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According to Iris Marion Young Oppression is systemic and built into the structure of society we recognize today. She states, "It's causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and collective consequences of following those rules"(Young, 39). Oppression is another term for the prolonged and unjustified treatment, specifically in marginalized groups. Marginalized groups face oppression as a collective. The five faces of oppression are violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and cultural imperialism.

In this article, the five faces of oppression are at work in the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v Wade. The supreme court is a key figure in the structure of society as we know it, and it has been carried by the five faces of oppression; exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.

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Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times

If you focus on the Supreme Court's expansion of equal rights since the 1950s, you could see Justice Samuel Alito's stunning, leaked draft opinion as a shocking, anomalous reversal, a decision at odds with the trajectory of the court.

But in doing so, you would also have to ignore the fact that for much of the court's history, it has been used as an instrument of oppression.

The potential for persecution is always present in the court, lurking like a recessive gene, waiting for an opportunity to express itself.

Opponents of equality know this well. That's why they focus so heavily on the courts. It is why Senator Mitch McConnell stole an appointment from Barack Obama and defied his own rationale for doing so - because it was an election year - to rush Amy Coney Barrett onto the court.

There are no inviolable rules for those bent on oppression. There is only winning, at all costs, no matter the casualties. Conservatives would abide a boor like Donald Trump because he could give them the judges they wanted, the judges who are now poised to reverse federal abortion protections.

The court is a product of the framers of the Constitution. And, for all their flashes of brilliance, they made some terribly flawed decisions about our government. That's why originalists, those who believe that judgments by the court must conform to how the founders understood the Constitution when it was written, are so dangerous.

As Thurgood Marshall put it in a 1987 speech, when the founders wrote "we the people" in the preamble, "they did not have in mind the majority of America's citizens." They did not see white women as equal citizens. They didn't see Black people as citizens at all.

As Marshall would say: "I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a Civil War and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today."

And yet the originalists know that they can turn that clock back. They know the horrendous history of the court, and they want it to rise again.

It was the court in 1857, in the Dred Scott case, that ruled that the framers believed Black people were "beings of an inferior order" and "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

As Douglas A. Blackmon laid out in his brilliant book, "Slavery by Another Name," it was the court that in 1883 "ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the one federal law forcing whites to comply with the provisions of the 14th and 15th Amendments - awarding voting and legal rights to Blacks - could be enforced only under the most rare circumstances." He wrote, "Civil rights was a local, not federal issue, the court found."

Alito used similar logic in the leaked draft of his decision that would overturn Roe.

It was the court that sanctioned the architecture of Jim Crow in its "separate but equal" ruling in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. And it has continued to hand down oppressive rulings since then.

In 1927, the court upheld the forced sterilization of the disabled. In 1944, it upheld the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1986, it upheld sodomy laws in Georgia.

And now the court has signaled a willingness to revisit some of its previous rulings that increased equality and curbed oppression. In 2013, the court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and now we are entering a new Jim Crow era, as conservative state legislatures adopt waves of voter restrictions. In just a few short weeks, the fundamental right enshrined in Roe nearly 50 years ago could disappear overnight for millions of American women. What's next? Is anything truly safe? The answer is "no."

The court is not bound by public opinion, the will of the voters or changing mores.

The court is a permanent council that answers to no one. It can behave as it chooses. The robes can go rogue.

This is the power Republicans want - the power to overrule the will of the majority - and the courts are one of the only areas where that power can be guaranteed. Conservative activists have fought for decades for this moment. Two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump (neither of whom won the popular vote when he was first elected), appointed five of the nine justices on the current court.

The average age of those five justices is 61 years old. And, as Forbes noted last year, the average age of a justice leaving the court, by death or retirement, has increased to roughly 81.

Republicans and their judges may well have just ushered in a new age of oppression.

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Opinion | The Supreme Court as an Instrument of Oppression

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If you focus on the Supreme Court's expansion of equal rights since the 1950s, you could see Justice Samuel Alito's stunning, leaked draft opinion as a shocking, anomalous reversal, a decision at odds with the trajectory of the court.

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White women have used the court system to contribute to the genocide of Black men for centuries...

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White women have used the court system to contribute to the genocide of Black men for centuries...

