Douglas Hosler Moral Problems with

Oppression Theory

I have been unhappy for a number of years about

oppression theory. Part of the Left—and I see myself as belonging to that—is pretty insistent about seeing society as run by a series of oppressions. The view of this segment of the Left is that there is oppression of non-White people in the U.S. by White people, women by men, gays by straights, disabled by able-bodied people. On behalf of this view I would say if you are not convinced, investigation will reveal (repeatedly) that non-Whites, women, gays, disabled run into structures which at once confine (restrict options), ignore, and de-value them. These are structures which, if you are in the dominant group, you do not even to see. Racial structure in this country is a good example. White people tend not to notice that they do not in general have to fear the police because of their Whiteness, that they do not have to worry about their Whiteness in seeking housing or jobs or decent treatment of their children in school. White people tend not to notice that people of color do have these problems. Whites are concerned that people of color can get scholarships that are not available to White people. Along these lines one should note the tendency for Whites to view racism as an attitude and for people of color to view it as a structure. Whites all know racist Whites and sort White people into racist and less racist. People of color find this of little interest; they are more concerned about how an individual (no matter what view the individual expresses) will treat them. At all events, there is a structure which is a matter of experience for people of color and a matter of investigation for White people. Similar things can be said about the situation of women, gays, and the disabled.

Oppression theory recognizes these structures and that I see as its great virtue. Oppression theory goes beyond this, however, to the claim that those who are advantaged are also in control. Thus, not only does oppression theory see that Whites, men, heterosexuals, and able-bodied are privileged (in that they do not have to face a structure as Whites, men, heterosexuals, or the able-bodied) but also it claims the society is run by the Whites, the men, the heterosexuals, the able-bodied for their own benefit and at the expense of those groups that run into these structures. On oppression theory to understand the structures, one merely needs to note "who has the power." It is assumed that if one has "the power" (and little moral virtue) one will use that power to one’s benefit (or to the benefit of one’s group) and squeeze from the others what is rightfully theirs. It is this second part of the theory that I find lacking. I have found it repeatedly not to have much predictive value. Certainly there are those in elevated positions and those in denigrated ones. And the structure in which this occurs seems particularly resilient. However, it does seem subject to changes as different structures come into being over time. How this all comes about, I would submit, is a matter for careful social and historical analysis— often painstaking analysis. The idea that the group in the elevated position is controlling things to its advantage does not work out in investigation, as tough-minded a position as it may be. I would not deny that elevated groups do what they can to maintain their position, but control of the situation seems out of their reach. There seem, again and again, various forces which combine to elevate one group over another.

Oppression theory has some nice consequences. It is first of all very simple. The examination of the forces maintaining or enhancing a structure need not be studied, for the matter is very simple: the X’s are in control and the X’s like it that way. Secondly, on oppression theory the wrong of the inequity is reinforced by the power analysis: "The bastards are exercising their power and keeping the poor suckers down." How nasty! Obviously, since the inequity is wrong, it is doubly wrong because of the motivation of those who maintain it. In fact one could argue that in making the wrong a moral one, there has to be moral failure to be behind it. Oppression theory keeps everything within a moral realm. The wrong is morally wrong, the account of it is one of moral failure on the part of someone, and the rectification of the wrong is in part to get the elevated group realize its error and to correct it (after all the elevated group on oppression theory has "the power") and in part to help the disadvantaged groups to "take power" or "become empowered."

I have been frustrated by oppression theory on the very ground it seems really to say little more than "those who are in elevated (privileged) positions are in elevated positions." It does not analyze things much beyond "has the power" which flows (in the oppression theorist’s mind) from "is in an elevated position." One problem with this is that in searching what lies behind evil, moral failing is not always what one comes up with. The evil is evil, but how it came about can be complex and hard (often) to trace to human failings on a level with that evil.

