#imaginary oppression

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

How to Tell if You’re Living in a Patriarchy

Arguments that patriarchy exists in the West today are largely dependent on reinventions of the concept that would be better dispensed with.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Re-Published: Mar 28, 2025

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in Areo Magazine in July 2017.

The word “patriarchy” seems to be everywhere. In newspapers, online magazines, talk shows, or social media, as soon as the issue of gender relations or rights is raised, so is the spectre of “the patriarchy.” Battles rage over what it means, whether it exists now, and whether it ever did exist. My area of research focuses on the ways in which English women negotiated patriarchy using religion in the late medieval and early modern period, so I am fairly confident it did. A historical understanding of patriarchy rejects both the claim that it was a straightforward form of male domination and the claim that it is a feminist fabrication and never really existed. Arguments that patriarchy exists in the UK, US, or much of the Western world today are largely dependent on reinventions of the concept that I argue would be better dispensed with. Instead, they should be replaced with more rigorous investigations of whether gender discrimination exists and a more positive attitude towards individuality.

Patriarchy literally means “rule of the father” and on the most basic level, refers to literal fathers having the right to direct the family which includes sons. When sons marry, they become the head of their own family and when daughters do, they come under the rule of their husbands. In patriarchal societies, women are excluded from positions of ruling power and denied autonomy in their own lives. This was imposed by law and social expectation for most of recorded history. In Christian cultures, the idea of the patriarch became closely related to the idea of God, the Father. Although the likelihood is that God was depicted as a father because the concept of the father as one who both loves and disciplines and is to be respected and obeyed was already widely accepted, Christianity perpetuated this as a moral imperative.

When considering patriarchy in historical terms, it is often pointed out that a naive view of society in which all men had power over all women fails to take account of class and that women of the ruling class had rights and advantages that men of lower ones did not. This is undoubtedly true. Hierarchical class structures required men to defer to women of a higher one in many ways throughout the medieval period and only changed gradually in the modern one. However, it is a mistake to try to “even things up” in this way and argue that because nearly everyone was oppressed for most of history, gender inequality was insignificant. There existed throughout medieval and early modern English history a deeply gendered structure of society in which ruling class men had authority over ruling class women and working class men over working class women. Women were required to obey their husbands and nearly always required to marry either by family or by financial necessity. Wives had no right to own property until 1870, no right to decide their own movements, no right to their children or to work without their husband’s consent. Professions and roles of public authority were simply closed to them.

On a deeper ideological level, there was an understanding of the masculine as that which rules and the feminine as that which is ruled. This was so deeply entrenched that murder of a husband was considered treason in England. The Petty Treason Act of 1351 recognised three cases of aggravated murder in which a superior is betrayed by a subordinate: servants killing masters, clerics killing prelates, and wives killing husbands. This was not abolished until 1828.

When Elizabeth I came into power in 1558, she needed to use a considerable amount of rhetorical skill to overcome the very real scepticism of her advisers and subjects about a female leadership. For this, she depended upon a medieval understanding of the king’s “body politic” and “body natural” in which the king was both a divinely appointed ruler and a mortal man to enable her advisers and subjects to feel they could separate her female form from her royal authority. We see this in her speech at Tilbury in 1588,

“I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.”

Of course, she never married. A better criticism of the concept of patriarchy as a simplistic gendered power structure is that this ignores the fact that there are different spheres of power and different ways to exert it and that whilst women may not have had much legal power, they possessed it in other forms. Much of my work has focused on the ways in which women obtained autonomy and authority for themselves using the systems of law, social expectation, community justice, and religion. Recent social history attempting to uncover women’s history has revealed a far more active role for women than was previously assumed. A naive reading of history could assume that because records relating to women so often take the form of sermons and treatises telling women to stay at home and be quiet, this is how women lived. In the popular mid-fourteenth century text, “How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter” young women are instructed to be “meke and myld,” particularly to husbands referred to as “your lord” and to stay at home.

Go not as it wer a gase [goose] Fro house to house, to seke the mase [entertainment] Ne go thou not to no merket To sell thi thryft, bewer [beware] of itte. Ne go thou nought to the taverne, Thy godnes for to selle therinne; … Wherever thou comme at ale other wyne [beer or wine] Take not to myche, and leve be tyme; … Ne go thou not to no wrastylynge [wrestling] Ne git to no coke schetynge [cock shooting]

However, it should be clear that there would be no need to keep telling women to avoid talking a lot, talking loudly, talking angrily, arguing with husbands, visiting friends, markets, taverns, getting drunk and attending wrestling and blood sports if they weren’t doing all those things fairly consistently.

