A lot of people in my comment sections tend to say things like “why does it matter if something is structural oppression or not? My pain still hurts, even if a thousand other people aren’t suffering it.”
But, properly understood, structural oppression isn’t about the validity of your suffering– it’s about what we do about your suffering.
First, let’s define structural oppression. The first result for me on Google says:
The ways in which history, culture, ideology, public policies, institutional practices, and personal behaviors and beliefs interact to maintain a hierarchy – based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or other group identities – that allows the privileges associated with the dominant group and the disadvantages associated with the oppressed, targeted, or marginalized group to endure and adapt over time (Aspen Institute).
So, structural oppression means that people with a particular trait get screwed over a lot. Many people do things– without even thinking!– that hurt them (such as making jokes about men in dresses). Many people have bad ideas that cause them pain (such as the idea that trans people are making it up for attention or have a sexual fetish). Systems might be deliberately set up to hurt them (like trans gatekeeping that isn’t based on any evidence about who doesn’t regret transition) or accidentally hurt them (like gender on IDs or MY ARCH-NEMESIS, FORMS THAT ONLY INCLUDE TWO GENDERS).
If you have blue eyes, and you believe you are hideous because of your blue eyes, then you are obviously in quite a lot of pain. Believing you are hideous hurts a lot! But assuming you aren’t a close friend of mine, my correct reaction is probably saying “dude, that sucks” and moving on with my life.
Now, let’s say that TV shows regularly use “I thought she was hot… but then she had BLUE EYES” as a punchline, that even people who are attracted to blue eyes tend not to date people with blue eyes because their friends would make fun of them for dating an uggo, and that it is routine for people who are not attracted to blue-eyed people to be loudly repulsed by people with blue eyes daring to leave the house and be blue-eyed in public because, let’s be real, no one wants to see that.
What does this mean?
Well, first, it means that I can assume that there are lots of other people who hate their blue eyes. It would be reasonable for me to assume that any blue-eyed person I met either thought their blue eyes were hideous or had done a lot of work to love their eyes in spite of the cultural messages about how hideous they were. That means I might want to put more effort into helping blue-eyed people. Each person’s pain is equally important, and that means you should target the kinds of pain that affect many, many people before you target the kinds of pain that affect only a few. Shut up and multiply.
(Smart guys in the comment section: yes, the conclusion of shut up and multiply is effective altruism. The argument isn’t about effective altruism vs. social justice.)
Second, it gives me a lot more options for helping people in pain. If I write a blog post in our universe about how you shouldn’t say people are ugly because they have blue eyes, everyone would probably go “well, I mean, I agree, but… why are you telling me this? Huh?” If I write a blog post in Hypothetical Blue-Eye-Hating Universe (HBEHU) about how you shouldn’t say people are ugly because they have blue eyes, I would probably let some non-blue-eyed people know how hurtful their behavior was, comfort some blue-eyed people and affirm that their pain was real, and get at least one person explaining that their sexual attractions were brought down on a tablet by Boner Moses, how dare those SJWs say they have to have sex with blue-eyed people.
Similarly, if I become a Blue-Eyed Rights Activist in our universe, I am going to find my office as busy as the Third Amendment Rights Group. If I become a Blue-Eyed Rights Activist in the HBEHU, there are a lot of TV shows to write angry letters to and “blue eyes are beautiful!” PSA campaigns to organize. It makes sense to concentrate on the problems where there is actually any meaningful course of action to solve them.
Thing of Things 
I feel like this does not successfully defend actual practice. (Which a very common thing, and may have been your intention.)
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Under this conception of structural oppression, is there any use arguing over what is and isn’t structural oppression? It seems like someone trying to start an anti optochromism charity would sort itself out via no one caring
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“Structural oppression” strikes me as a useful concept that effectively compresses all of what you (Ozy) describe here and aids social justice discussion, but ultimately suffers the same fate as other labels (e.g. “feminism”). Arguing whether something is structural oppression seems to be a case of debating definitions. Are people with [trait] treated worse because of that trait? Then it’s wrong regardless of what we call it! A phrase that effectively conveys everything about “people with a particular trait get screwed over a lot” is useful to have (talking about things is so much easier when they have words!), but if we’re deciding who to help then I really think we should break down the phrase instead of using it. (see also: Diseased Thinking, Yvain).
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I hope someone else has already commented or I’ll look like a right ass, but:
>So, structural oppression means that people with a particular trait get screwed over a lot.
That is not, in fact, what the thing you just quoted said. I mean, my eyes skipped over it at first too, but still.
The quote defines “structural oppression” as hierarchical.
To be more precise, it defines “structural oppression” as – if I may be allowed to paraphrase the more verbose clauses in that sentence:
“The ways in which [things] interact to maintain a hierarchy [in which white cismales are on top] that allows [this hierarchy] to endure and adapt over time.”
That is, “structural oppression” doesn’t mean stereotypes (according to the Aspen Institute, whoever they are.) It doesn’t mean “people with blue eyes are ugly” at all. It means a particular kind of stereotype – one which “maintains a hierarchy” and which “endures and adapts over time”.
In other words, according to the Aspen Institute, everyone in the world believing blue-eyes-are-ugly is only “structural oppression” if this is reinforcing some sort of class structure, and if it will survive even if someone invents a Blue Pride movement and makes lots of posters showing how blue-eyed people can be beautiful too.
If I “merely” waved a magic wand tomorrow and created a stereotype in everyone’s minds believing that blue-eyed people are ugly – and I believe this to be possible, Robber’s Cave and other experiments seem to show stereotypes are essentially arbitrary – then, while it would indeed cause a great deal of pain and suffering, it would not be “structural oppression”.
This seems to me to accord with the “correct” meaning of this term, as I’ve seen it used; but you’re much more knowledgeable than me about these matters and I may be wrong.
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To be clear, this seems like a pretty good definition, as it fits with stuff like “racism” and “misogyny” and “transphobia” being structural oppression, other Bad Things and stereotypes not being structural oppression, like anything that hurts men or white people or whatever.
It also explains arguments over whether transmisogyny counted as structural oppression based on whether trans women counted as “privileged” (and thus transmisogyny was going against society’s hierarchy ) or “disprivileged” (and thus transmisogyny was supporting society’s hierarchy, and could potentially be a form of structural oppression.)
I’ll leave the question of whether it’s a natural category/”carves reality at it’s joints” open – since, to be fair, sexism/classism/racism/transphobia/homophobia/whatever seem oddly enduring and do seem to be in some sense supporting an existing hierarchy; but I’m not sure whether there’s a connection (do other stereotypes “endure” the same way? Do most forms of “hierarchical” stereotyping “endure” this way?) or what the connection is if there is one.
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Hierarchies can take different forms, though; I don’t think anything in that definition says they have to be class-based/economic. If everyone thinks blue-eyed people are ugly, that certainly puts them in a “lower” position in social contexts, dating/sex being the most obvious scenario.
But also, beauty hierarchies tend to reproduce themselves in economic contexts. In our universe, people with economic power (like employers) are biased against fat people and IIRC against people considered unattractive in general. (Though this may interact in strange ways with the stereotype of exceedingly beautiful women as not very competent at things other than being beautiful.) So if everyone thought blue eyes were ugly, blue-eyed people might find it much harder to get a job. Certainly any public-facing jobs would be much harder for them to get. That or they would have to spend extra money covering up their blue eyes, or they would be so stressed from feeling bad about themselves that their performance at all sorts of things in life would suffer.
What do you have in mind as the definition of “hierarchy” that would cover much of what’s generally considered structural oppression while not including stereotypes of ugliness?
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Being stereotyped as ugly but better in every other conceivable way would definitely not count as structural oppression, to give a particularly obvious example.
More generally, there have to be “the privileges associated with the dominant group and the disadvantages associated with the oppressed, targeted, or marginalized group” – that is, your “oppression” has to be significantly correlated with other bits of “oppression”, and there has to be another group “oppressing you by having largely positive stereotypes where yours are negative; or it isn’t “structural”.
Yes, a single stereotype could snowball, given time; but the example of “well, that’s bad, but it isn’t structural oppression” is all the negative social stuff and stereotyping surrounding men. Because, you understand, men are the privileged ones compared to women; they are on “top” of our little fucked-up two-gender hierarchy, and thus they are not structurally oppressed.
Thus: men aren’t stereotyped as “ugly”, but if they were, it would not be structural oppression. (Or if it would be, then the “true” meaning of the term has significantly diverged from common usage, I think.)
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This…doesn’t really do anything to address the objections to using structural oppression to rank individual instances of pain, which is where the objections often come from.
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I think that the objections might *come from* there, but they tend to go further than simply saying you can’t rank individual pain based on oppression into denying oppression exists.
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Elsewhere:
Sjwtatler: Man, those blued-eyed whiners are a bunch of entitled twits, comparing themselves with people who have real problems. I’m going to go start a new blog over at getstungbymillionsosofwasps interspersing images of blue-eyed people with images of people kicking puppies and complaining about their broken toes.
Sjwaldorf: Don’t you think if enough people see that it might lead to the droolin’ ceruleans actually having real problems to complain about eventually? Eh, who’m I kidding? Sounds like fun.
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Upvoted for the Statler and Waldorf pun. (Also, good point, I guess.)
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Upvoted for “droolin ceruleans”
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I think that maybe it is not a simple yes/no division?
In our world, blue eyed people or people born on Wednesdays or people who like the colour green are clearly not oppressed or even stereotyped against. Similarly, trans people, people of colour (at least in white majority countries ) disabled people, poor people etc obviously are oppressed.
But there are grey areas. Are people structurally oppressed for being poly? Or for having body modifications? Or not being conventionally attractive? Some people say yes, others say no. Personally I think there is a sliding scale between structural oppression and purely individual unkindness/unfairness.
Say Albert works in a bakery and is good at his job, but one day there is a new boss who fires him for a reason unrelated to his performance. I think Albert getting fired because he is gay is very different for Albert getting fired because he has tattoos. But I also think Albert getting fired because he has tattoos is different than Albert getting fired because the boss has a personal grudge against Albert’s boyfriend. All of these are bad. Gay people suffer a lot due to Homophobia. Tattooed people suffer somewhat due to people having prejudices against tattoos. Only Albert suffers because the new boss is stupid and mean.
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An issue I have is that the stuff that gets to count as “structural oppression” does not seem to be picked based on a consistent basis. For example sufficiently extreme body modification is socially punished MUCH more harshly than being openly gay. And this does not require any “offensive” body mods (like a swastika tattoo or something). Another example seems to be how the problems of the short are conceptualized. The same statistical techniques that support that being black is “Structural oppression” also suggest being short definitely counts. Sexual fetishes seem basically impossible to reliably change in adulthood. Yet few seem to care that openly stating you are a furry (in a sexual sense) results in massive discrimination.
My honest ordering of which groups suffer the most discrimination on average does not match the list of “structurally oppressed” groups at all. I do not think this is because we are using the same framework but estimating differently.
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I feel like this is mostly explained by the relative dominance of feminism in modern social justice, or at least of women. Fat shaming is something that women tend to feel; ‘short’ shaming is more keenly felt by men. Similarly, IIRC, women are much less likely to identify with socially unacceptable kinks- furries, diaper play, even foot fetishism.
Thus, the gatekeepers of what counts as oppression and what does not are going to be more sensitive to things that cause trouble for women and less sensitive to things that mostly hurt men.
(I may have just made a prediction that most extreme body modders are men. I don’t know the actual numbers, but that’s what my theory says.)
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There was a nationwide short acceptance rights organization, the National Organization of Short Statured Adults (NOSSA). It began in 2005 and shut down in 2013, because it never found enough short people interested in joining. (This is in contrast to little people organizations, which have been more durable.) Googling shows relatively few blogs or websites by and for short people.
The fat acceptance movement happened, to a great extent, because a critical mass (no pun intended) of us fatsos actively wanted it to exist. (Just looking at what comes up on google, it seems that there are more fat men interested in fat rights than there are short men interested in short rights, although there’s no way to prove that.)
From my perspective (as a fat, male feminist), it wasn’t a matter of on-high “gatekeepers” declaring “there SHALL BE a fat acceptance movement” and then we came into existence.
It was more that we existed and organized in small ways and spoke out, including speaking out against anti-fat ideology within feminism. And at first we were dismissed and made fun of, and then it became “I’d just like to be able to talk openly without the damned fat activists jumping down my throat,” and then it became “we’d like to officially apologize for the anti-fat sentiments in that post,” and then it became what we have now.
My bet is that if short adults could do the same level of persistence and organizing that fat folks have done, they’d see similar results. But so far not enough short people seem interested.
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The biggest gripe I’ve heard from short men is that they’re considered ineligible for romantic / sexual relationships. And people tend to react very badly to having their romantic / sexual preferences questioned in any way. Fat activists are on firmer ground in this respect, because the scope of the problem is wider (moral condemnation, generic insults etc.).
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So here is my answer as a feminist and SJW: heck yeah short people are victims of structural oppression. Which, OBVIOUSLY. I’m not sure how their collective oppression compares to mine, as a trans woman. To find that out you kinda have to turn to social sciences, alongside anecdote and activism.
So yeah, short folks: step up, stand together, speak out.
No one else is gonna do it for you.
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On the last point, I in fact do often speak out about short people, particularly short men, at least insofar as I *acknowledge* they get a raw deal. But I’m not short. I can read the stats, about romance, about job prospects, where clearly tall folks win. But I cannot know in my bones what it’s like. Short folks have to take that stand.