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Braden speaks to white southern women in an effort to rally support for the release of Thomas Wansley, a Black incarcerated man. Wansley was convicted of raping a 57-year-old woman; she could not identify him at the time of his arrest. Although his conviction was overturned in 1964 due to ongoing protests, once the protests stopped, Wansley was convicted again. Braden speaks on the Myth of White Southern Womanhood; if a black man is convicted of a crime against a white woman, there is no mercy for him. By remaining silent white southern women are actively imprisoning Black men and are using the “wronged white woman” status to maintain a sense of identity.

This article is eerily similar to the premise of Braden’s piece that white women have blamed Black men for assault to have their moment in court and feel like they have power. By walking on the backs of Black men, white women are benefiting themselves and contributing to the genocide of Black men at the hands of the police.

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There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.

"Rise Up," a statue by Hank Willis Thomas at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It's the nation's first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence. Credit... Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

At a time of so much death and suffering in this country and around the world from the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be easy, I suppose, to take any incidents that don't result in death as minor occurrences.

But they aren't. The continued public assault on black people, particularly black men, by the white public and by the police predates the pandemic and will outlast it. This racial street theater against black people is an endemic, primal feature of the Republic.

Specifically, I am enraged by white women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their white femininity to activate systems of white terror against black men. This has long been a power white women realized they had and that they exerted.

This was again evident when a white woman in New York's Central Park told a black man, a bird-watcher, that she was going to call the police and tell them that he was threatening her life.

This was not innocent nor benign nor divorced from historical context. Throughout history, white women have used the violence of white men and the institutions these men control as their own muscle.

From the beginning, anti-black white terrorists used the defense of white women and white purity as a way to wrap violence in valor. Carnage became chivalry.

We often like to make white supremacy a testosterone-fueled masculine expression, but it is just as likely to wear heels as a hood.

Particularly in the post-Civil War era, when slavery had been undone, white male politicians used the fear of rape of white women by black men to codify racial terror.

As the author and scholar Rebecca Edwards has pointed out in her book "Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics From the Civil War to the Progressive Era," white politicians have long focused their furor by claiming to be the defenders of white women, a last guard against their suffering.

As Dr. Edwards noted, Mississippi's James Vardaman, arguably one of the most violent racist politicians in American history, and that's quite a feat, said in 1903, "a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, a vote for the quelling of the arrogant spirit that has been aroused in the blacks by Roosevelt and his henchmen, ... a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women and children." Vardaman, who once famously said, "If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," won election and became governor of Mississippi.

Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them.

But it goes even further than that. The Tulsa Race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it.

In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted for the killing of two little white girls. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. His trial lasted only a couple hours. There was little or no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses or calling of defense witnesses. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty, and he was sentenced to death.

He was just 5 feet 1 inch tall. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, "He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders." Some say the book was in fact a Bible.

A circuit court judge threw out Stinney's conviction in 2014.

The torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he "grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her." His torturers beat him, shot him in the head and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. A few years ago, the woman admitted to an author that she had lied.

Till's lynching would serve as the big bang of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus, she said that she was thinking of Till.

This practice, this exercise in racial extremism, has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 911, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men.

In a disturbing number of the recent cases of the police being called on black people for doing everyday, mundane things, the calls have been initiated by white women.

And understand this: Black people view calling the police on them as an act of terror, one that could threaten their lives, and this fear is not without merit.

There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for these white women not to know precisely what they are doing: They are using their white femininity as an instrument of terror against black men.
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Opinion | How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror (Published 2020)

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There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing. At a time of so much death and suffering in this country and around the world from the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be easy, I suppose, to take any incidents that don't result in death as minor occurrences.

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Recognizing privilege is a step towards liberation for all...

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Recognizing privilege is a step towards liberation for all...

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Peggy McIntosh argues for the abolition of structural privilege. She recognizes the importance of recognizing privilege and dismantling at the structural level, such as in the Supreme Court. McIntosh states that she was taught that racism puts people at a disadvantage, but she was not taught about the advantages or privileges racism gives her as a white woman. Although she faces oppression for being a woman, she understands racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same. She still faces advantages as she is white. Privilege to her is weightless, and people choose not to speak about it, which keeps white privilege and racism alive. Privilege is the series of advantages one has because of their background and proximity to whiteness.

This article by Global Citizen discusses the challenge of accepting you have privilege and how important it is to recognize you have privilege. Global Citizen then connects the acceptance of having privilege to taking steps towards liberation for all.