Christian cultures also gave women the opportunity for a limited autonomy and authority via religion despite religious doctrine frequently being the justification for denying them both. In a patriarchal Christian society, the ultimate patriarch was God and it was understood within medieval Catholicism that God talked to men and women. This enabled holy women and those who would be saints to become figures of spiritual authority and it also provided lay women with some power to “go over the heads” of their husbands and fathers and cite communication from God himself. Within early modern Protestantism, it was understood that women could and should interpret the bible for themselves. Drawing on Christian humanism in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer was enabled to write an intensely logical rhetorical refutation of the idea that women should be subordinated due to the sin of Eve by pointing out that it was men who killed the son of God and saying, very much tongue in cheek, that she was prepared to let bygones be bygones if they were.

Historians have uncovered records of women using a strong knowledge of law to their advantage and consistently organising and managing Church events around which communities were based. The latter in particular put them very much in charge of the social lives of communities. Women could also call upon and enact forms of community justice to support them, and before the advent of policing, this was often the strongest form of law.

There is a remarkable account from the late 14th century of a Leicestershire priest named William de Swynderby (William the Hermit); who preached so frequently about the failings and pride of women (de mulieribus defectibus et superbia) that the townswomen plotted to stone him out of town. Hearing of this, he hastily turned his attention to merchants. He seems not to have felt that he could depend on the men of the town to stop the women and, in fact, his contemporary, Henry Knighton, describes this incident as an example of his flaw of “not knowing when to stop” (finem facere nesciebat).

Further complicating simplistic ideas of patriarchy is the fact that women were generally accepted to have the right to police the moral behaviour of other women. On the 24th September 1531, the Venetian Ambassador, Lodovico Falier, wrote:

It is said that more than seven weeks ago a mob of from seven to eight thousand women of London went out of the town to seize Boleyn’s daughter, the sweetheart of the king of England, who was supping at a villa on a river, the king not being with her; and having received notice of this, she escaped by crossing the river in a boat. The women had intended to kill her; and amongst the mob were many men, disguised as women. Nor has any great demonstration been made about this, because it was a thing done by women.

Falier’s observation that nothing was done “because it was a thing done by women” can only be understood by recognising the gendered spheres of power and authority. If men were to try to kill the later queen, this would be regarded as a punishable political act, an act of treason against the king, a protest against the rise of Protestantism, or an opposition to the rising power of the Boleyn/Howard faction. If women tried to attack Anne, this was more likely to be regarded as part of the unwritten right of women to punish other women; in this case, one who was attempting to steal another woman’s husband, and therefore none of men’s business. If Falier was correct and men disguised as women were part of the mob, this would have been done to conceal a political element and “legitimise” the assassination attempt as an established form of female community justice.

If we read only laws and sermons on the rights of women and the behaviour required of them by the Church, we get a simple picture of an oppressed and subordinated class but accounts by individuals of how society worked in practice show things to have been more nuanced. Communities had a tendency to work justice and fairness out among themselves around the rules of church and state, as did individual couples.

The most detailed account of a late medieval couple from the woman’s perspective is found in the Book of Margery Kempe written in the 1430s but lost until the 1930s. This autobiography of a woman’s religious life has been of most interest to historians as social history. We see evidence of patriarchy when Margery is asked for evidence she had her husband’s permission to travel, when she is told she must not preach because she is a woman, and when her protection from being thrown in jail for doing both is the names of her powerful father and high-status husband. However, the book also revealed that she owned a considerable amount of money and started two businesses, one against her husband’s wishes. More significant is that neither she nor her male scribe felt it necessary to explain how this was possible suggesting that her readers did not need an explanation. Further research has suggested that whilst all businesses needed to be registered in men’s names, some were, in practice, owned by women. There were also private arrangements in which women’s husbands accepted them as the owners of the money they had inherited or earned even though, legally, they had no right to it. Margery describes her husband, John, as “always a good and easy man to her” and gives us glimpses of her marriage,

It happened one Friday, Midsummer Eve, in very hot weather—as this creature [Margery] was coming from York carrying a bottle of beer in her hand, and her husband a cake tucked inside his clothes against his chest—that her husband asked his wife this question: “Margery, if there came a man with a sword who would strike off my head unless I made love with you as I used to do before, tell me on your conscience—for you say you will not lie—whether you would allow my head to be cut off, or else allow me to make love with you again, as I did at one time?” “Alas, sir,” she said, “why are you raising this matter, when we have been chaste for these past eight weeks?” “Because I want to know the truth of your heart.” And then she said with great sorrow, “Truly, I would rather see you being killed, than that we should turn back to our uncleanness.” And he replied, “You are no good wife.”