In a just world this would not be the case. But then, in a just world none of this would not be necessary. This ain’t a just world.
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Regarding arguments over who is structurally oppressed and who ain’t, along with how much: yeah, there will be arguments. And in fact who *wins* those arguments will sometimes themselves reflect structural issues. Which means this is another locus of conflict.
And that sucks, but it *does not mean* we shouldn’t talk about structural oppression, cuz pretending racism is not there does little to mitigate, and fighting for *voice* is a real fight that we have to have.
Bring facts. Demand facts.
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Seconded.
(Normally I wouldn’t post a comment just to second someone, but it occurs to me my previous comment could be taken as denying that short men are structurally oppressed, which wasn’t what I intended and may not be how anyone will take it. But just in case….)
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I am short as well as fat, and I find the prospect of being included in your fight against structural oppression absolutely terrifying. I am currently envisioning a future where merely being short (and/or fat) automatically causes me to become conscripted into your war. I am not a victim, and your war is not my war. Keep me out of it.
I could speak a bit more about why I am against this (proposed) pro-short-people activist movement, if anyone is interested. However, for now, I feel like I would get more useful mileage out of talking about the pro-fat movement.
Being fat is unhealthy (trust me, I know). Being extremely obese (which, thankfully, I am not) is actively dangerous. I understand that your goals are noble — you want to make fat people’s lives easier by changing the way society sees them (or, I should say, us) for the better. However, every time your movement manages to discourage a fat person from losing weight, you are endangering their health. Every time you discourage an obese person from seeking medical attention, you are endangering their life. Every time you promote the idea that obesity is perfectly fine (or possibly even desirable), you are potentially killing people. So, as you contemplate your next mass media campaign targeted at fat-acceptance (which, again, is a noble goal), try to calculate how many fat people will die because of it, and how many will live drastically shorter life. Make sure the tradeoff is worth it.
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@ Bugmaster
Uh, every time a fat person sinks into self-hate and depression due to bullying, their health and life are endangered as well. In some people, self-hate manifests as self-destructive eating patterns. Other people experience other forms of self-destruction or self-neglect. I think the fat acceptance movement actually helps some people become healthier by counteracting these effects.
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That’s got nothing to do with my argument, which was about people being motivated into activism (not war) by their own experiences (not conscription).
But I think your vision could make an interesting science-fiction piece. You could either write it from the left – in which case, the war is a heroic rebellion of fat activists against the Skynet Corporation’s fitness cyborgs who force terrifying “Biggest Loser” style regimens on all they capture (shot in the style of a Terminator movie). Or from the right – the terrifying story of a heroic American, who just happens to be fat but certainly doesn’t cotton to that fat activism b-crap, conscripted and forced into the evil fat activist army, which brutally force-feeds him Big Macs and Cheetos (shot in the style of “Starship Troopers”).
As for the rest: I’m not currently in the mood for a “is fat activism a KILLER?” debate. Maybe some other time, though.
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It’s funny how these conversations each time recapitulate Social Justice 101.
But anyway, I’m pretty sure there is a whole section in Serano’s *Excluded* on this topic, one of the double binds she discusses, between “fighting the fight” and “being normal.”
Anyway, yes, @Bugmaster, you are not required to join any political alliance you do not want to join. Obviously. But consider, the short people versus fat people thing was introduced above as a rhetorical attack against the idea of structural oppression. The argument, as I understand it, was that these tools are used unfairly, that some groups “qualify” for concern while others do not, and this has little to do with the merits of their case.
To me, I agree with the *facts* of this argument. However, it leads me to conclude simply that social justice advocates are not perfect and have their own limited viewpoints.
Which, duh. This is social justice 101.
Perhaps we can call this insight meta-structural-oppression, which is how even groups who advocate for social justice have their own prejudices and false beliefs, and this shapes their activism in lousy ways.
This is not a new idea. In fact, black feminists/womanists have been writing about this very thing for quite some time. In fact, the idea has seeped pretty far into SJ at it currently stands. This is old hat. We know about it, even if we don’t always do a great job acting on this knowledge.
The social processes that exclude short men from social justice concern, while including fat women, are pretty obvious. I’d say they are tribal, and “fat women” ring the right bells for your typical SJW, whereas “short men” rings the bell associated with fulminating men’s rights dickwads.
The SJ crowd is wrong about this. However, *this process itself* is correctly explained by structural oppression. It says that structural oppression is real and exists at every level.
Actually, it would be a surprise if structural oppression did not show up at every level. Social justice activists are not gods. We are running the same messed up wetware as every bigot alive. We’ve absorbed (most of) the same toxic cultural messages. The difference is we have tools to understand what is happening.
This is all true regardless of your personal motivations toward activism.
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@veronica d:
It seems like you missed my entire point. You keep saying, “yes, we the SJ crowd need to pay attention to short fat people as well”, whereas my point was, “please continue overlooking me, kthxbye”. You say:
> Anyway, yes, @Bugmaster, you are not required to join any political alliance you do not want to join. Obviously.
Well, it’s not obvious to me. I don’t see myself as terribly special, incredibly important, and lacking in agency, simply because I was born with than one (or maybe a few) standard deviation away from the mean.
The problem with social justice movements is that they have “no middle gears”, as Pratchett would say. Would I like to see fewer cases of short, fat people being treated as the butt of a joke ? Sure I would, but not at the expense of instituting a society-wide taboo on jokes about anyone who is shorter or fatter than average. Would I like people to stop calling me insulting names ? Well, maybe, but not if that means that people can get their careers destroyed and their lives ruined for saying “fatso” on Twitter. And yes, it would be nice to have some more resources allocated to medical care for short, fat people; but not at the expense of making the study of obesity or height a taboo.
The problem is, there’s no “opt-out” button on your (proposed) movement. Once it really gets going, everyone who fits into your target demographic will have to either come on board, or be branded a traitor. That’s what I’m afraid of.
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Bugmaster: There’s also no opt-out button from fatphobia or heightism. There is no “everyone gets to decide, personally, how much SJ and how much oppression they’re comfortable with” option. If we adopt your proposed system, then all the fat people who would be happier in a society where there is an anti-fatphobia movement– including several people in this very thread– get screwed over. Therefore, the question of your own personal preferences is, mm, irrelevant? The question is what will lead to greater happiness *overall*.
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@Bugmaster — I hear you. Actually what you say is entirely consistent with the stuff that Serano talks about in _Excluded_, which I mentioned above, the double bind stuff. For example, plenty of trans women want nothing to do with trans activism; they just want to live normal lives as women, as close to that as they can.
Now, their *ability* to live as such depends on an ton of factors. For example, how well can they pass? How willing are they to hide their life history? On and on.
On the other hand, some trans women, when they bump into the transphobia, decide to fight.
And dammit I’m glad they do cuz I don’t have the option of passing and fitting in, nor do I want to hide my past, nor do I want to deny my queerness from the world.
But I’m still a woman and trans and other queer activists have given to me a world where I can thrive.
Without the trans activists of the 90’s and the 00’s, I’d be dead now.
No really. [cw: suicide]
I couldn’t go on like I was, and I lack the guts that those queer freaks back in the pre-90’s dark ages had, who said “fuck it all” and transitioned anyhow.
So when you go after social justice folks, I think of those who came before me. I owe them my life.
And yeah I know you mean the annoying, overzealous folks on Tumblr. Fine. But social justice is bigger than them. They are one chapter in a very long book.
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I mentioned Serano above, but I want to reiterate: she would fully support your choice. If you choose “avoid activism and just live my life,” then yay!
But my point stands, and you have done nothing to counter it, short men and fat folks are targets of structural oppression. The evidence is overwhelming, in romance, in business, in media portrayals, on and on. This is pretty hard to deny.
What you do about that is up to you. There are no perfect choices, cuz the problem ain’t you. It’s way bigger than you. It’s the injustice of the structure itself.
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Trans activists annoy the crap out of me like 80% of the time. That other 20% they say stuff that is damn important and needs to be said. Moreover, I need them and the work they do.
I like to share the load.
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If you’re trying to make structural oppression “things that happen a lot and so have more weight in the utilitarian calculus” then you’re using it so differently from everyone else that your additional definition can’t possibly do more than muddy the waters.
Consider the actual debate we had a few months ago about structural oppression. Some people were saying that nerdy men feeling like nobody loved them wasn’t an example of structural oppression. But this is very, *very* common. In fact, given the number of nerdy men and transgender people, nerdy men feeling unloved is certainly more common than transgender people facing transgender-related problems. Even if the average transgender person suffers much more, when you multiply out the sum total of the nerdy male suffering is probably much greater on numbers alone.
Under your definition, wouldn’t that mean that nerdy men feeling unloved is *more* of an example of structural oppression than transgender people hearing anti-transgender jokes on TV?
I also don’t think you can dismiss the argument from effective altruism that quickly. Any principle strong enough to say “You should help structurally oppressed transgender people rather than people who happen to feel bad about their blue eyes, because there are more of the former and it’s a greater utility loss” is also strong enough to say “You should help people with malaria rather than structurally oppressed transgender people, because there are more of the former and it’s a greater utility loss.”
So under your system, any social justice activist who says we should be focusing on transgender people because they’re structurally oppressed (and not focusing on people with malaria instead) is just making a stupid mistake. I think that’s uncharitable to them, and that we should assume they’re using some definition of structural oppression in which their actions make sense.
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On the nerd thing:
My view is that anti-nerd sentiment often reduces to several recognized forms of oppression, namely ableism, gender norms, and beauty norms. As far as I can tell, nerds who are not bad at social cues, conventional gender expression, or beauty don’t suffer the brunt of anti-nerd sentiment at all.
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I think the axis of “weird interests” is also in there. A lot of “nerd culture” has gone mainstream or at least gained some acceptance, but not all of it, particularly in the case of non-media areas of interest. Nobody would consider a passionate entomologist anything but nerdy (and I know, I’ve met LOTS of them), but a house full of beetles and roaches can get you socially marginalized pretty damn fast.
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Right. It’s hard for me to see big shot software engineering types as particularly “oppressed” —
Except some of them are autistic and really can’t relate to anything *but* software. That seems a legitimate disability. Autistic nerds have a case.
There is so much *bad stuff* about the discourse surrounding nerds, such that I think we’re better off teasing out the specific *hard shit*, such as autism, from the general nerd stuff.
For example, mere *social awkwardness*, which I think functions at a level beneath what an autistic person suffers, can suck, but most of us get over it sooner or later, at least to a sufficient degree.
Like, the jocks who bullied me in high school — I kinda wish they could see me now! I’m smart and gorgeous and popular and have a terrific job. Yay me.
Which Scott Aaronson talked about this stuff, in the most ignored part of his comment, how he got successful and got his shit together, and then how romance followed.
Big lesson there. It’s saying “Once I made it big at MIT, then my sense of oppression went away…”
Which, duh.
It’s the nerds who didn’t get that success we need to talk about, such as the men on Wizchan. What happened to them?
I dunno. It’s hard for me to engage with people like them. They seem to really hate people like me.
But do they experience structural oppression? Almost certainly.
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The definition I’ve always assumed was in use was ‘we have this model (which Ozy called the kyriarchy in a recent post) of certain generalized ways people get hurt, and people getting hurt in a way that fits our model is structural oppression, and people getting hurt in other ways is not.’
This has some valuable uses as a framework. If you think that there’s a huge huge class of interrelated hurts that have a common cause, such that you can predict a lot about which hurts someone will suffer by knowing their identity memberships and you can reduce hurts across many different axes by tackling the underlying dynamic, then ‘this hurt is a member of the category of hurts that have a common cause we’re in the process of fixing’ is a valuable observation.
Saying “This movement fixes structural oppression and doesn’t do anything about other forms of harm” is perfectly reasonable to me. I wouldn’t donate to such a movement, because it’s obviously not very effective, but I don’t take issue with it and I wouldn’t ask it to tackle other forms of harm any more than I’d ask soup kitchens in Chicago to start working on malaria. I think it’s fair for soup kitchens to say ‘we just feed people’ and feminists to say ‘we just fight harms that fit our model’ and everyone else to, based on that, decide whether the movement is doing valuable enough work to be worth supporting.
If the model is sufficiently wrong, and you can’t actually predict much about which hurts someone will suffer by knowing their identity memberships, and you can’t actually reduce hurts along many different axes by tackling the underlying dynamic, then it’s plausible a movement trying to fix structural oppression will do no net good at all, the dynamic that it’s trying to fix being totally orthogonal to actual suffering. This doesn’t seem to me like it’s true, but I know some people who believe it is.
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I … kind of feel that this a strawman of Ozy’s point. (Sorry!)
Jokes about trans people on TV is a problem we can fix by making blog post about it, maybe making a few loud protests – that is, it is a purely “social” issue, by whatever standard you want to use. It is also a serious problem, so fighting it is important. It’s a social attitude that’s hurting a sizeable group of people via certain well-understood, well-established mechanisms; and I think this is roughly Ozy’s definition of “structural oppression” – groups being “oppressed” by the structures of society, or something like that.
Nerds feeling lonely may or may not be this kind of problem; there’s some debate, although I suspect Ozy would probably argue it is at least partially “structural oppression”, and they do kind of devote a fair amount of attention to it. (Proportional? Eh, who knows, and Ozy is already specializing in certain areas including transness anyway so I sure can’t calculate it out.)
