One Piece of Everyday Oppression

I've been thinking recently about one very particular kind of use to which oppressive statements get put, one that I really do not get to witness all that often these days. I can think of one social context that I still occasionally inhabit in which it occurs, and one or perhaps two other contexts which used to be part of my life. It is an interesting example because it functions somewhat differently than most instances of people with privilege making oppressive statements amongst ourselves, and it illustrates a particular way in which different oppressions interact with each other.

Most of the time when we are in a group consisting solely of others who do or are presumed to share privilege along a certain dimension, most of the oppressive statements that we hear (and, let's be honest, at least occasionally make, no matter how well developed we think our politics are) are made with either no conscious understanding that they are oppressive or with a kind of semi-conscious invokation of complicity among the privileged people who are present. Those kinds of statements happen all the time, in all contexts of which we are a part.

In this instance, I'm thinking about the relatively rare (in my experience, at least) situation in which a statement is deliberately made precisely because it is known by the speaker and the listeners to be oppressive. It is made deliberately because its oppressive nature is seen by the speaker as being transgressive, because most of the listeners would rather it was not being said. In the contexts in which I have experienced this, most often these statements are racist but occasionally homophobia is also used this way, and even more occasionally a subset of sexist statement which carefully objectifies women in general or some other specific woman or class of women but could (in a sexist way, of course) be argued to have nothing to do with those women who are present. In any case, it is important to how these statements function that they are not perceived as being directly oppressive to anyone actually hearing them (whether or not this is actually true). The contexts in which I have seen this happen are ones in which all of the people present are white or presumed to be straight, but the majority of people present would object to such blatantly oppressive use of language, albeit mostly not in a way with any overtly political basis.

The people who use these statements, in my experience, tend to be older white men who occupy a position of power within the context.

These deliberately oppressive and transgressive racist or homophobic statements are used to assert and reinforce patriarchal power within the context in question. The speaker knows that most people present would object in some way to the statement, and he makes them precisely to assert that he has the power to exert decisive influence over the content and boundaries of this social context. Gender-based power is signified and reinforced by racially or sexually oppressive statements.

In my experience, these statements have usually remained unchallenged. Over the lifetime of the social contexts in which I have experienced this kind of statement, I can recall some early efforts to engage with them, before the contexts had settled into the form in which these statements were a defining feature. These efforts at engagement usually resulted in conflict in which the gendered power inherent in the context was asserted more directly, failed to effectively challenge that gendered power, did not stop such statements from occuring again, and soon enough were no longer attempted. Once or twice since the still-current context attained its current shape, I have witnessed a response which tries to address the blatant racism of the original statement with a counter-statement crafted in such a way as to disagree with its content in a way that replaces blatant racism with liberal orientalist racism, and that makes clear in its conciliatory manner an acceptance of the underlying patriarchal structure of the interaction. When this has happened, it has not been well received by the original speaker, and obviously it is responding to the transgressive (i.e. impolite, "not tasteful") nature of the original statement rather than its oppressive nature as a whole.

I should add that this kind of situation is among those in which I do the worst job of responding to oppressive statements, I'm not proud to say. In general, everyone present -- subordinate males, women, children -- has made decisions to navigate that particular social context by enduring rather than challenging its underlying patriarchal structure. I tend to exist in the contexts I'm talking about in this post in a very detached way, so I'm not generally part of the conversations in which such statements arise, merely a weary witness who mostly isn't paying much attention. All of this makes it much more difficult to respond to in a constructive and politically appropriate way, I find, than if it is peers talking over a pint or whatever. Which doesn't excuse inaction, of course, for anyone who tries to claim the label "ally."

But still, one part of figuring out how to respond in situations like this is recognizing that doing so involves challenging a very intimate, personal, gendered assertion of a right to dominate a social space. It is important to consider such situations in advance because the power structure most personally relevant to how we respond is not the one that the statement itself is about, and we need to figure out what that means for how we respond.