Margery is showing her readers her commitment to her holy vow of celibacy but modern readers have typically found this account humorous. On a psychological level, John’s thought experiment looks very much like a test of his wife’s feelings and his need to know he is important to her following the end of their sexual closeness due to her newfound religiosity. Margery’s book is full of her power struggles with patriarchal Church authorities, but with her husband, we see more of a personal, emotional negotiation between her intense, zealous personality and his easy-going, gentler one and much mutual affection. When looking at power relations, it’s necessary to consider not only the official rules but also the community’s sense of fairness and the couple’s bond and need to make their relationship work.

The reality of English history shows that people who claim patriarchy to have utterly removed any power or agency from women are wrong. Women have always been an influential part of society, deeply involved in forming and regulating cultural norms. They’ve also been loved by men who wanted them to be happy. However, people who claim that this and the class structure which gave some women more power than some men show that patriarchy did not exist are also wrong. Women were still explicitly and systematically subordinated to men by a system of laws and church- and community-enforced rules. When married women did run their own businesses, decide their own movements, and own their own money, this was because their husbands allowed them to and even then there were still many doors resolutely closed to them.

We cannot judge a system by the way the most just and compassionate people treat those they have power over but by how it allows the most unjust and cruel to treat them. A woman being visibly and severely abused would be likely to draw condemnation from the community and the Church might intervene and insist he stop it or even give permission to the woman to leave him, but there was still a considerable amount of abuse which was quite legal and respectable. A man could refuse to allow his wife to leave the house, set her unrealistic amounts of work, and beat her within accepted limits (a few strokes with a thin stick and not on the head) daily for any infraction with little consequence. He would be regarded as a “strict” husband but still respected in the community and approved by the Church.

This was the experience of the Puritan Anne Wentworth in the late seventeenth century but by this time there was a printing press she could use to publish her grievances. With his “barbarous actions,” Wentworth claimed her husband had “over-done such things as not only in the Spirit of them will one day be judged a murdering of, but had long since really proved so if God had not wonderfully supported and preserved me.” [He so over-did husbandly discipline that not only would he be judged guilty by God of a murderous spirit but could have literally killed her.] Her community did not protect her because “all esteem my husband as he is an honest, moral man full of blind zeal and hath the gift of his tongue. A man very fit for business and employment in this World, for he will not cheat or cozen any man.”

It was simply true that men ruled women and so patriarchy—the rule of the father—existed in a literal form, as it does today in some parts of the world. Women did not have the right to autonomy or authority, to own property or control their own movements and activities without their husband’s consent. They could not vote or access most positions of power or professions. Although women with loving husbands and no ambition to access positions only open to men could be happy in a patriarchy, it was an unjust system which restricted women and left them vulnerable to abusive men.

The dismantling of patriarchy in Britain began in the nineteenth century, at the end of which married women began to be able to own property and money and started to access professions including medicine and accountancy and to be able to live independently. This phenomenon was known as “the revolting daughters.” Throughout the twentieth century, rights and freedoms increased until women had attained the vote, access to all professions and qualifications, the right to equal pay for equal work, and the right to decline sex within marriage.

By all historical understandings of patriarchy and by looking at patriarchal societies that exist now, it seems clear that the UK and the US and much of the Western world are not patriarchal. Women are no longer obliged to obey their husbands and have full legal equality with men and access to all of the public positions that men do. Yet, within feminism in particular and to some extent in wider society, the word “patriarchy” is used to describe a problem in society that still needs to be overcome. How is this justified?

Most often people point to statistics showing that men are very much over-represented in politics and business and say that this is evidence of a society ruled by men. However, there is no law that only men can access these positions and some are held by women. Our current Prime Minister is, after all, a woman. There is little evidence that the imbalance is due to discrimination against women rather than different choices made by men and women. Since women have had access to all professions, they have quickly come to dominate education, healthcare, publishing, and psychology. Does this make these heavily social fields, which guide how society thinks and feels, matriarchal?

It is perfectly possible that some sexist discrimination against women is going on in male-dominated professions but we cannot discover this or the extent of it if we only look at those areas and do so with an a priori assumption that discrimination is the cause whilst ignoring the ample evidence that men and women have different interests and priorities on average. We need data which incorporates the whole field of employment and factors in men and women’s choices and does not assume that male-dominated fields are superior and the only ones which have power in society.