Malaria is not the kind of problem you can solve by writing blog posts and maybe protesting a little, because it is not caused by humans. The closest you can come is to fight the-lack-of-people-fighting-malaria, which may be a good idea, but is kind of a different thing because we still need to figure out how to fight malaria.
… but I’m pretty sure “the third world” is massively more structurally oppressed than pretty much anyone else, possibly including pedophiles and maybe even mass-murderers. No matter what scale or metric or definition you use, if it’s even vaguely sane I suspect it’ll still come out that way. This is really, really obvious and basically indisputable.
… but then, it might also require even more effort to solve, and we’re in a different (wealthier) country, so the marginal blog post … I don’t even know anymore.
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It is obviously true that people should be working on effective altruism and not on social justice and the only reason I do SJ blogging is because this is my hobby but if I were an ideally virtuous human being I would write about EA all the time. And it is also obviously true that trans activism is incredibly ineffective and, again, hobby. If someone wants to do pro-blue-eyes activism as their hobby, that’s cool too.
If you remember the argument we had about structural oppression a while back, I *said* that Scott Aaronson’s pain was an example of structural oppression. And then some people responded to me with “why do we care if it is structural oppression?” And this is why.
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a while back, I *said* that Scott Aaronson’s pain was an example of structural oppression.
Hmm, where was this, exactly? Do you have a link to the text, or to the post or thread?
It was hard to capture 100% of the Aaronson-saga-related commentary; but my memory is rather the opposite, that you were ultimately quite dismissive of Scott Aaronson’s suffering since he was/is part of the super-privileged class of humans, other than to the extent that he might have had some mental illness. So I’m interested to be corrected on this point.
In general, though, I agree with several of the prior comments, that identifying “oppression”, and “structural oppression”, and whatever other varieties there may be, is not at all closed-form; and so their definitions become just another battlefield to prove one’s ideology (imagine a cavalry charge of hobby horses, if you like).
For example, in the hypothetical “sad man, behind blue eyes” oppression, I would certainly expect to hear objections/denials along such lines as “there’s not really that much anti-blue-eyed sentiment as you think” or “that anti-blue-eyed stuff is really minor and can’t really affect your life that much” or “just being told that you’re ugly isn’t significant compared to other things people suffer””; and I would especially expect to hear these arguments from people who already felt they had a case against blue-eyed people for some other quality that is correlated with eye color.
This is, after all, in perfect synchrony with what we heard from internet feminists following the Scott Aaronson story: that feminist-driven condemnation of male sexuality generally either didn’t exist, or wasn’t significant enough to impact anyone’s life, or it didn’t matter because SA was from the super-privileged class and so can’t by definition suffer structural oppression. And, all of that commentary was sickly and wrong, violent and bigoted, a non-zero net loss for humanity.
So, to disagree with the OP title, I’m very skeptical about the efficacy of this concept; seems to me instead yet another tool to fashion weapons, net loss overall.
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Landru: c’est ici https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/in-which-ozy-despite-not-being-a-scott-a-adopts-their-habit-of-long-blog-posts-concerning-feminism-and-nerds/
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1. Then even talking about nerdy men is giving too much benefit of the doubt. Suppose I hate having to sit in rush hour traffic every day. This is a universal human experience. It’s very common. It’s much more common than unloved nerdy men *or* discriminated-against transgender people.
Either having to sit in rush hour traffic is structural oppression, in which case the term is meaningless, or structural oppression doesn’t correspond very well with things that are common and carry a lot of weight in the utilitarian calculus.
2. If the main use of structural oppression is to point to which things are important to talk about, and you think it does a terrible job at that, why defend it?
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I don’t think every social problem is perfectly fungible with every other social problem.
This is the dust motes argument in disguise. There is a reason I’m not a utilitarian.
I’m trans, and I have to ride the subway also, and considering I’m in Boston and our transit system literally melted down this winter with several multi-day outages — yeah that has an enormous human cost.
But if the population said in unison, “Fuck trans people, grind their bodies and use their precious life blood to make the trains run…”
Well I’m pretty sure that is perfectly absurd. People want good trains, but they also want social justice — and it ain’t the precious “trans vote” that passes good laws for us in Massachusetts (but terrible laws elsewhere in the US). It is that people say, “You know, I don’t want trans folks to live in misery. They get a raw deal and it seems fair to give them a break. Oh, and can you *also* do something about the trains!”
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[That was meant to thread with the Scott’s grandparent post.]
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[Oh wait, not it wasn’t. Never mind.]
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unimportantutterance: Thanks for the pointer/indicator. I went back and re-read that post, which is rather rambly and hard to summarize. But the part concerning S. Aaronson is pretty much as I had suspected: namely, the only reason his experience could come under heading of “structural oppression” was because of his mental illness. There’s no recognition or even acknowledgement of the more central idea, of what it’s like for a well-meaning man to live under a feminist-driven culture that shames and demonizes unreciprocated male sexuality. It’s not surprising, though; Ozy has to maintain zir feminist card in good standing.
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1 in 30,000 men & 1 in 100,000 women seek gender reassignment surgery.
1 in 42 boys & 1 in 189 girls have autism.
Is this the proportion of attention we should devote to trans activism and autism activism?
I’m not comfortable with that conclusion.
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Sorry, forgot to cite sources:
https://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/prevalence
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Eesh. So, the first one cites data from 1974, and the second one is Autism Speaks.
Which, if you’re not familiar with the neurodiversity movement may not mean a lot to you but . . . Autism Speaks is terrible. They have a long history of curebie-ism, anti-vaccinationism, dehumanization of autistic people, attacking anyone who criticizes them, and rejecting inconvenient science. Don’t cite ’em, don’t support their events (they’ll have a lot soon, since April is coming up), don’t give ’em money, and speak up when you see other people doing so.
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+1
Autism speaks is dreadful.
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I have no special interest in either category, so my search has the depth of a summer rain puddle. Nabbing the CDC stats on Autism Spectrum Disorder, roughly 1 in 68 people have some form of autism (using Autism in people age 8 as a prior for all people; I have no particular reason to suspect that people in general are more or less likely to have autism at other ages, and my understanding is that autism is persistent/permanent). Trusting veronic d to be more knowledgable than I on this topic, we get roughly 1 in 200 people are trans. This is a little under a factor 3 ratio of autism to trans.
I’m not going anywhere with this, so please draw your own conclusions.
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@InferentialDistance: I have no particular reason to suspect that people in general are more or less likely to have autism at other ages
If I recall correctly (and I may not), although grossly exaggerated by anti-vaccinationists, there is some (weak) evidence that the genuine prevalence of autism spectrum disorders may be rising somewhat, even after accounting for the (much bigger) effects of diagnostic broadening, increased awareness, and diagnostic substitution (primarily for mental retardation). A variety of potential explanations have been suggested, including that increased female participation in higher education and the workforce has resulted in a greater tendency of people with some genetic predisposition in that direction to marry each other and have children together, with a resulting increase in the number of children who have inherited predisposing genes from both parents. This is pretty damn speculative, though.
my understanding is that autism is persistent/permanent
Sort of. The underlying neural characteristics are unlikely to simply disappear, but various studies find that anywhere from 3% to 25% of children diagnosed with ASDs subsequently “lose their diagnosis.” Which is not, of course, to say that they necessarily become truly neurotypical, just that they no longer meet diagnostic criteria.
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There’s probably diminishing marginal returns to activism, but ‘it’s far higher impact to do activism for marginalized groups that there are way more of’ seems totally true. What about it bothers you?
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Only looking at incidence #’s hides the quality & amount of suffering among different marginalized group.
No source for this, but I imagine trans people are way more likely to suffer severe bullying & ostracism into adulthood then autistic people.
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I suspect this is more of a problem for groups that can’t organize themselves.
Presumably, if there is a large difference in the suffering from oppression experienced by an average trans person suffers versus an average autistic person (in either direction), the result of that, in the long run, will be greater effort and activism from the group that is suffering more.
(There are other variables as well that make it harder or easier for groups to organize. If admitting that you’re a member of [group] could get you arrested, that’s a major impediment to organizing despite the high level of oppression. Prior to the internet, organizing groups that were spread thinly across the country was much more difficult. In many ways, it’s more difficult for groups that are formed from “horizontal identities” – that is, groups whose members probably don’t share their membership in [oppressed group] with their parents – to organize, than it is for groups with “vertical identities.” (Terms stolen from the book Far From The Tree.) )
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There is a spectrum (forgive the pun) for both trans folks and autistic folks, plus there seems to be reason to suspect the conditions are comorbid.
Which does not surprise me. Trans stuff is brain stuff.
Anyway, it would take a lot of hard work to tease out the differences, but in the end I wonder the point. This is not a contest nor a zero sum game. Good social justice activism should be raising awareness of both groups.
What trans folks most want are better laws, which in fact cost little. We also want insurance coverage for trans healthcare, but that is at the pennies-per-person. (When my employer added trans healthcare, the cost-per was too small to bother with.)
Autistic people, on the other hand, seem to benefit much from extensive education and training. We should provide that. I doubt many trans people would disagree.
Plus roe’s stats are off by orders-of-magnitude, if that matters to you.
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moebius – I apologize & thank you – I thought I somewhat knew what I was talking about but clearly there’s an important sense in which I didn’t.
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“Seek gender reassignment surgery” seems like a really bad metric. Many trans individuals openly presenting full time as the sex opposite to what they were assigned at birth do not seek GRS. For a large variety of reasons.
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Sure – but I don’t think painting in broad strokes with not-quite-accurate but easily collected stats detracts from the overall point – we’re still talking large differences in preponderance.
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On the other hand, improving the lives of transsexuals by just treating them as a normal person of their desired sex seems significantly easier than improving the lives of autistic people.
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Going to have to disagree – high-functioning autistics can be taught coping strategies, and it seems way easier to ask people in general to be patient with folks who miss non-verbal social cues and don’t make eye-contact &etc. – gender expectations are pretty deeply embedded psychologically. Plus there’s a whole religious component you have to deal with.
(To be clear – I think social attitudes towards trans folk is a tough problem but I think it’s worth changing even if the #’s say it doesn’t affect very many people)
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@roe:
As the long discussion that just happened/is still happening on this blog should have demonstrated…both coping skills for autistics, and understanding from non-spectrum folks, are much harder to teach and/or pull off than they sound.
One reason HFA/AS is *so* disabling is precisely that it *sounds like* it wouldn’t be so hard to help / accommodate. But it *is*.
Non-verbal cues are *also* “pretty deeply embedded psychologically.” (For me as a non-spectrum “cis by default,” they were far, far more so than gender!)
I did still learn…through years of having several close friends with diagnosed HFA/AS. But…it *took* years.
(The years it took to even *figure out* the way in which Friend 1’s conversation does not fit others’ “instinctive” ideas of how long a pause should last…let alone figure out something he could say to others that they could even comprehend…let alone that they could apply well enough to be able to detect that he had something to say…OMG. And…during all those years, he could not get a job despite having an advanced degree, because he could not get past the interview. Because he “had nothing to say.”
Friend 2 wins full academic scholarships but cannot hold down a job because no employer has yet figured out how to give precise enough instructions that he is not constantly asking for clarification or, often, sincerely believing a task is done when it is not. So he “has no initiative” and “is lazy” or even “is a lazy, selfish liar”…)
…sorry, not trying to get into Oppression Olympics here, just…the fact that it “sounds much easier than it is” is part of the problem with HFA/AS.
(Wish I could participate more in the continued On Creepiness/Why I’m Not A Reasonable Feminist discussion, but I’m having to save most of my limited “certain kinds of physical effort, including typing” ability for other things right now. Possibly in a week or two…by which time everyone will have moved on… :tiny violin: ;))
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@Lizardbreath:
Out of curiosity, do you think the best solution for Friend 2 would be more understanding and accommodating employers, or more generous social support for people who cannot work, combined with a lessening of the stigma against people who don’t work?
I instinctively think the latter solution would be better, but I don’t think my instincts are based on knowledge, in this case. (And I realize that it’s not an either/or question in reality.)
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I think different solutions will help different people, so saying, “If we could just do X, then yay” misses the point. We’re gonna need both in some measure, and figuring out how much of each is an impossible problem, alongside terrible politics.
Which, given the political constraints, saying “I’ll just put my energy into X” is probably the best you can do. But do not pretend it is globally optimal.
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@roe: it seems way easier to ask people in general to be patient with folks who miss non-verbal social cues and don’t make eye-contact &etc.
This would work better—if people would actually do it—if people consciously got made at autistics for missing non-verbal cues and failing to make eye contact.
But in my experience (admittedly as someone who’s autism-adjacent but probably not diagnosable—I’d be curious whether this matches with moebius’s experience, if he’s still reading this thread), that’s not, mostly, what people get mad at me for, even though it is what I’m doing that results in them getting made at me.
Outside of a romantic context, people mostly don’t get mad at me for missing non-verbal cues, they get mad at me for ignoring non-verbal cues—that I actually missed. They don’t get mad at me for failing to make eye contact, they get mad at me for not paying attention to what they’re saying—as proven by my failure to look at their faces when they talk. They don’t get mad at me for being poor at face reading, they get mad at me for not caring that they’re upset.
And a lot of them still do that after I tell them about my impairments. So if you can persuade people to accept that they should be patient with those who miss non-verbal social cues, a lot of them will—judging by past experience—simply be “patient with people who can’t, but not with those who simply won’t,” and mislabel a lot of the former as the latter.
