiable author.
What is actually disputed
Whether structural accounts leave anyone responsible.
If oppression requires no intention and no identifiable agent, then it is unclear who is to blame and what anyone is obliged to do. Critics argue that this either produces collective guilt, which is unjust to individuals, or produces nobody's problem, which is useless.
Young's social connection model is the standard reply: participants in a structure that produces injustice bear a forward-looking political responsibility to change it, which is distinguished from backward-looking liability for having caused it. Whether that distinction holds up under pressure is disputed.
A second argument concerns identification. If oppression is only visible in aggregate, then any group can claim it and the evidence for or against is statistical and contestable - which makes the concept powerful, essential, and unusually easy to deploy without warrant.
Commonly confused with
- individual prejudice Prejudice is an attitude a person has. Oppression is a pattern produced by structures, and eliminating the first changes the second far less than expected.
- being treated badly Mistreatment is episodic and can happen to anyone. Oppression is systematic and attaches to a group position.
Defined against
- Emancipation The pair defines the field: one names the condition and the other the project of ending it
Philosophers
- Karl Marx Exploitation as the structural transfer of surplus
- Simone de Beauvoir Woman constituted as the Other of a norm
- Achille Mbembe Colonial subjection and its structures
- Judith Butler Norms determining whose lives are recognised
- Paul-Michel Foucault Subjection produced by institutions rather than imposed by rulers
Works
- The German Ideology Exploitation as structural
- The Second Sex The situation analysed rather than the intention
- Black Skin, White Masks Oppression as lived and internalised
- Pedagogy of the Oppressed Oppression and the education that answers it
- Discourse on Colonialism The imperial case
- The Sexual Contract Subordination built into the founding story
Schools
- Classical Marxism Where exploitation is analysed structurally
- Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where domination is examined across institutions
- Modernity-Coloniality School Where colonial subordination is the subject
- Philosophy of Liberation Where the perspective of the oppressed is methodologically central
- Negritude Philosophy Where a subordinated identity is affirmed
Related concepts
Domination 1997 · Hegemony 1935 · Emancipation 1843 · Recognition 1807 · Equality 1762
The analysis of oppression as structural rather than intentional is largely twentieth-century; Frye's birdcage image from 1983 and Young's five faces from 1990 are the formulations most used.