Another common argument for patriarchy is the fact that rapists and boorish men still exist. This is said to be evidence of a rape culture and is presented along with the fact that violent criminals, and particularly sex offenders, are much more often men as evidence of a society which devalues women and in which men feel entitled to abuse women. The problem with this claim is that we have a society in which violence by men against women is taken very seriously and punished more harshly than violence by men against men and much more than violence by women against anyone. Violence against women is also despised culturally and men are by far the greatest victims of violence. We have shelters for women and very few for men. We have a special register for sex offenders and they have to be segregated from other violent offenders in prison because hatred of them is so profound. It is very difficult to argue that a culture which regards sexual abuse of women as so abhorrent is a rape culture or that one which is so much more concerned about female victims of violence than male victims is a patriarchy in which women are devalued and abuse of them is acceptable.

A more modest claim of patriarchy is that it is seen in the fact that sexist and domineering men still exist and can even attain positions of power. There are men who feel that patriarchy should still exist or act as though they think so by belittling women, doubting their capabilities, talking over them, or condescending to them. Many of these accusations are justified. I have been told both rudely and politely that I am not the intellectual equal of men and cannot cope with public positions of responsibility and should stay at home and have babies. This is a recognised ultra-conservative view. It is not reflected in wider society which recognises my intellectual capabilities by awarding me academic qualifications and job opportunities. The mirror image of it is to be found in people who belittle men and generalise them according to the least ethical, intelligent, and productive male members of society. However, it is demonstrably false to claim that society approves more of sexist men than sexist women. We saw Tim Hunt reduced to tears, contemplating suicide, and feeling compelled to resign following a joke about sexist attitudes and recently an Uber director resigned following outrage that he had said a meeting with more women in it was a meeting with more talking. Meanwhile prominent female figures including politicians have been able to use the term “mansplaining” without comparable censure.

The most reasonable and well-supported claims that contemporary society continues to be affected by its patriarchal history relate to gender role expectations. Men can be expected to be the main provider even if this means they see less of their children whilst women can be expected to be more responsible for children and domestic chores even if this limits their ability to focus on their career. Men can experience much pressure to be emotionally and physically strong and dominant whilst women can feel pressure to be socially skilled, empathetic, and conciliatory. Even though there are good evolutionary reasons for gendered differences in these preferences and traits on average, there is much variation and overlap and social pressure to comply with them cannot be justified. Criticism of such pressure is warranted but it is unclear that perpetuating claims of patriarchy and thinking in terms of gendered class oppression will be more helpful than advocating individuality, challenging assumptions, and supporting gender non-conformity.

Patriarchy has existed for most of recorded history and its complete dissolution in law is recent. My 75-year-old mother remembers not being able to get a mortgage without a male guarantor and being told “there’s no accounting for women” when she asked to be able to take her employer’s accountancy exam. This is illegal now. If there is hidden discrimination against women, it will be found by rigorous investigation rather than assumptions based on “blank slatism” and ideological readings of statistics.

There is still a hangover of patriarchal attitudes in the form of socially conservative ideas of gender roles but now, for the first time, men and women are able to defy them and we get the chance to see what a society in which everybody gets to access everything will look like. It probably won’t result in men and women making exactly the same life and work choices in exactly the same numbers, but women are already everywhere. It is this ability to exercise autonomy and individuality to access every opportunity that we need to seize and the confidence to defy any social pressures we experience that we need to encourage. Approaches to gender equality which perpetuate ideas of women’s weakness and need for special protections in the public sphere can only undermine this goal. We have smashed patriarchy in the systematic sense and we can smash any residual cultural hangover with individual assertion of our own choices and respect for other people’s.

==

tl;dr If you live in a western country, you don't live in a "patriarchy" and you're not "oppressed." And we're just going to stop pretending, or taking seriously, the claim that you do and are.

If your best justification is outcomes - presidents, prime ministers, CEOs - and not laws, policies and procedures, then all you're doing is calling innate sex differences "patriarchy." And that's just whining about evolution.

You can't be disappointed Kamala Harris didn't win the US election and still claim you live in a "patriarchy" in the west. If you really believed in "patriarchy," you would have assumed she was going to lose because "patriarchy" would prevent her. (Why and how it didn't prevent her getting the VP position or being the unelected candidate is anyone's guess...) If you hoped or expected her to win, you already know and believe that it's entirely feasible for a woman to become US president. Even if she ultimately does not.