And sure, there is a simple solution to a lot of this, if not necessarily an easy one, which is to just assume good faith as regards failures of indirect communication, even if bad faith seems “obvious,” and fall back on direct communication as a backup. But that seems to be a very unpopular solution, judging by responses to my posts on other threads.
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@Lizardbreath: I periodically check old threads that I’ve made contentious comments on, and will certainly make a note to keep on eye on those two. Good luck with your [wrists/hand/arms/back/other relevant anatomy as appropriate].
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Those stats are wrong, see a long discussion in *Whipping Girl*. Plus GRS is not the correct measure, as most trans folks do not seek GRS for a variety of reasons, mostly cost. Check the numbers on HRT for a better measure.
And even then, not every trans person seeks HRT.
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In fact, this is one of the better online summaries of the stats: http://www.blog.juliaferraioli.com/2015/03/engineering-first-run-experience.html.
Short version: about 0.5% of the general population is probably trans.
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Uh, totally wrong link. (Sorry.)
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-we-dont-know-the-size-of-the-transgender-population/.
(I think my brain is on the fritz today.)
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Well, the other link was interesting too. 🙂
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” If I become a Blue-Eyed Rights Activist in the HBEHU, there are a lot of TV shows to write angry letters to and “blue eyes are beautiful!” PSA campaigns to organize.”
I’m pretty sure that if I tried, in this universe, I could find plausible instances of anti-blue-eye bias on TV shows. All I have to do is pick instances where blue-eyed people happen, by chance, to get picked on. Of course, these instances would not actually be there because of anti-blue-eye bias, just because of chance, but there would be no way for anyone to *prove* that.
I see this all the time. For instance, “black guy dies first” may sometimes be a real complaint, but even in the complete absence of racism you’d expect there to be a number of TV shows where the black guy dies first just by chance. I could cherry-pick those examples and assert that they are examples of bias and there would be no way to prove me wrong.
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Statistics?
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Statistics cannot prove or disprove examples taken one at a time. And the examples are typically taken one at a time.
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@Jiro – Exactly, which has been one of the things that constantly bothers me about the way SJ relies on anecdote. It’s emotionally impactful but logically flawed.
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Statistics show frequency. Anecdote shows effect. We need both.
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There is a way to prove you wrong or right; going through every instance (or some fairly selected sample) of death in popular fictional media within mixed-race groups of characters (of which at least one character is black). If the likelihood of a black character dying first is greater than the average proportion of black characters, then that difference is the bias, although it would take more work beyond that to show that it was a direct bias.
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Some issues I have:
1) Ozy’s interpretation seems highly non-obvious. MugaSopher points out that Ozy’s interpretation does not even seem to follow from the definition Ozy picked. In addition the normal use of “structural oppression” is to discuss group dynamics not specific problems. For example to justify the claim that since (cishet white NT) men as a group hold power its impossible to be sexist against men. Ozy brought up men who wear dresses. The logic of “group dynamic structural oppression” leads to one of two conclusion. Either the individuals are trans and hence deserve 100% sympathy. Or they are non=trans in which case their problems do not really matter at best. At worst they are appropriating femininity. There are alot of problems with treating people as member of racial/sexual groups.
2) Even if we accept Ozy’s definition there are problems. Many people suffer for reasons that are either genuinely uncommon or just not on the official list of “big issues.” Some possible examples would be white students at majority black schools suffering bullying because they are white. Or perhaps men who are deeply uncomfortable with their penis being below average in size (despite not being a micro penis). If you add up all the people suffering greatly from problem that are “not major societal issues” you might get the majority of the population (though maybe just a big minority).
3) Ozy’s advice to shut up and multiply makes no sense in interpersonal contexts. Which tend to be the contexts where individuals can actually make things better or worse. Very, very few people can change large scale social norms and an especially small number of people have any effect on the laws of a nation. In my life it does not matter, at all, what percentage of the population think they are disgusting because they have blue eyes. What matter is that someone in my social group feels this way. The amount of compassion I show her should not depend at all on the national percentage of people with her problem (though some issues do depend on the percentage of people in my specific social group with a need preference).
Ozy said: “Believing you are hideous hurts a lot! But assuming you aren’t a close friend of mine, my correct reaction is probably saying “dude, that sucks” and moving on with my life.” Which shows we agree in the case of close friends. But I think “close friend” is not going nearly far enough. The better standard is “person I actually personally interact with.” For example the other commentators on this blog count.
4) I think its much safer to promote an attitude of “We care about your problems because they are your problems. Not because we think your problems make sense or because of large scale group dynamics.” If someone genuinely holds that view then you do not have to worry about whether they think your problem “counts” or not. SJ people often do not think problems caused because someone is Male/NT/White*/etc really merit accommodations. Conservatives do not want to accommodate LBGT/atheist/etc concerns. However if both groups genuinely accepted a norm of being generally accommodating there would be alot more sympathy in the world.
*I personally think issues caused by being White are very, very rare in the USA (outside of college admissions). However this would not cause me to react any differently to a White person who was a victim of serious racism compared to a Black person who was a victim of equivalent racism. Even though the later group is vastly more common.
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“Ozy’s advice to shut up and multiply makes no sense in interpersonal contexts. Which tend to be the contexts where individuals can actually make things better or worse. Very, very few people can change large scale social norms and an especially small number of people have any effect on the laws of a nation. In my life it does not matter, at all, what percentage of the population think they are disgusting because they have blue eyes. What matter is that someone in my social group feels this way. The amount of compassion I show her should not depend at all on the national percentage of people with her problem (though some issues do depend on the percentage of people in my specific social group with a need preference)”
This is my view as well. If I’m a policy-maker, or CEO of a big company, or donating a very large amount of money to charity, then yeah, I should take the structural issues into account.
If it’s in an interpersonal context, compassion should be equal. If a trans-woman gets to complain that dating is hard for her because of her being trans and be listened to and get compassion in a given context, then a nerdy cis-het white guy who struggles with dating for personal reasons that aren’t immediately clear should be able to complain about it in a given context as well, and he should be listened to and given just as much compassion.
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To be fair, I do see “structural oppression” used and argued over WRT, for example, Affirmative Action policies. In essentially the same terms as other arguments over SO, I think, for whatever that’s worth.
This seems (to me) fairly important, and we should have terms for it, even if it isn’t necessarily the typical use for SO right now (which it may well not be.)
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“I think its much safer to promote an attitude of “We care about your problems because they are your problems. Not because we think your problems make sense or because of large scale group dynamics.” If someone genuinely holds that view then you do not have to worry about whether they think your problem “counts” or not.”
As a nonbinary sad trans person who spent years questioning/in denial: YES, yes, this is the most important thing here that directly concerns me.
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But there is a *big difference* we need to talk about. If a white person is a victim of some horrible racist shit, then *almost always* that white person can take two steps to the left and find a path not mired down.
I mean, really almost always.
Which doesn’t mean it does not suck, but every life hits *some amount* of adversity.
But consider, the black person cannot do this. When they take two steps to the left, they find another racist path; four steps to the right, same; throughout their life, most every path, unless they are super-extraordinarily lucky — more and more racism, again and again, at ever turn.
The white person whose *entire life* is bogged down with racism will be really quite extraordinary. We can talk about that person. We can (and should) care.
But compared with almost all black people — this shit adds up.
That’s what we are saying. And it’s obviously true. We should believe true things.
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Yeah, well… so then what about, as it were, The Men? If the measure of adversity should not be whether someone else is in more pain, but whether it can be easily escaped through individual actions and life choices, then, well, what’s going on is structural oppression, full stop. The only justification for dressing it up with coy phrases like “patriarchy backfiring” is the logic of scarcity and the importance of relative privation.
I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but I cannot, I will not shut up at this point until more people besides Ozy or me can say: “Men are an oppressed group” and not add any qualifiers, HOWEVER TRUE AND TECHNICALLY VALID THE QUALIFIERS MIGHT BE.
(I’m not talking about the bizzare anti-SJ logic of scapegoating women for things that men and women suffer in asymmetrical ways. Screw the anti-SJs… but they did learn this line from “somewhere”.)
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1) A large fraction of people, hence a large fraction of white people, are children. Children cannot easily change paths to escape racism.
2) The entire world is not the USA. While anti-white racism is very rare in the USA its not obvious to me its that rare in countries where Whites are a small minority (though it does seem less bad than the percentages of whites in a country might suggest). SJ theory often does not often say “anti-white racism is impossible in the USA and most of Europe.”
3) Even if the “you can change paths” point is true of some group I think “but every life hits *some amount* of adversity” is a little lacking in sympathy. Imagine half the companies in the USA were openly racist against black people. Or half where very trans-phobic. But the other half were non-racist/non-trans-phobic. The percentage is 50% over all industries but the percentage varies significantly by industry (maybe tech is 80% racist or something but medical is 20% racist).
In such a world people could “change paths” to avoid racism/transphobia. But I would not be willing to round this problem down to “life is hard.” There would still be a giant problem.
(there is a giant problem with racism/trans-phobia now. I am not arguing there isn’t. I am just describing a different world).
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Well, you’re switching the topic from racial oppression, where things are pretty cut-and-dry, to gender oppression, which has a more complex structure.
(A summary of the differences, I think: minorities tend to separate culturally, whereas the genders very much do not, cuz heterosexuality. The fact that men and women are roughly equal in numbers and that most of us want to hook up with the opposite sex shapes gender oppression quite differently from other types.)
Anyway, so yeah. Switching to gender oppression does indeed complicate the conversation. And feminism is not great at talking about this, but the “about the menz” conversation is fraught with bad faith on both sides, so that needs to be addressed.
The (rather simplistic) adage goes, “Patriarchy oppresses women, but it ranks men.” Which, I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Men play their reindeer games, wherein *women mark status*. We are trophies. Furthermore, in practice the men who complain about this put the lion’s share of the blame *on women*, cuz obviously if the hotties jump on the nerdboys, then the reindeer games would magically shift in their favor.
See, by *withholding the prize*, women are the cause.
So the story goes.
To me it is no surprise that feminists have little patience for this discourse and come at it short-fused. But sure, here on this forum we like to speak in facts. So is it a fact that “men are oppressed, as *men*” (which I take to mean something separate for “as autistic men” or “as black men” and so on).
Honestly I’m not sure how to answer. Some men clearly are, insofar as they fall short on the pecking order constructed by other men. But then, those other men! They seem like they’re winning the game. So for *men-in-general*, nope.
Look, Janet Mock won the trans woman lottery. Which, yay Janet Mock. I celebrate her.
I fall short of that. Some trans women fall waaaaaay short of that. We are not all equal. But there is no doubt our transness is uniformly a target of oppression and almost never a source of oppression versus others, which makes it entirely unlike masculinity.
You can construct a bizarre scenario where it is, in that one improbable case. But not really.
With masculinity, it seems to me the pecking order is baked into the structure. Which is a big part of what feminism complains about.
So maybe we can say “men who cannot play their gender well” are oppressed. Sure. Seems true enough. But as a feminist I insist we put the spotlight on the real problem: the fucked up nature of masculine status ranking. Where should we not put the blame: on women.
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Veronica: I agree 100% about not scapegoating women, which is why I have specifically made the disclaimer that many anti-SJ, pro-men complaints are guilty of this and it needs to stop.
And agreed about the pecking order, *however*, I hope you still agree that even men who appear to have “made it” – conventionally attractive, enviable career, success with women – can still suffer greatly from the virtually inescapable patriarchal messages.
(This is especially true for “success with women” – the patriarchal narrative of women as status symbols, of male desexualization that can only be overcome through constant gender performance – are NOT easily dispelled even by the “fact” of having sex with conventionally attractive women. So many men go to *extreme* lengths to confirm the overriding idea of their undesirability and dismiss all evidence to the contrary; hence all the jokes how “Please fuck me right now” is still too subtle a come-on for the Average Dude.)
And yet, before we address the troubles of (outwardly, relatively) gender-conforming men, what is pop/SJ-ish feminism doing even for gender-non-conforming ones? How do we make them more comfortable and at ease with themselves? Where are men’s body positivity campaigns[1], where are the reassurances that their masculinity cannot be coercively taken from them, that – most importantly, IMO – they are welcome in “progressive” spaces as imperfect individuals deserving of care, not as disciplined, stoic “allies” defined by their identity? Acceptance is such a big, powerful thing…
Some good broadly progressive bloggers, like Ozy or Mark Manson, are already sending some very good and positive messages to men. Then why is the typical asshole male feminist, like Dr. Nerdlove or Arthur Chu, so insistent on “tough love” and grand talk before a message of tolerance and acceptance?
[1] Thankfully the blatant (and oh so cissexist) body-shaming has decreased as of late.
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Veronica:
“…But there is no doubt our transness is uniformly a target of oppression and almost never a source of oppression versus others, which makes it entirely unlike masculinity. You can construct a bizarre scenario where it is, in that one improbable case. But not really.”
For fuck’s sake. Now you had to go and make this personal.