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I am a social worker. By virtue of the work I do, I think a lot about privilege. The process of becoming comfortable and open to acknowledging, critiquing, and accepting my own privilege hasn't been easy. It didn't happen all at once. I have had many "aha" movements that have helped me to understand my own privilege in relation to the clients I am serving and the world at large.

My profession puts me in the position of assisting individuals who are in need of resources, and who are often facing economic, educational, and environmental conditions different than my own. Further, when assigned a new case, I immediately hold a degree of authority over the client. Social workers are gatekeepers to resources that an individual needs - and are often unable to access without assistance. It's a complicated dynamic. Good social workers attempt to curb the power imbalance, but it's critical we acknowledge a simple truth: as professional social service workers we are, by-and-large, working from positions of privilege over our clients.
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Thinking about privilege and challenging it is an ongoing exercise. It's something that has become part of my daily consciousness. But it's a difficult concept to grapple with - and one that I didn't come easily. I am constantly learning to challenge my position in the world, and understand the power imbalances that I am a part of. With friends, I sometimes will bring up the subject of privilege (not in a preachy way, I swear!) and am always surprised at how divisive the topic is.

Case in point: At a dinner with a friend to who works on Wall Street, I began discussing a recent New York Times article that looked at how high school students challenged and thought about privilege. I said, "I find it sad that a student was quoted as saying that she didn't want to be called privileged, just because her parents were able to buy things." There was a long pause, and my dining companion responded, "Well, who is to say she is privileged? She could be experiencing a lot of things that make her life hard."

Photo: Pearly

This comment is the crux of the issue when discussing privilege and how many misunderstand the term. Having privilege does not mean that an individual is immune to life's hardships, but it does mean having an unearned benefit or advantage one receives in society by nature of their identity. Examples of types of identity that can afford an individual privilege include: race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, country of origin, lanuage, and/or ability.

I'll use myself as an example: my privilege stems from my whiteness, cisgenderedness, middle-class upbringing, education, resources to food, access to health care, and familial support. In many ways, I am an expert on the ways my privilege has benefitted me. This is not to ignore that my gender, femininity, and introversion don't at times put me at a disadvantage, but it doesn't take away from the many unearned benefits I was handed simply from being born with certain traits and resources.

When I explained this to my friend during our fancy West Village meal, he became defensive. He cited his struggles learning to read, being born into a household with parents who had immigrated from Europe, and being in debt from school as reasons that he should not be assumed to be privileged. While he did reference the disadvantages that women and minorities experience, he would not identify with the label of privilege.

In my experience, his level of defensiveness is not unusual when discussing privilege. When I think about unacknowledged privilege as a phenomenon, I recognize that since hierarchies in most societies are interlocking, there is most likely a lot of privilege (be it gendered, white, heteronormative, socioeconomic) that is denied and protected. As a white person, I realize that I have been taught about privilege as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but I haven't been taught to see one of its corally aspects - that my privilege puts me at an advantage over others. What I am reflecting in this article is not my inherent understanding of privilege, but rather a reflection on the knowledge I have gained through friends, mentors, teachers, observation, and reading.

As society generally does not give lessons on how to combat and speak about privilege, it puts the onus on us, global citizens, to address imbalances. While privilege is a tricky subject to talk about, and can spark misunderstanding. From my work as a social worker, I suggest a list of five tactics I use when discussing privilege with others - or with yourself.
1. Lead with empathy. Get an understanding of individual experience.
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I find that part of the issue in discussing privilege, is that even individuals who have LOTS of privilege want to be acknowledged for their hardships. This makes sense - we all want empathy towards our life challenges.

When I first enter into a conversation about privilege, I start by asking about the ways in which the person does not have privilege. This is helpful not only in understanding the person more, but also extending empathy. In a conversation as touchy as one on privilege, it's important to try to disarm defensives and cultivate open dialogue. Then, after speaking with the person about the ways in which they don't hold privilege, I ask in what ways they do. (I'll use myself as an example: while I am a woman, dyslexic, and have a chronic medical condition, I ALSO have the privilege of being upper-middle class, living in the United States, holding a graduate degree, having financial resources, and being white.)