"Patriarchy" is the word people use when they're upset that men and women are different.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

I miss the days when comedy was more absurd than reality.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

If your threshold for ”oppression” is that low, then you’re not “oppressed.”

Stop co-opting and diluting the language of those with real problems.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

North Korea defector compares woke US ideology, education to regime tactics

“I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century … And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they inv

By: Rikki Schlott

Published: Feb 11, 2023

“They were in Manhattan, living in the freest country you can imagine, and they’re saying they’re oppressed? It doesn’t even compute,” Yeonmi Park told The Post of students at her alma mater, Columbia University. “I was sold for $200 as a sex slave in the 21st century under the same sky. And they say they’re oppressed because people can’t follow their pronouns they invent every day?”

The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.

Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.

In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.

“I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom, and found it,” she writes. “I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to my new home … I want us — need us — to keep the darkness at bay.”

She implores readers: “I need your help to save our country, while time remains.”

Park first made headlines back in 2015 with her book “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom” and for her bold claims that the woke environment she endured as a student at Columbia reminded her of North Korea.

In an interview this week with The Post, Park recalled what it was like to be a North Korean defector who escaped tyranny and oppression only to meet college students intent on claiming victim status and earning oppression points. She dubbed her alma mater a “pure indoctrination camp” and said many of her classmates at New York City’s most elite school were “brainwashed like North Korean students are.

“I never understood that not having a problem can be a problem,” Park said. “They need to make injustice out of thin air or a problem out of nowhere, because they haven’t experienced anything like what other people are facing in the world.”

She was born in Hyesan, North Korea, the second child of a civil servant, and grew up under the rule of then-Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il under the bleakest of conditions.

In the first five years of her life, an estimated 3.5 million North Koreans died of starvation. Park recalls hunting for cockroaches on the way to school to quell her hunger — even as the Kim’s regime banned the words “famine” and “hunger.”

“Darkness in Hyesan is total,” Park writes. ”It’s not just the absence of light, power, and food. It is the absence of dignity, sanctuary, and hope. Darkness in Hyesan is … watching your parents and neighbors hauled away by police for the crime of collecting insects and plants for their children to eat.”

After her father was arrested and sentenced to hard labor for the crime of trading dried fish, sugar, and metals, the Park family’s life in North Korea deteriorated even further. Finally, they planned their way out.

“I didn’t escape in search of freedom, or liberty, or safety. I escaped in search of a bowl of rice,” she writes.

Park’s sister fled North Korea first. Park, then 13, and her mother followed, crossing the freezing Yalu River into China. But rather than finding her sister, the pair fell into the hands of human traffickers who sold Park into sexual slavery. 

After years of forced slave labor, a still-teenage Park was finally able to break free and travel across the Gobi Desert to Mongolia with the help of Christian missionaries. From there, she went to South Korea where she found refuge and was granted citizenship.

Seven years after they were first separated, Park also reunited with her older sister. But they found out that their father had died shortly after he managed to escape to China.

Losing him, Park said, made her “step into a different life: one dedicated to human rights, and improving the lives of people suffering under tyranny. A life of meaning. A life that would make my father proud.”

When Park was a young girl, her mother told her the most dangerous thing in her body was her tongue and warned her that, if she said the wrong thing or insulted the regime, her family could be imprisoned or even executed.

“That’s the end of cancel culture,” Park told the Post. “Of course, we’re not putting people in front of a firing squad in America now, but their livelihoods, their dignity, their reputations, and their humanity are under attack. When we tell people not to talk, we’re censoring their thinking as well. And when you can’t think, you’re a slave — a brainwashed puppet.”

Since her time at Columbia, the New York City-based author and activist has started a YouTube channel, “Voice of North Korea,” where she shares information about life under the regime. She also joined the board of the non-profit Human Rights Foundation, where she works with dissidents from around the world and, most recently, helped with efforts to drop anti-regime leaflets in North Korea.’

Recently divorced, Park is also now a mother to a five-year-old son. She wants him to have the same freedoms she found in America — but is afraid they’re under attack by pernicious woke ideology, and especially identity politics.

In North Korea, Park said, the government divides citizens into 51 classes based on whether their blood is “tainted” because their  ancestors were “oppressive” landowners.

“That’s how the regime divided people. What an individual does doesn’t matter. It’s all about your ancestors and the collective,” she explained.

Now, when she sees Americans indulging in race essentialism and identity politics, she said, it feels eerily familiar.