It is incredibly blatant to me how in trans spaces, the More Trans (i.e. binary and out and narrative-conforming) AMAB people have a HUGE relative privilege over nonbinary/genderqueer/genderfluid/questioning AMAB people. Who is more likely to hear “boys are gross”, “cis scum”, etc and apply it to themselves? Who is going to suffer because a binary choice of identity cannot describe their nonbinary situation? Who is going to conclude that they are Not Trans Enough, that they just want to ~appropriate~ transfemininity without “paying” for it? I’ve experienced all of this myself. I bear no ill will towards binary-conforming transfeminists as individuals, but the Proper Trans discourse has made me feel very bad and unsafe and unwelcome many times!
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Multi — In my experience, I find most non-binary AMAB folks pretty much just like me, except different. If that makes sense. Which, there is a danger we’ll pull the ladder up behind us, like we get our gender markers but make no effort to help NB get theirs. But still, we’re all so far down the queer pecking order and with so much heavy shit above both of us equally that the lateral oppression seems pretty small, at least when you put us beside the AFAB-trans folks, the darlings of the queer dance party where we AMAB folks can go suck eggs.
At least that’s how it seems to me.
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Plus, let met add, for a late-transitioning woman like me, I’m not sure if there really is an *essential* difference between my binary identity and someone else’s non-binary identity. Like, I mean in the sense of what is baked into my brain, not necessarily the fact I have an ‘F’ on my state issued ID and know exactly which restroom I should use. But like, how I relate to my gender in the world. I think we are more alike than different.
I went through thirty-fucking-years of “questioning” and “trying to be a dude” and that not working — NOT. AT ALL. — so a barrier between we binary trans gals who figure it all out so early and the poor queer boy walking the fine line — not sure if that really works.
I envy to some degree folks like Janet Mock who figure it out real quick. Like, I’ve read her biography and she really does fit the “I always knew” thing. Which, good for her.
I mean, I guess the “Harry Benjamin Syndrome” women exist. But like I don’t even really notice them much. They seem to have very little remaining cultural currency these days.
(And it’s a shame that Harry Benjamin’s name gets brought so low. He was in his own way a great hero to us.)
Anyway, yeah.
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My reaction to the Blue-Eye hypothetical is the opposite of Ozy’s. If I ran into someone in our universe who hates themeself for having blue eyes, I’d feel like I might be able to talk them out of it, so I’d probably make an effort to do so. If I had the same encounter in HBEHU I would probably not even try, because I’d have to fight all society to help this person.
It seems to me that if structural oppression is as entrenched as is commonly believed, fighting it might not be effective altruism.
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One issue I have with structural-oppression-as-described-in-your-quote (and many arguments about it I’ve encountered on the internet) is that it tends to paint everything that harms the “down” group as “evil”, even when there are perfectly reasonable explanations for such actions; and to treat those reasonable explanations as they were just a shallow rationalization of irrational hatred.
For example, as far as I can tell. For example, for various reasons, Blacks in America acquired a bit of a reputation for being criminal, because of actual differences, greatly magnified by people’s biases, the news, etc. (gross oversimplification here). Gypsies in Europe also have a comparable reputation, except that as far as I can tell, it’s wholly deserved for them (at least, for those from Eastern Europe). And sure, there’s plenty of structural oppression towards them, that reputation makes it hard to find a respectable job, etc. which sucks for everybody. Yet I don’t think people who are especially mistrustful of Gypsies deserve any condemnation.
Or alternatively, in many places it can be very hard to evict a tenant who’s not paying; and as a result, landowners are very reluctant to lease their home to people from groups who are unusually hard to evict (the elderly, those with children) and/or likely to not pay (the elderly, the poor). This totally looks like structural oppression, but I find it hard to assign moral blame to a landowner in this case.
These kinds of cases are why I don’t like the whole idea of “fighting against oppression”, and would rather look case by case (i.e. are transsexuals harming anyone apart from the English Language? not really, and they *are* suffering, so please smack down on *that* oppression), or at the incentives created by the system as a whole (e.g. stupid laws “protecting” tenants that were probably made under the flag of “fighting oppression”), and see if the system can be improved.
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“Gypsies in Europe also have a comparable reputation, except that as far as I can tell, it’s wholly deserved for them”
I live in Eastern Europe, I have a friend who’s writing her pHD thesis on Roma (‘Gypsy’ is an offensive term, as I get rather tired of saying), and she’s found little evidence that the Roma reputation for crime is justified. So you may want to look for another example.
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Another Eastern European here, can confirm Roma folks seem pretty normal.
I’ve noticed that the most intense Roma-hate seems to come from Romania and Bulgaria, so perhaps their Roma are unusually evil? On the other hand, Romanians and Bulgarians themselves have a pretty bad reputation.
They are also the countries with the highest poverty rate. So I think it’s more likely that there’s more dysfunction in poor communities, which then gets essentialized into “Romanians / ‘gypsies’ / black people are lazy, dirty and criminal-minded”.
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For what it’s worth, I’m getting a fair amount of my information from a scholarly and respectable source: a bunch of anonymous comments on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/27v82c/cmvantigypsieroma_prejudice_should_be_viewed_as/
that thread has some interesting discussion of the topic – and a gipsy calling himself by that name is partly why I’m okay with using it too (though Roma works as well). I’m mostly thinking of the Roma from the East who recently moved to Eastern Europe and are definitely unwelcome in France, Germany and Italy.
From what I understand, Romania, Bulgaria, and especially Hungary are especially nasty towards the Roma, which could explain both their poorly adapted social norms (they’re used to being in “hostile territory”) and the fact that they want to move to the West.
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Also, another thread with some interesting comments : http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1u5vjh/i_believe_gypsies_are_bad_for_europe_and_should/
I’m mostly going on the fact that I’ve heard a fair amount of anecdotes of the form “Every single interaction I had with a Roma from Eastern Europe has been terrible”, and hardly any of the form “Most of the Roma I know are fine, normal people”. Whereas for African-Americans, the vast majority of anecdotes are of the second kind.
Not the most rigorous kind of analysis, I know, but I don’t trust the media nor academia to do a much better and clearer one (I admit I haven’t looked very hard for one), considering the risks to reputation.
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Ah, good old reddit. Infuriating as always.
Yeah, totally. If someone admits to being a ‘gypsy’ in a demographic survey, they’re just saying that they’re an abusive, sexist thief. We’d better arrest those shameless bastards on the spot.
Nope, not at all. Of course not.
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Nita: I’m not seeing where you’re pulling those quotes from … maybe somewhere in the stuff that’s downvoted to oblivion and doesn’t show up on my ctrl-v ? (I usually only read the most upvoted stuff in reddit threads…)
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@ Nomophilos
Both quotes are from your first link. I think they illustrate some characteristic attitudes pretty well.
Quote 1 is hidden, but it has a score of 41 points — pretty high for its depth. Search for “Morman” [sic] and expand the deleted reply.
Quote 2 is not hidden. Search for “People use”?
Also, take into account that your conclusion about Eastern European Roma/gypsies* is based on a comment by a Spanish person who’s never been in Eastern Europe, as far as I can tell. Paraphrase: “Oh, my people are diverse — some work typical middle-class jobs, some collect scrap — but those Eastern Europeans are all thieving scum.” Did it occur to them that Eastern Europeans who are settled and work middle class jobs usually don’t move to Spain?
* They do often call themselves the equivalent of “gypsies” here. But Russian black people call themselves the equivalent of “negros”, too.
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@Nomophilos: The fact that anti-Roma prejudice often coincides with anti-immigrant prejudice, and/or anti-Eastern European prejudice, does little to reinforce your point.
As for people self-identifying as ‘Gypsies’, my friend asked a bunch of Roma why they did that, and they said it was simply out of not wanting to go through the additional bother of explaining what ‘Roma’ meant to non-Roma.
I could find a bunch of racist comments towards just about any group on Reddit, it proves nothing.
(As an amusing addendum, the most common exonym for Roma where I live is neither ‘Roma’ nor ‘Gypsy’, but, literally, ‘black people’).
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Nomophilos:
“that thread has some interesting discussion of the topic – and a gipsy calling himself by that name is partly why I’m okay with using it too”
…nigga please.
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Nita: About Roma-in-spain vs. Roma-in-Eastern-Europe: both me and that person on Reddit are mostly talking specifically about the Roma from Eastern Europe who recently moved to Western Europe, and not about the other groups who had already been in the West for a long time, or who stayed in the East.
kalvansen: “I could find a bunch of racist comments towards just about any group on Reddit, it proves nothing.”
I agree you could, but I found those after searching for discussion of Roma on r/changemyview as it’s usually a place of somewhat intelligent discussion, that tries to represent all views. If you have suggestions for better, accessible and not-too-long sources of information on that topic I would be interested. It’s something that’s genuinely hard to get good information about.
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@ Nomophilos
Earlier, you said:
In other words, “Gypsies from Eastern Europe have a reputation for being criminal, which is wholly deserved”. Even shorter — “Gypsies from Eastern Europe are criminal”.
1) You did not specifically mention recent migration.
2) Let’s imagine that you did: “Gypsies from Eastern Europe who have recently moved to Western Europe are criminal”. Do you really stand by those words? Do you believe that not all black Americans belong in jail, but all East-to-West immigrants of Romani ethnicity do?
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Nita: yes, my original comment did not specifically mention recent immigration, so I clarified what I meant in later post. It was an off-hand comment about structural oppression, not a well thought-out manifesto – I didn’t expect some kind of spanish inquisition!
*jarring chord*
No, I don’t think they are “all criminal”, or even less that they all belong in jail.
In the US there’s this thing where African-Americans are more likely to be implied in various kinds of crime, and some people react too strongly to that and confuse “more likely to be criminal than white people” with “more likely to be criminal than not being criminal” and so act in a way that is completely at odds with the *actual* risks, a bit like how idiots avoid taking the plane because of 9/11 or some stupid movie etc.
And more aware Americans (those that are better at stats, or just spend enough time with actual black people) realize that this is bunk.
BUT I also think many Americans heare what Europeans say about the Roma, and assume it’s the same pattern going whereas actually as far a I can tell the ratio of Roma you’re likely to interact with in the street *is* actually high enough so that being extra careful is totally sensible.
A woman holding her purse more tightly when crossing the path of an African-American is being irrational, but doing so when crossing the path of a Roma might not be.
(Which, again, doesn’t mean *send them all to jail*; you don’t send people to jail because they might commit a crime, due process matters, etc.)
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I’ve passed them on the street, I’ve stood next to them on buses and in bus stops, I’ve talked to them. All of my stuff is still with me.
I don’t know, maybe we should get even more specific. Maybe there are some evil gypsy clans in Romania/Bulgaria/Hungary that supply the entire Western Europe with “bad” gypsies. But then you should find out what they call themselves and narrow down your statements until they’re actually true.
Right. I don’t call them “criminal”, either.
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You don’t seem to be arguing in good faith, just looking for “points” to strike against me. Which is a general frustration I have with SJ-ish people; discussions tend to turn into a “try to accuse your opponent of racism” game, which is totally useless from the point of view of either “get a better understanding of the situation” or of “find actual solutions to the problem”.
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” If you have suggestions for better, accessible and not-too-long sources of information on that topic I would be interested. It’s something that’s genuinely hard to get good information about”
No, I don’t know any short or easily accessible sources. If you don’t want to engage with anything too dense or too long, that’s your call, but I would really recommend not concluding your prejudice must be objectively correct based solely on short, accessible sources.
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kalvarnsen: I’m trying to avoid the classical “just go spend a month reading this huge thing and you’ll see I’m right” which is a lazy argument I’ve seen used a few times (“read the Bible!” / “go read all of Mencius Moldbug!” / “read the sequences!”).
I’ve tried to honestly show whatever (weak) evidence I had, and so far you have shown me pretty much no reason to think otherwise. Snide dismissals like “concluding your prejudice must be objectively correct” don’t help convince anyone.
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Also, take into account that your conclusion about Eastern European Roma/gypsies* is based on a comment by a Spanish person who’s never been in Eastern Europe, as far as I can tell. Paraphrase: “Oh, my people are diverse — some work typical middle-class jobs, some collect scrap — but those Eastern Europeans are all thieving scum.”
Huh. Kinda reminds me of the traditional of some German Jews (and gentiles, for that matter) toward Ostjuden.
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” Gypsies in Europe also have a comparable reputation, except that as far as I can tell, it’s wholly deserved for them (at least, for those from Eastern Europe). And sure, there’s plenty of structural oppression towards them, that reputation makes it hard to find a respectable job, etc. which sucks for everybody. Yet I don’t think people who are especially mistrustful of Gypsies deserve any condemnation.”
Let me see if I can address this. I’ll use Italians as an example. At a certain time in the US, especcially the NE US organized crime was dominated by Italians. This was a simple fact, the important criminal gangs were made up of Italian families. This meant that Italians had a bit of a reputation as criminals, or as people associated with criminals, and, perhaps, in some ways this stereotype was true. That does not excuse being especcially mistrustful of Italians. Italians running the mob did not mean that the many Italians who were not working for the mob were any more criminal than anyone else. Antiziganism is a serious problem in Europe, it not only makes it hard for gypsies to get jobs it also means they are more likely to be harassed by police and they are often subject to violence. It is also present in the US in the tarot reading culture. Many gadje readers will warn people against gypsies ripping them off and will spread negative rumors. This is much milder than what happens in Europe, but that doesn’t make it ok.
Meanwhile, as far as discrimination by landlords against people they might be barred from evicting, that is also illegal, just harder to catch. Certainly the landlord is acting from rational self interest, not out of prejudice or evil, but that is exactly what makes the oppression structural, the structure of society causes people who act in their own rational self interest to oppress members of those groups.