Another frustration I have with that theory is that it sees rectification as attained by morally rightful means: the inequality as something to be rectified by "seizing power" "empowering" or other such avenues. In this it seems to limit itself. When I have analyzed (so far as I could) factors involved in elevation or dominance, strange results have suggested themselves. For example, in the White dominance and elevation in the U.S. what suggests itself strongly is that the very category "White" has to cease if the racial structure is to cease. It seems to me built into the very concept of "Whiteness" that it imply denigration of others. Certainly on my analysis the category "White" must come to have far less importance than it now does. If racism is going to disappear, Whites in essence have to disappear. In a way this is a strange echo of the nineteen sixties: "Off Whitey!" My remedy is a less drastic measure, but perhaps equally hard to obtain; namely, those who now identify as White (primarily) have to find other modes of identification, especially ones that cut across racial lines (yuppie, Muslim, Wisconsinite, Midwesterner) and ones within the racial category (German-American, hill people). These categories have to become much more important to self-identification than "White" is now. I do not want to spend too much time on this; I just want to suggest that solutions outside oppression theory can very rather strange and surprising. My complaint about oppression theory is that by confining the matter to a moral one, it confines the solutions.

This long introduction is to set up something I have only recently discovered: that in addition to finding predictive, explanatory, and remedy frustrations with oppression theory, I have all along had moral suspicion of that theory. And that is what I want to discuss, especially in relation to traditional feminist theory.

The model of oppression theory in any of its forms is a wrong being done to innocent beings by culpable ones. For example, a number of thinkers have a tendency to load up guilt about the dominant U.S. culture. One thing I do not like about that sort of attitude is that it makes the dominant U.S. culture too special. That culture becomes responsible, powerful, and a clear moral agent. The others are "just there" and "beautiful." While some of my more conservative colleagues would grouse about how unequal this is (to blame one group and make that group a villain), the complaint I have is different. These other cultures are (a) idealized and (b) given only virtue—they can have no vice. What I see happening is that in doing this these other cultures have their agenthood reduced. They are subtly degraded, and the dominant U.S. culture subtly elevated as a force in the world—albeit a bad or screwed-up one. In the case of women and men, something similar occurs. I have become more and more suspicious that characterizing women as victims, as helpless, as not at fault for their situation, is degrading to women. To characterize women in this way "dis-empowers" them (to use a word from my opponents) and makes them ultimately less worthy of respect. The "I’m so sorry for you attitude" has always had the ring of "you are less." Think of the disdain involved in "I pity you." The nasties (here the men) are powerful and exciting and amount to something. Yes, the nasty ones are bad, bad, bad. But they wield real power, they are real agents, real people. Their victims are almost non-agents. Their victims are less actors in the drama and more props in it. Their victims—as much as we are to be outraged by what has happened to the victims—are almost inconsequential.

However, more than this happens: the helplessness of the oppressed is part of the charm of the oppressed. They have become innocent beings. It is not just that the oppressed could not stop the oppressors and hence are not guilty of participation in their own oppression, it is that the oppressed are innocent beings—pure and clean and untainted by darker and more difficult things. This bears some examination. To understand this, let us first look at something that apparently happened to the image of children. In Medieval times (I am told) the view of children was far different from what it is now. Children are seen in our era as basically innocent, untainted, pure. They are innocents, not just innocent of this and that. They are guilty of little misdemeanors and some naughtiness, but they are precious, darling, open happy, and wide-eyed beings. It is tainted, darker, twisted parents and others who do them in, hurt them, do the real damage (as opposed to naughtinesses). Supposedly people in Europe in the Middle Ages did not see children as innocent beings. Children weren’t seen as "wide-eyed and wondering and wonderful." They were seen as humans, and humans were seen by those in the Middle Ages (according to this work and my imagination) as immersed in original sin. Humans were seen as (somewhat) depraved creatures—with a range of motives including depraved and evil ones, including madness, and including an untamed or wild quality (not all the same thing, I think). It is easy to get parents these days to laugh about "the little monsters" they are raising, because kids do appear that way. "Darling, captivating, frustrating, annoying little monsters" is probably a description that most parents would find apt—even if they reject it. So we can be sympathetic to what I am describing as the view of children in the Middle Ages. Apparently in the Middle Ages parents and adults felt that kids were as much monsters and demons as they were angels and doves (and neither). In those days children were seen as having the full range of human motivation, whereas nowadays they are seen as particularly innocent of that full range. I am sure people in the Middle Ages (why I have such a firm picture of a time I know precious little about, I don’t know) did see children as innocent of some things, but there was little or no tendency to picture children as basically innocent beings—as having some status of overall freedom from impurity.

In our era, why do we not want kids to see pornography? Why should kids not watch sex movies which are not pornographic (naked adults in sexual relations)? "Why, they are Innocent and this Impurifies them." Of course we are here dealing with a strong picture of sexual activity as impure, but let that go for the time being. The interest I have here is in the drive to keep (or respect) the child’s innocence. Innocence is then this state of purity.