I find that structuring a conversation that includes the way people have and don't have privileges makes it easier for others to understand the power of privilege in creating a system of oppression - and this process is transformative.
2. Understanding the relativity of privilege
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For instance, I am right handed, and in turn, have never been forced to write from a desk that is not fitted for me. It's a privilege I have by nature of my birth. But it's not to say that my right-handed privilege has the same social responsibility as the privilege that is my white skin color, wealth, and sexual orientation. The point I am trying to make is this: our identities are nuanced and intersectional.

Some of my close friends will get defensive when discussing privilege because they are afraid that the discussion will not talk about the powerful ways in which they do not have privilege, and as a defense, they deflect to speaking to only these things.

It's important to understand - just because we have don't have certain kinds of privileges, it doesn't mean that we don't benefit from other kinds of privileges. If we realize this, it's easier to work together with folks who share our privileges and those who don't to create a better, more equal, world.
3. Systematic injustice is good for no one
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Systemic privilege hurts everyone.

Consider white privilege - For instance, in the US white privilege is a construction created by rich Europeans who wanted to combine their wealth by pitting poor Europeans against Indigenous and African peoples working as slaves. Poor white people were made to feel that they were superior to other races, and were given small privileges over people of color to create diversion. What this meant was that poor white individuals got to be superior to blacks, but still were not on equal footing with wealthy whites. Ultimately, these privileges don't create advantage for the vast majority of the population, and subsequently, this division creates unfairness - and that's bad.

Similarly, men have social and economic privileges over women. This is created from a deep rooted patriarchy that prioritizes men over women. Male privilege isn't helping anyone ultimately though - it doesn't help families where mothers make less than male partners, and it doesn't benefit women in helping to advance the fields of science, math, technology, journalism, finance, and engineering. We all lose when people are treated unfairly and not on the merit of their person.

Ultimately, in order to move from a space of marginalization, people need to confront their privileges and recognize that inequality helps no one. As global citizens, we have the revolutionary ability to transform the political, economic, and social environment by recognizing that injustice creates a societal imbalance that negatively impacts everyone.
4. You don't need to feel guilty or defensive when discussing privilege
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One of the best life-lessons my father taught me was that guilt is a useless emotion. And it's true. Guilt is a feeling that ultimately does nothing in bringing about change. I try to use this concept when I talk to friends about privilege. A lot of time, people will respond with defensives, or guilt. I have had my fair share of conversations where someone will literally (and I mean literally) throw up their arms and say, "It's unfair, sure! But what am I going to do?"

To this I respond with a reminder that each of us is able to undermine the system of oppression by refusing to live with unchecked or unacknowledged privilege. Simply by reflecting and challenging our privileges, and working to change the system of discrimination through direct discussion, we can help to shift the status quo.
5. Consider ways in which to equalize power
Photo: wehearit.com | some people carry "lesser" burdens

To create change, it's important to frame discussion on privilege with actions. As such, the conversation shouldn't be, "Check your privilege, stupid!" but rather, "How can we work to make sure that we are understanding and undermining the system of oppression and privilege that hurts all of us?"

By framing the dialogue on action, and steps toward liberation, the conversation is more accessible and powerful. For instance, ask yourself questions like, "Can I, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time?" If the answer to this question is yes, challenge yourself to address why this is. Is it strictly due to demographics, or are those demographics shaped by historical discrimination? (For a list of anti-oppression questions, visit Dr. Peggy McIntosh's open letter ).

For more actionable change, reach out to like-minded people within your community. I will give a personal example on how addressing my privilege got me involved in grassroots organizing: After a year of working as a social worker, I was dismayed by inequalities within social services. I reached out to a group that mobilized social service workers who were committed to addressing injustice. By joining with others with similar interests, I felt I was working to transform a broken welfare system, and it resulted in my professional work being more impactful.

I encourage all global citizens to reflect on the privileges you have, and the privileges you don't have. Extend this conversation to your friends and family members to build a world that is focused on equality and fairness.
In order to break the systems of oppression within our societies, it is important to intentionally set-aside time to think about justice, and whether or not our values are aligning with the ways in which we live our lives.
What are your thoughts on privilege? Is it a topic you have familiarity with? Share your thoughts in the comments, and continue the discussion about privilege with friends and family members!

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Why It's Important to Think About Privilege - and Why It's Hard

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I am a social worker. By virtue of the work I do, I think a lot about privilege. The process of becoming comfortable and open to acknowledging, critiquing, and accepting my own privilege hasn't been easy. It didn't happen all at once.