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Do you agree that it’s theoretically possible that people from one identifiable group are significantly more likely to commit petty theft, and that if that’s the case, it’s perfectly reasonable to e.g. keep an extra eye on them if they’re inside a store you own, or if they’re standing too close to you in a crowded place?
Do you disagree that this is theoretically possible, or do you just think it’s factually not the case for Roma in Western Europe?
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Because as long as we agree that this case is theoretically possible, it seems like this would be grounds for “structural oppression” (i.e. the petty theft people would be much less likely to find jobs, etc.) but I find that the *framing* of “oppression” is not very well suited to handling this case; pretending the people who are extra watchful when the petty-theft-people are around are “evil racists” is doing nothing to solve the problem.
And I find that a more interesting topic than the specifics of to what extend the Roma fit the bill.
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If someone’s standing “too” close to you, you should probably be careful regardless of their skin color. If no one will hire people of a “criminal” ethnicity, how is an honest, hard-working person of this ethnicity supposed to survive?
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That’s a good and interesting question, and my beef with talk of “oppression” here is that it suggests the solution of blaming the potential employer for not hiring the “crime-prone” group. I’m not even sure it would be better for society as a whole if employers or landowners sacrificed themselves (losing money from theft, bad tenants etc.) in order to slightly improve the conditions of disadvantaged groups (i.e. the benefit may be offset by them going out of business and harming everybody).
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Uh, I guess that’s why SJ people call such things structural? That is, these problems are hard to solve by individual actions?
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Imagine group B is really significantly more likely to commit crimes. I actually think it is still very racist to treat members of group B different from group A (A is the “average” group). At least as long as group B is not absurdly dangerous. My feeling is you have a moral obligation to the numerous safe members of group B. And if this requires you sacrifice some of your safety so be it (as long as that sacrifice is not crazily severe).
Alot of people seem to think its ok to engage in actions as long as you are genuinely trying to keep yourself safe (and the facts are with you). I don’t. I think even if the Roma stereotype is true you are racist if you treat Roma differently.
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I think it would mostly depend of what kind of actions you have in mind when you talk talk about treating group B differently from group A – about how much it impacts you vs. innocent members of group B.
For example, if it means “inconspicuously leave a hand on top of my handbag and keep an eye on it”, then it’s not really harming any group B-er, and it’s potentially protecting me, so it’s not the kind of safety I find it sensible to sacrifice.
For employers and landowners, where acting on the increased risk (i.e. not hiring / leasing) significantly harms innocent group-Bers, then I’d say it’s more of a moral dilemma; one that can be attenuated a bit by e.g. doing a good background check that might provide more information than group membership. Otherwise, I think it’s admirable if they *do* make such a sacrifice, but I don’t like the idea of condemning those who don’t (and especially not of treating them as equivalent to people who just hate different people out of stupidity).
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I think most of the points I was going to make have already been covered by other people, so I’ll just say, I notice that there’s no mention of relevance. Which maybe just shows how different the SJ-er notions of “racism”, “sexism”, etc. are from the notions I was previously familiar with. Those were about fairness — they meant you were judging by irrelevant criteria rather than relevant ones; they were relevance violations. This notion of “structual oppression” seems to be unrelated to that. Not that that’s necessarily a problem, of course; but I thought it was worth pointing out.
(To briefly head back to this post, I think this is also related to why saying someone is “racist” tends to have the connotation that they’re mustache-twirlingly evil. Normally when people do bad things, we think, it’s because they’re selfish, they get something out of it. When someone does something bad but doesn’t actually benefit from it, we conclude it’s worse than that, they’re a terrible person who just likes to hurt people. Racism falls under that: A person making a bad judgment due to racism doesn’t benefit from it, because, well, it was the wrong judgment. Somebody may well benefit from it, but it’s not the person making the racist judgment. It’s not selfish, which means it’s either stupid or sadistic. “Stupid” is basically the right answer, but…)
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Holding racist beliefs allows you to instantly feel superior to a large chunk of humanity. That’s a benefit. Similarly, when a man says, for instance, that “men have invented everything”, it helps him feel better about himself, even if he has invented nothing.
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But that’s not unique to “isms”. Oppressed people sometimes feel superior because they can more easily disown the bad things their society has done. Unintelligent people can feel superior by appealing to “street smarts” and being down to earth. As far as I can tell everybody does this.
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Eh, sure. I just pointed out that racist beliefs can bring some psychological benefits, and so we can’t conclude that racists are either sadists or so stupid that they act against their own interests.
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Nita: That renders the whole notion trival, though, if you count such psychological benefits; counted that way the “selfish” branch subsumes the whole “sadistic” branch, and you can never judge something as pointlessly evil unless it’s stupid.
(Note that I would not suggest that this is actually a good way to think about this, at all. Just a model of how people might think about it.)
Also it might be appropriate to generalize “selfish” to “selfish or nepotistic”; then racism can go in that branch rather than “sadistic”. But [large class of people that includes e.g. most Americans] would I think generally consider “Well I’d like to help out my own race” as pretty terrible as well. Which I guess shows the weakness in this framework — now I’m not explaining it, I’m just restating of the phenomenon! Oh well. Still might be something there at least.
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^ on the politics of last-place aversion.
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@Nita: I think that there is a meaningful distinction here, even though it’s not about pointless evil. This is a bit more tentative than a lot of what I say, as regards the details, but I think the gist of it is correct:
So, it’s reasonable to have a certain degree of tribal pride when one’s champions triumph over the other fellow’s, sure. The classic example is sports: I contribute negligibly at best to my school’s team winning a home game which I attend, and certainly not at all to a victory in an away game, or in a home game that conflicts with my schedule. Nevertheless, if we win a game against one of our major rivals, then I’m apt to smirk at the handful of people I know who have ties to the school in question the next time I see them, and cheerfully ask if they caught the game yesterday. (And then they’ll be confused because field hockey is the one sport I actually follow fairly consistently, and they weren’t even aware that there was a game yesterday, because it wasn’t football or men’s basketball. But the point still stands!) I think this is entirely reasonable, because it’s fundamentally human, and good for creating a sense of belonging.
But there is a limit not only to how much of this it’s reasonable to indulge in, but even to how much it’s reasonable to want to indulge in. To want to feel like you’re on the winning side and that fellow from the other tribe is not is fine. To want to feel like you’re a prince and he’s dirt is not, unless (a) tribal allegiance is at least to a large extent voluntary and (b) your tribe is actually morally superior to his[1].
Race isn’t voluntary, and the archetypal attitudes of racial pride that people think about in connection with “the evils of racism” are pretty damn extreme. So discriminating against someone else simply because it reinforces your sense of racial superiority to do so is not just a vicious act, it’s an act that aims at a vicious end. In contrast, discriminating against someone who belongs to a race that’s statistically more likely to do bad things if they get an opportunity is still (outside of extreme cases) a vicious act, but it’s one that aims toward an entirely reasonable end.
[1] Which I why I think that glorying in being culturally Western as opposed to, say culturally Arabic is fine, as long as you’re willing to accept as equals in that glory racial Arabs who assimilate sufficiently thoroughly to Western culture.
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That’s an interesting idea about people who do pointless evil being seen as extra-evil, and about racism and such being pointless.
However, I think where that line of thought goes wrong is in assuming that everyone who acts in a racist way knows they are being racist and can separate their racism from other factors informing their decisions. A big part of modern anti-racist activism is pointing out that unconscious racism is a thing. At a job interview, if the interviewer holds unconscious racial bias, they may think they are making objective decisions based only on relevant factors, but in reality they might be seeing black candidates as less qualified than white candidates. For that matter, even if the interviewer is consciously racist – they consciously believe that black people are not very competent – this too may color their perceptions of black job candidates, and they may still consider themselves fair and objective when they reject those candidates because they think the candidates are incompetent.
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Well, I mean, that’s basically the “stupid” branch. 😛
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Sniffnoy:
Yeah, that’s what I thought you might’ve meant, just wasn’t sure 🙂
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I did a quick google search for “is not structural oppression” and found the following (trigger warning: everything)
Sexual body dismorphia in transwomen (both because it isn’t caused by society and because transwomen are really men and therefore their pain is funny)
Society being horrible to asexuals and demisexuals (because it isn’t intentional)
Being gender-shamed to near-suicide made worse by being intrinsically thin-skinned (because while both have causal links, only the second cause counts)
Various hurtful stereotypes of gamers (no reason, just mockery, though maybe this one shouldn’t count because the first person to use the phrase “structural oppression” was using it sarcastically)
Discrimination against men (either because it isn’t “systematic” enough, though in what way is left vague, or simply because they aren’t women)
natural disasters, ethnic and religious conflict, illness, corrupt bureaucracy, poverty, sexual violence,
and the global market (because there is no class of human villains)
It’s possible I would have found more if I’d search for “it’s not structural oppression” or “that’s not structural oppression”, but both good statistical hygiene and laziness call for leaving it as is.
As near as I can tell, every single one of these meets the standard of “people with a particular trait get screwed over a lot“. Ozy: do you agree with that assessment?
If so, it seems this definition doesn’t match how the term is used in the wild.
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I feel like the discussion here has a lot of resonance with “Social Justice and Words, Words, Words.” “Structural oppression” has a perfectly reasonable definition! It’s just not what 90+% of the people using it mean by it.
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In theory there may be a formulation of structural oppression that makes sense, but in practice it is used to enforce double standards and hierarchies of empathy.
Added more criteria, like whether something can be done, doesn’t necessarily help; it just adds in more ways to use the term self-servingly. Who decides whether something can be done about a particular case of suffering? To know whether something can be done requires knowledge of the situation. So if we just refuse to inquire into the outgroup’s situation, we can say that not much can be done, it’s their fault not society’s, and they are not structurally oppressed.
Yes, it’s useful to consider whether people getting screwed over is related to to institutions, cultures, and hierarchies, as long as we consider that it might happen to all groups.
We get into trouble when trying to define “dominant” groups. This assumes a single axis of dominance (which Scott over refers to as the “unidimensional” model of privilege), while in reality, there are multiple axes of advantage.
If we take the pyramid model, rather than one pyramid with cis het white men positioned at the top, there are a bunch of different pyramids. The standard social justice model has one pyramid, which is mostly about socioeconomic status. In reality, there are many pyramids, such as social hierarchies, legal hierarchies, political hierarchies, ideological hierarchies, moral hierarchies, and sexual hierarchies. And the order that different groups sit on the pyramid is not the same.
To make matters even more complicated, for some pyramids, you might have members of your group at both the top and at the bottom. And in some cases, a low position on a pyramid may be not be unjust, but that’s another discussion.
When a group sits at the bottom of all or most pyramids, then I think it’s safe to say that they are a not a dominant group (e.g. trans people). But some groups (e.g. men and women) actually sit high on some pyramids and low on others. So it is meaningless to call them “dominant”, “privileged”, or “oppressed” without the context of which pyramid you are talking about.
In practice, “structural oppression” is used to say that your ingroup has it worse by cherry-picking all the context, axes, and “pyramids” where your ingroup has it bad, and ignoring or trivializing the contexts, axes, and pyramids where other groups have it bad and your group comes out well.
Could this view be true? Yes, it could be. Maybe your group really is low on most pyramids, and the pyramids you are high on are the short, crumbling ones. Maybe the outgroup really occupies an unjustifiably higher perch in most areas of life.
But even if you confront them with good arguments that the disadvantages to the outgroup are institutionalized, systematic, and hierarchical, they will never say “oh, well you’ve convinced me that your group is structurally oppressed, too.” They will say that your struggles don’t satisfy checkboxes X, Y, and Z, even if X, Y, and Z are obviously present.
They will keep trying to add special sociological qualities to their groups struggles, and deny the institutionalized, systematic, and cultural nature of yours. Or they will say that your disadvantages are deserved. I think we saw all of those reactions to Scott Aaronson’s post, though it was as plain as day that what happened to him was encouraged by institutional and cultural messages, despite him being on the extreme end of suffering.
Humans are notoriously self-serving and envious, so they are biased to believe that their struggles are the worst thing in the world and their advantages are trivial and justified (which is occasionally arguable for some people in some contexts, but is not correct as often as people think it is). We see patterns and social influence in the bad things that happen to our ingroup, while the bad things that happen to the outgroup look like individual exceptions.
As for solvability, people may be biased to believe that their struggles are due to solvable social problems, while the struggles of other groups are natural, deserved, self-inflicted, or intractable.
While theoretically “structural oppression” could be a useful framework, in practice it is a moving target that only seems to apply to social justice ingroups. The only way to salvage it is to make it more inclusive and remove unprincipled exceptionalism from the criteria for “structural,” and to not just flatly deny structural features that others identify.
With a concept of “structural oppression” that makes any sense, there are probably no broad demographics who are not structurally oppressed in some relevant context in the present. That’s because if a group is doing well, other groups will start targeting them systematically, institutionally and culturally (e.g. Jews, upper-class Russians in the Soviet Union, and various present-day examples). Unless a disadvantaged group is suppressed to a feudal level and completely excluded from media, education, and government, it may eventually oppress the oppressors through whatever institutions and cultural footholds it can gain. Oppression wants to be cyclical.
The typical usage of “structural oppression” is itself a form of structural oppression because it creates an unjust moral hierarchy and trivializes genuine disadvantages from groups who aren’t designated victim groups.