Why I raise this picture-change of children is that nowadays non-children victims have come to have the features of children as innocent beings. Powerlessness gives one a state of innocence. It is maybe be concerned and caring to do this to the oppressed, but it is also degrading. In the case of feminist thought this reduction to child-innocence has occurred in a particularly striking way. In the colonial period in this country there was a tendency to picture women as earthy, lusty temptresses, as sources of deviance. Women tended not to be pictured as nicer and finer people (as women). Eve was really at fault in this era for the downfall of Adam—although Adam justly bore equal responsibility. But Eve was the temptress. Women in this picture are given to earthy, lower, less elevated thought and activity. Notice how terribly different the picture of women is in the Victorian era. There they are fine—too fine to mess with the coarse and crass day-to-day encounters of the hostile world (in the Victorian era). Women were delicate, elevated, and much more pure than men. Women are no longer fellow workers, but much more tender, precious items (along with the tender, precious children they are to nurture) who need protection from the mean and nasty world. Men bear more of the taint of original sin than do women. Women don’t think about sex, men do. Men are coarser, cruder, rougher. What a reversal of viewpoint about women (and thus men) in the space of a hundred years! The reasoning used on a Wisconsin woman who applied to be an attorney in the State of Wisconsin in the 1890’s (and was turned down by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin) beautifully echoes the Victorian idea of the fineness of women (a fineness that would be sullied by the coarse and the crude matters of the world outside of the household). [Ann Walsh Bradley (now a Wisconsin State Supreme Court Justice) cited the elegantly written passage when she first came to my class on feminist philosophy. I should have a copy, I don’t, but I can get it for you.]

Okay. We have two radically opposed views of women. Let me go one step farther: The women’s movement that started in the sixties has had two phases (my source here is the text by Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought). The first phase (when the women’s movement was called "women’s liberation") was one of equality. In this period women were seen as being just as good as men, as being capable of whatever men could do. This phase had a lot of features, but it was essentially egalitarian. The second phase (when the women’s movement re-appropriated the term "feminism") was marked by what Eisenstein calls "women-centered analysis." It involved praise of women and women’s features. This phase has been a big one; eco-feminism, all kinds of feminist hope for transforming the world have sprung from it. One of the problems I see (I am guessing, but it is a persistent guess) is that this change made the general population say "Huh! You feminists finally admit yourselves that women and men are really different (and hence suited to different things). You even pick up the picture of women we all along thought right, to whit, the purity-of-women picture." Indeed in women-centered analysis it was almost exactly the Victorian picture of women (and men) that was dusted off and put into place. To this Victorian picture is wedded the powerlessness of women in the grips of the nasty men and presto! childlike innocence in all its glory shows itself in women.

As an aside: One of the reasons the general population felt that feminism was failing internally was that this double move—powerlessness-making-into-innocence and the Victorian-pure picture of females—reinforced the traditional view that women are themselves child-like. Women are seen generally as connected with children and somewhat tainted by them. The male fondness for calling attractive women "babes" or "chicks" seems to indicate that men cheerfully regard (attractive) women as child-like beings. All of this came from a very un-feminist culture, and here feminist thought was doing a lot to reinforce it—to agree with it.

In any case, (back to the main point) the moral argument against oppression theory in feminist thought is that the moves it has made lower considerably the status of women as agents and view women in a child-like state. Women become innocent beings—but at the price of not being real actors in the drama and really worthy of respect. It is this that fuels my moral suspicion of oppression theory. It makes one group into innocent beings—but at the same time degrades them.

As I have said, I see the structures which give one group disadvantage compared to another as being very real and very problematic. However, I think these structures can be understood and work to "deconstruct" them done without thinking one group is less of an agent than the other.

Also as stressed above, the argument about the moral weakness of oppression theory is separate from any argument about predictive or explanatory inadequacies of such theory. However, these two separate matters reinforce each other for me. What I wanted to do here was own up to my own moral suspicions of oppression theory.

I don’t think that the view I oppose (what I have called "oppression theory") has invidious consequences. I want to raise a question, a problem, a matter of concern. My own views are going in another direction, but at bottom whether one holds oppression theory or not is unimportant to me; what is important is that people are in the fight. Once they are in the fight to undo the structures of oppression, I can bug them and they me about these issues.