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Great summary. With example of a nerds: why there is no structural oppression of nerds? When I was younger, I think I would fit a a bit of a nerd definition I later found in the net. What I learned from the movies for the children is that nerds just pretend to be clever, but really they are just stupid and full of themselves (smurphs; at one time kids in my neighbourhood got really tough at me because of “brainiac” in smurphs), they don’t desrve love of women they love, only love of other nerdish females, which were presented in movies as rather unattractive and ugly; and so on. Definetely I felt that society actively creates stereotypes which art hurting me.
Yet this was not the structural oppression.
And that’s my biggest problem with this term. It is so vague despite pretenses of being well-defined, that it allows to arbitrarily declare that something “is” structural oppression, while something else is not.
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Nail, head, boom.
The basic problem with the modern social justice movement is its total blindness to this bias and its consequences. Human psychology simply does not allow us to get away with creating a double standard, however justified we think it is. Group-selective application of empathy is always bigotry in practice.
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This does not make it wrong to recognize structural oppression, nor to advocate for it. It just means that SJ activists suffer from the same biases that everyone does, including our opponents.
So argue on the facts, use evidence, demand evidence, etc.
Which is to say, the theory of structural oppression can be true even if you encounter a nitwit on Twitter.
We should want to believe true things. Structural oppression exists.
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Structural oppression is not a fact, it’s a theory. Theories about society can be pretty much whatever you want them to be, because the space of facts to account for is vast and contradictory. See, e.g., MRAs arguing that men are an oppressed class because we have to fight all the wars and pick up all the garbage.
I believe structural oppression theory is nothing but an ad hoc way of justifying “My problems are real and serious; yours are trivial and probably your own fault.” The most charitable thing I can say about it is that it probably wasn’t intended that way.
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Virtually all SJ folks would agree that bigotry against trans is a form of structural oppression. (TERFs are an exception, but they are also frequently despised within SJ circles because they are transphobic). And yet most SJ folks do not identify as trans.
Virtually all SJ folks would agree that racism is a form of structural oppression (although not anti-white racism). And yet a huge proportion, perhaps a majority, of SJ folks are white.
And of those SJ folks who are not white, virtually all would recognize that racism other than racism against their own group exists and is also a form of structural oppression.
Virtually all SJ folks would agree that poverty is a form of structural oppression. And yet a huge proportion, probably a majority, of SJ folks are not in poverty.
Virtually all SJ folks would agree that anti-fat prejudice is a form of structural oppression. And yet….
Virtually all SJ folks would agree that homophobia and heterocentrism are forms of structural oppression. And yet….
I really could go on with this list for a long time. The idea that “structural oppression theory is nothing but an ad hoc way of justifying My problems are real and serious; yours are trivial and probably your own fault is obviously counter to reality.
Maybe you should examine yourself for “everyone I disagree with politically is a selfish jerk” bias?
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How about we amend stillnotking’s statement to be “structural oppression theory is nothing but an ad hoc way of justifying that the problems of the groups I empathize with are real and serious; yours are trivial and probably your own fault is obviously counter to reality.”
Also, comment stuck in mod due to links.
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But this does not indicate the social justice theory is false, merely that the process of social justice is flawed in the way that all social struggle is flawed. But it’s absence is also flawed, and I think flawed in a more serious way. So what we have is a locus of struggle, for groups *who have a case*, but who are ignored by the broader SJ community.
So if you want, make your case. But know the social context where your case is made. The “about the menz” conversation has been really poisoned by some very terrible cycles of abuse and mistrust. Fixing this will be hard work.
Which again, this shows that social justice is a human process. We do not speak with the authority of heaven.
I assure you, what you say will be evaluated. If you say, “It sucks for short guys, thus women have it easier and feminism is wrong…”
Bzzzzt! Try again!
How about: “short men have a kind of male privilege, but it is rather attenuated by the degree that society privileges tall men, and this is the result of actions by both men and women. Thus short men live diminished lives. This leads to frustration and pain.”
There is a ton of evidence to back this assertion. It is entirely consistent with SJ feminism.
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@veronica d: I think you misunderstood me. The MRAs’ case is equally bad, IMO, even if men, in general, demonstrably suffer more than women on a lot of objective measures of suffering. (And subjective ones — men self-report lower happiness.) My point is that suffering is ultimately personal, and ultimately egalitarian; prioritizing empathy on the basis of group membership is mere self-aggrandizement, an attempt (even if you acknowledge it an unsuccessful one) to speak with the voice of heaven. No group should have to “make a case” for receiving more empathy than another. The Oppression Olympics is the inevitable result.
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@Ampersand: The obvious objection is the one Distribution made, that coalition logic applies here. A perhaps less obvious objection is that a desire to draw the lines of the playing field, or merely feel important, is intrinsically selfish; believing one’s ingroup to be Satan incarnate can be a boost to the ego in its own way. White guilt is just as selfish as white supremacy.
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@Ampersand,
1. There’s a purely political form of selfishness apart from the selfishness of trying to reap tangible individual rewards. If a Democrat or a Republican tried to force through legislation that nakedly showered untold benefits toward politically favored constituents while inexplicably cutting those toward those aren’t, programs that aren’t even politically controversial, and they brook no compromise whatsoever, I think this is a form of ideological selfishness, and I doubt many people would object to the “selfish moniker”. Let’s say the Democrat is a senior Senator from California while the Republican is a senior Senator from Wyoming, so it won’t materially affect their chances of re-election or lofty appointments, so all vestiges of individual rewards are moot and can’t be used as an excuse.
This applies at the activist level as well.
2. One of the things in your list is not like the others. Anti-fat prejudice lacks the historicity of the others and out of all the ones in that list, most Americans would be the most skeptical of it being a structural oppression.
Trying to shoehorn in anti-fat prejudice while trying to keep others (which may also lack historicity or broad agreement from the public) out can most definitely be a form of selfishness, especially if done for gendered reasons.
@veronica d,
There’s also an alternative besides “society is unfair to short guys and thus women have it worse” and your formulation. Which is that short men can have some social privileges as men, some disprivileges as short men, and some privileges/disprivileges for other reasons, but the first does not win out over the others; the latter two no more merely “attenuate” the first any more so than the other way around. I suspect that this is much closer to the viewpoint of the people you’re arguing with than “society is unfair to short guys and thus women have it worse”.
But I like your formulation overall and if that was the message we were consistently getting from SJ feminism, there’d be no bad blood.
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Did you mean to type “women have it *easier*”?
In any case, on your last point, you are correct that SJ has got this wrong and this is bad. On the other hand, social justice is *broadly correct*, and throwing it out would be a bigger error than trying to correct it. But more, this bad blood is deeply entrenched and the people who support short men often use this as a tool not to elevate short men, but to damn social justice. It’s a ball in the field.
Likewise for male autism and likewise for male rape: political footballs in the hands of anti-feminists.
So yeah the conversation is poisoned and I don’t know how to fix it, but structural oppression is still true and social justice is still a broadly correct framework.
So we recognize this as a locus of struggle. And we fight.
Are you aware that trans folks were totally thrown under the bus by the broad gay liberation movement *for many many years*, and we had to fight our asses off versus unfair odds just to get other LGBTQ folks to accept us?
No really, this is a big fucking deal. These days the TERFs seem kinda a joke, but they used to be the received wisdom in gay and lesbian circles.
That Fucking Sucked! (It still sucks.)
But gay liberation remains broadly correct. It sucks we trans folks had to fight for a seat. But we had to fight.
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“Hierarchy of empathy”. Good phrase.
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Who gets to decide what’s structural and what isn’t? Who gets to measure who’s getting screwed over “a lot”, “just enough”, vs. “not enough”? Who gets to decide who’s analogous to your blue-eyed people vs. who’s analogous to civil rights marchers? That’s the crux of the issue.
This difference is huge. It’s essentially the difference between Society Must Change for you and You Must Change for society. (Or alternatively, you must Accept Your Place in the current scheme of things.) This is why the stakes are so huge. Contrary to what OP’s implying here, there is no confusion here. The reason people act like the former has been violated is not because they misunderstand SJ theory, but because they understand it and find it to be false and inhumane. To many people, suffering from a clearly broad-based social pattern or prejudice against people of their type, and being told the latter is a form of denying the validity of their suffering; especially if the speaker is clearly hypocritical and demands that the Earth move for lesser offenses against their pet demographics.
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I find the OP’s standard to be too fluid and subjective to be useful to anyone. Generally, when SJW’s try to draw a line between structural oppression vs. other sorts, they try to draw a distinction in kind, not of degree. Though the OP never referenced the below, I’ll address below some common distinctions they try to draw that are common enough that it bears mentioning when this topic is brought up. It’s good for my own record-keeping to write these thoughts down somewhere, anyway.
1. Anything that correlates to higher likelihood to becoming a CEO or holding high public office counts as structural oppression; any form of suffering that does not, is unfortunate but just a part of life.
I’m going to address this one first, because I see it as the relatively strongest one, so I’ll spend the most words against it. My replies to the other two are derivative of what I’ll say here, anyway.
A) SJW’s clearly believe that many things that have little, no, or even positive correlation to likelihood of CEO-hood count as oppression, if they disproportionately hurt a demographic they care about.
An obvious example is ageism. Ageism cannot exist under this schema, or if it does, it only exists against the young. For a variety of gender-specific reasons, when SJW’s talk of ageism, the default definition seems to be ageism against the old. Ageism against the old cannot exist because advanced age is perhaps the single demographic trait most overrepresented among CEO’s and high public office. In fact, by this standard, ageism against the young is one of the most pressing issues that there is, by far swamping out a lot of other, more established –isms.
Anti-fat prejudice is another. I don’t think a positive causal relationship exists between fatness and CEO-hood. But I remember a study saying that overweight men are somewhat more likely to be elected to positions of public office, while overweight women were somewhat less likely or neutral, I forget; given findings like this, I don’t think a negative one has been established, either. Given that weight correlates with age and age correlates with traditional power, I’d strongly suspect that the overall correlation is somewhat positive, though correlation is not causation. Then again, SJW’s claim that merely having people in power who “look like you” provides some vague privileges.
And asexuality sounds like it will have a neutral or even positive correlation with attaining high positions of power. This list could go on and on, but I’ll clip it here.
B) Conversely, there’s a lot of things that can pretty much instantly disqualify you from executive positions in the public or private sphere, that no one would agree counts as structural oppression (though maybe we should?). I really like queenshulamit, stargirlprincess, and Toggle’s thread up above, which I wholly agree with, and discussed, among other things, extreme body modification. Sporting extreme body modifications obviously makes you ineligible for top public leadership positions, a lot faster than many traditional –isms would. And again, the list could go on and on to include a lot more than just body mods. But surely that doesn’t count! Obviously, that’s an inappropriate comparison, and you’re just trolling!
I’m reminded of the argument that all morality must come up from God or the Bible, because man cannot be trusted to come up with such things on their own. The obvious rejoinder is . Well, that’s obviously wrong! they’d reply. In which case it sounds like men like them are perfectly capable of coming up with an independent morality outside of God or the Bible after all.
If it’s so obvious a priori what’s appropriate or not to be considered an oppression like this, why do you even need the CEO component in the first place? Sounds like your mind is already made up.
C) Correlation with higher likelihood of CEO-hood or presidency itself is difficult to prove, given the multitude of factors involved. Social science has its limits, and there aren’t an infinite number of studies. This means that much of this is just kicking the can down the road, CEO-hood becomes a political Rorschach test, and we simply read into it the prejudices and beliefs we already had coming in. Let me illustrate an example.
I don’t doubt that sometime within the next five years, a study will come out finding that people who are 60 pounds overweight are much less likely to X, where X is something pretty damn important. Lefty media outlets will proclaim that this vindicates everything about fat activism. Well, with something about 60 pounds, no duh. From what I’ve seen in the world, very obvious, undeniable prejudice will definitely set in by that point. What if it were something like 20-30 pounds, instead? Because of how nebulous and multifactorial something like attainment of executive leadership positions is, I bet this couldn’t be proven or nailed down. And yet it is a creed of SJ that girls don’t need to be even that overweight to feel a whole host of negative effects, and that these collectively can be framed as an oppression.
Meanwhile, a study will come out showing that people with social anxiety, severe social awkwardness (as measured by some latest psychiatric diagnostic tool), or place anywhere on the ASD are much less likely to Y. This will be treated much more carefully; the usual suspects will sanctimoniously warn about the limitations of this study, how it most definitely does not apply to garden variety of social awkwardness and definitely definitely not for that hateful horde of people out there “self-diagnosing with Asperger’s”. Whereas someone like me would believe that “garden variety social awkwardness” is the equivalent of being 20, 25 pounds overweight.
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The point of all this is not to force others into “admitting” something that they clearly don’t actually believe. “Fine, anti-old/anti-fat prejudice doesn’t exist! Anti-body mods prejudice does!” No, that serves no one, and for the record I do believe the former exists (it’s rather obvious). The point is it’s the mark of a bad, gerrymandered rule that not even its loudest proponents can keep to it consistently. Because it’s morally unintuitive and doesn’t actually represent how people live, prosper, or suffer through everyday life. Something that hurts someone unfairly now is bad because it’s unfair now, not because of its ramifications for one’s career path decades down the line.
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2. Vague appeal to historicity.
Again, this works for racism/sexism/homophobia, but not so well for some of the newer, “softer”, less established oppressions. LOL nerds aren’t oppressed! They were never denied the vote or had dogs sicced on them by the police! Uh… neither were fat people. Or an endless list of similar examples.
3. Immutable traits vs. changeable traits.
This is applied too inconsistently to be useful. Religion is the quintessential example of something that’s changeable but can be used as an axis of oppression. Other traits are immutable and demonstrably make one’s life worse, and are probably underrepresented among people in positions of power, yet no one’s seriously arguing for it being oppression.
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This paragraph should read:
“I’m reminded of the argument that all morality must come up from God or the Bible, because man cannot be trusted to come up with such things on their own. The obvious rejoinder is (insert Old Testament atrocity here). Well, that’s obviously wrong! they’d reply. In which case it sounds like men like them are perfectly capable of coming up with an independent morality outside of God or the Bible after all.”
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Agreed completely.
What about things like prejudice against conservatives in social science? It is real; liberal academics openly admit they would discriminate against conservatives; conservative students admit they fear discrimination and are affraid they would not fit in liberal academia; so, is this example of structural oppression or not?
I mean as soon as you start to discuss with a SJW and ask for actual examples of structural oppression, the seemingly clear and nice definition becomes all muddy and based on “I perceive that to be oppression”.
I mean is fat-shaming structural oppression? Why is it so?
Is prejudice against conservatives a structural oppression?
What about nerds? Rednecks? Are rednecks structurally oppressed? What about my group, Poles? Are Poles structurally oppressed? What about blondes, with all those stupid blonde jokes? We can go even further in here. Why some group some people as a “groups” that can be oppressed, while other groupings are invalid? Can you say that “murderers are structurally oppressed” or sadists, thieves, paedophiles, schizophreniacs?
I am of impression that everyone can be structurally oppressed, and that’s why the term “structural oppression” is invalid and of no practical use, except as a way to minimize suffering of some people.
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Did you intend that to be a list of random groups people tend to dislike, or are you saying that paraphilias and mental illness are morally equivalent to crime?
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list of random groups people tend to dislike and which would have problems finding job, starting political career, and so on, and for which – except schizophreniacs – the dislike faced by those people is somewhat, in my humble opinion, somewhat justified. E.g. paedophile may grumble all he wants that the culture is prejudiced against him and his desires, but I’d say it should stay that way, all while understanding his pain and the possibility of lack of choice he has.
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OK, we both agree that (generally) dislike of murderers and thieves is justified, while dislike of people with schizophrenia is not. So, let’s look at the paraphilias.
I think you’re lumping together different things. Here’s my view:
– disliking harmful actions – OK
– disliking people who have performed actions you consider harmful – can be OK
– disliking sexual arousal related actions you consider harmful – can be OK
– disliking people whose sexual arousal is related to actions you consider harmful – not OK
People can’t change most parts of their brain wiring, so it makes no sense to hate someone who hasn’t done anything wrong just because their brain is potentially problematic.
A sadist or a pedophile is a potential abuser in same way that every person with a sex drive is a potential rapist — that is, technically it’s true, but this potential doesn’t justify moral condemnation.
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@Nita Well, basically I say ye to most things you have written. I am not advocating a hatred towards sadists, paedophiles, and so on, if they had not did anything wrong. I was rather asking whether paedophile is right by saying “I am structurally oppressed, because when I express my desire in public, people react by eww, I could lose friends and so on”. I would say public condemnation of people actually EXPRESSING their desires and wishing to fulfill them is justified – e.g. if a society tries to prevent paedophiles from fulfilling their wishes, this is perfectly OK for me.
And yet, by what I read, it seems there is a structural oppression towards paedophiles. Or maybe not? And if not, then why not?
(BTW, There are even people trying to convince you that paedophilia is not actually that harmful and legal age of consent should be lowered, that is they try to dispute the “harmful action” part. )
PS: Just curious, this is not attempt to convince you of anything:
If people can’t change a large part of their brain wiring, and large part of that is because of genes; then their behaviour surely is also effect of things beyond their control. For example, the willpower, the ability to try to change and control your behavior is also – possibly – affected by genes.
Why then hating someone for something he did is OK, why hating someone for having a desire to do it is WRONG?
I mean, for me it is obvious why, but I am not using the rationale “you cannot change your brain wiring”. I am only interested in what is the rationale behind this difference, if you are using arguments “you can’t blame someone for the way his brain is wired”.
I hope I expressed myself clearly – I am not native speaker.
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Yeah, I’m actually pretty skeptical about the moral justification for blame and punishment, in the light of what neuroscience has shown so far.
But from a pragmatic perspective, behaviour seems to change when the belief “people will dislike you if you do X” is held by the subject. “People will dislike you if you are Y”, however, seems to have mixed results.
And from the point of view of conventional morality, so to speak, judging people for their actions is an ancient tradition.
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Here are three fascinating audio stories about this topic, by the way: http://www.radiolab.org/story/317421-blame/
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It’s interesting that ageism against the young gets so little attention from the social justice movement, when young people face more legally sanctioned discrimination than any other group (except maybe felons), in addition to the same sorts of cultural and personal biases as other groups. IMO, any theory of structural oppression that doesn’t rank youth as the most active axis of oppression is suspect.
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Seconded,
Which “curse” would be worse: being a white man who wakes up one morning to discover that he’s become black, or being an adult who wakes up one morning to discover that he’s become a ten-year-old boy?
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I think to be meaningful, any theory of structural oppression has to contain a concept of not just differential treatment but unjust differential treatment.
Doug compares being black to being ten years old. But – Star Trek scenarios aside – it is not unjust that we don’t allow 10 year olds to drive or work full time. It is unjust that Black people have to fear the police and are discriminated against by employers.
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Nobody wants to believe they’re supporting the unjust kind of differential treatment. People managed to come up with rationalizations for why the differential treatment of women and black people under the law wasn’t unjust, too.
We look back at phrenological charts from the 1900s that purported to explain why the female brain wasn’t suited for complex decision-making, and we laugh at how silly they were and marvel at how sexist people must’ve been to use them to deny women the vote.
Then, we look at modern fMRI images that purport to explain why the teenage brain isn’t suited for complex decision-making, and we solemnly nod and wonder if it’s time to raise the voting age.
When someone reacts to a person based on their demographics instead of their individual characteristics, we call them out for objectifying, or for unfairly generalizing: crime statistics don’t justify treating all members of a race as potential criminals.
But when faced with the fact that setting the voting age at 18 means rejecting many younger people who are just as qualified, we shrug and accept that there’s going to be collateral damage.
In other words, the standard of justice seems to be much, much lower when it comes to this particular form of discrimination.
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” People managed to come up with rationalizations for why the differential treatment of women and black people under the law wasn’t unjust, too.”
I think that corpses should be fully equal people under the law. Corpses and also racoons.
If you disagree, I will respond that you’re rationalizing for differential treatment, just like racists and sexsits do.
Is that a good argument, do you think?
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I never said there weren’t good reasons for the oppression of ten-year-olds…
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Hmm, interesting.
Are you saying you believe the evidence that corpses and raccoons are incompetent to exercise their legal rights is as flimsy and subjective as the evidence that young, black, and female people are?
Or are you saying you believe that young people, black people, and women are as obviously and universally incompetent as corpses and raccoons?
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To be clear, what I’m saying is:
1. The evidence that young people are universally incompetent to exercise their legal rights is as flimsy and subjective as the evidence that black people and women were.
2. Even to the extent that young people as a class have a higher risk of being unprepared to exercise a given right, that doesn’t justify discrimination against all young people, any more than, say, crime statistics justify discrimination against black people, or upper body strength statistics justify refusing to hire women in physically demanding jobs.
I believe you’re holding discrimination against young people to a lower standard of “justice” than other types of discrimination, in one or both of these areas.
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I’m obviously not saying either of those awful things. Why not ask me if I’ve stopped beating my wife, while you’re at it?
Being disingenuous and mean is not being clever.
What I was saying is that some distinctions are made due to substantive differences, rather than prejudice. And the fact that some people have made bad arguments rationalizing prejudice based on race and sex doesn’t establish that ALL arguments that distinguish between two classes of humans – to use a clear-cut example, between dead people and living people – are identical to the arguments made by racists. Therefore, your argument that all distinctions are the same as racism and sexism fails. You have to do the work of showing that having different rules for children and adults is unjust;
There are a bunch of important differences between (Blacks or women) and children, even though some people are all three at once. Three year olds, to use the extreme case, are genuinely less competent than adults along many objective measures. That we don’t allow three year olds to drive is not baseless prejudice.
Another essential difference is that all humans progress from being an infant to adult, and (apart from death) this transformation is unavoidable. Thus the distinction that (say) adults but not children are not allowed to work full-time impacts all individuals equally over the course of their lives. There is thus an essential equality to the different roles – parent, child, etc – assigned to people according to age that is very different from permanent unequal roles assigned according to race or sex.
Pragmatically, it’s not viable to make full-time wage work legal for all 8-year-olds and then depend on individual assessment to avoid the child exploitation and horrific child abuse that would result. There are pragmatic and important reasons we outlawed child labor, based not on prejudice against children, but on real-world experience with children being horrifically damaged by policies of no legal difference between children and adults.
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@ Ampersand & taradinoc
Both of you seem like kind and reasonable people. Can we try to narrow this discussion down to your actual disagreement?
E.g., I think both of you will agree that parents should not be allowed to beat their kids into submission, or send them to “camps for troubled teens” run by shady individuals with no appropriate qualifications. At the same time, I think both of you will agree that a ten-year-old cannot sign a legally binding contract or consent to sex. Am I wrong?
This problem — how to ensure that guardians* act in the best interests of their wards and relinquish their power as appropriate — is actually one of the largest unsolved problems in our society. It’s like the principal-agent problem, but with an extra status difference that makes it even worse.
* and in a way, the power of law makes the state and its voting citizens the guardians of everyone too young or otherwise “unfit” to vote
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Sure, I agree with all that. Taradinoc?
I’d also favor lowering the voting age, although I’m not sure where it should be lowered to.
(Thanks for playing peacemaker.)
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@Ampersand:
Well, I did point out the flaws in the most common arguments in favor. But I disagree with this premise: I think discrimination against a demographic group is unjust by default, and the social justice movement tends to recognize this in all other cases. If you want to say that the treatment you fight against when it’s done to women and black folks is acceptable when it’s done to 17 year olds, I think the burden of justifying that is on you.
I agree, but that doesn’t support the idea of discrimination against an entire age group. Let me illustrate with an analogy:
“Skinny fashion models, to use the extreme case, are genuinely less competent than men along many objective measures of physical strength. That we don’t allow 90 pound women with below-average muscle mass to work as firefighters is not baseless prejudice.”
This is an argument for discriminating based on strength, not on gender. Likewise, yours is an argument for discriminating based on driving ability, not on age, and we already require drivers to demonstrate their individual driving ability.
Does that mean racism and sexism would be OK if everyone had to spend some time on both ends? I’d say increasing the number of people who are subject to unjust discrimination makes for more injustice, not less.
That’s a noncentral example: 8 year olds generally aren’t the young people who are itching to get a job, and most forms of age discrimination have no history of abuse to justify them.
Many forms of age discrimination could easily be eliminated without being replaced by individual assessment, either because an individual assessment already exists (like passing a driving test before getting the license, or winning an election before being elected to the Senate), or because the forbidden act poses negligible risk (if you do a bad job of voting, you’re just contributing a tiny bit of statistical noise).
@Nita:
I don’t agree with that. I don’t think I’ve met any ten-year-olds who I’d trust to be able to make either of those decisions, but there are very few generalizations we can make about the mental abilities of any large group of people — if there’s even one person who can, then discriminating against them is unjust.
Also, the mental requirements for making those decisions are pretty vaguely defined. It’s hard enough to judge whether a specific person sitting right in front of you is capable of doing them, let alone an entire class of people you’ve never met.
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I see what you mean, but in this particular case the issue seems purely theoretical — in practice, I don’t think a person who has attained such maturity and social knowledge by the age of 10 can exist.
Yes! So, what do you suggest? If we get it wrong one way, we deny competent minors their rightful agency. If we get it wrong the other way, we get Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter H. Breen.
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…unless you raise them in a controlled environment specifically designed to develop the ability to correctly sort contracts into “probably good for me” and “probably bad for me”, to the exclusion of everything else, I guess.
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What do you believe is involved in that ability? I just don’t see what’s so demanding about it.
Evaluating a contract means weighing the benefit against the cost, and your future ability to hold up the contract against the penalties for breaking it. I think any doubt about someone’s ability to do that has more to do with their life being unpredictable than their mental capacity: if they sign a lease on an apartment today, are they still going to want it in 6 months, and are they still going to be able to pay for it? Making the decision is almost trivial other than that.
When there’s any doubt, err on the side of giving people more control over their own lives, not less.
I can’t imagine where erring on the side of giving people less agency would ever be a better option, other than cases of temporary incapacitation (e.g. drunkenness or injury) where the potential injustice will last a matter of days at most.
Also, note that the current system of ageism wasn’t sufficient to stop Marion Zimmer Bradley or Walter H. Breen, and considering that their victims came forward to accuse them of molestation (i.e. they believed it to be nonconsensual), I don’t think it was necessary either.
Also also, note that there are many, many, many forms of ageism where the downside isn’t nearly as emotionally charged. What’s the worst that happens if we let a 24 year old run for the House or rent a car?
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