“They say white people are privileged and guilty and oppressors,” Park said. “This is the tactic the North Korean regime used to divide people. In America it’s the same idea of collective guilt. This is the ideology that drove North Korea to be what it is today — and we’re putting it into young American minds.”

Park told the Post she hopes her second book serves as inspiration for Americans to fight back against false promises of “equity” while they still can.

“I really don’t think that we have that much time left,” she warned. “Already all our mainstream institutions have the same ideology that North Korea has: socialism, collectivism and equity. We are literally going through a cultural revolution in America. When we realize it, it might be too late.”

==

When someone who escaped North Korea gives you a warning, you pay attention.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

When you live in first world countries where the government doesn't just allow but actively promotes awareness and/or celebration days/weeks/months, you're by definition not "oppressed."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

When you have the luxury of learning about your "oppression" through postmodern and Marxian philosophy vanity classes in name-brand colleges, it's safe to say that you're extremely privileged, not oppressed.

If you were actually oppressed, they wouldn't be teaching it out in the open in colleges at all, earning degree credits and even funded by government loans, to students sitting in airconditioned lecture theaters taking notes on their MacBook Air.

If you were actually oppressed, things would look much more like Iran or China or Singapore, and much less like a kindergarten.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Melissa Chen: I Came to America for Freedom, but Now It’s Looking More Like the Country I Left

I grew up in Singapore, where I felt first-hand what it was like to live in a society where free speech is restricted. Social harmony is prioritized over civil liberties in Singapore's multi-cultural society, fomenting a culture of fear and self-censorship on top of legal prohibitions.

I moved to America for college when I was 17. I wanted a challenging education and a social milieu that valued the free exchange of ideas because I knew that was the only way to grow intellectually and cultivate emotional resiliency. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I realized that the America I had sought was increasingly resembling the conditions in which I grew up in in Singapore.

Across town from me in Boston, Harvard University had disinvited a record number of speakers, for reasons including their views on topics like immigration, Israel, and sexual orientation. Harvard’s guidelines banned “behavior evidently intended to dishonor such characteristics as race, gender, ethnic group, religious belief, or sexual orientation.” This guideline was nearly identical to what was law in Singapore.

But even worse than that, an intolerant ideology that promoted collective guilt and racial essentialism had begun to emerge. I noticed my white and male classmates were not being allowed to express opinions that addressed issues related to people of color or women. Phrases like “check your privilege” became a part of everyday conversation. This was something that I never witnessed in Singapore, a nation that was prosperous despite its faults because of its focus on the equality of all people.

After university, I co-founded an organization named Ideas Beyond Borders, where we translated and digitied texts about Enlightenment ideas into Arabic for free. We worked with translators who lived in places like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran and Iraq. My exposure to so many failed states led me to see the common denominators that undergirded societal dysfunction and civil conflict; many of these places were severely dogged by extremism, intolerance, and sectarianism.

Even more than my life in Singapore, this provided me with an intense appreciation for the freedoms we have here in America. Why were the students around me so focused on the problems with my white male classmates and teachers, while they largely ignored the injustices I was witnessing around the world?

And since I’ve graduated, it seems like these trends have spread through our nation far beyond the reaches of academia. While so many were focused on American culture wars, including for example asking Disney to fire Gina Carano for supposedly offensive tweets, few were paying attention while Disney made deals to film with the government in Xinjiang, China, where Uighur Muslims were being held in concentration camps. 

This way of looking at the world has a goal of raising awareness of racial injustice. That’s laudable. But within this conception of the world there is also a simplistic and reductive understanding of power dynamics in which oppression must always come from people seen as  white, male, western, heterosexual, cisgender, or ablebodied – and be inflicted upon those seen as marginalized – people of color, colonized or indigenous people, women, LGBT, or the disabled. 

This lens ignores the struggle against real repression globally, including what I have witnessed in Singapore and the Middle East. In doing so, it empowers illiberal, authoritarian forces, from China, to Russia, to the stirrings of Islamist groups eager to rebuild their caliphate.

All around the world, from pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong to feminists in Egypt, countless people seek the freedoms that we in the West take for granted. Meanwhile, we are undoing the ideas that have made the modern West the most progressive place on the planet, while shielding the world’s most brazen abusers of human rights from criticism.

If you care about justice for oppressed people, it’s incumbent on us to push back against bad ideas. America has problems, and we need to improve, but the center of the struggle for human dignity isn’t here. Please, let’s keep America the country I wanted to come to.

I’m Melissa Chen. Join me in defending pro-human values at FairForAll.org.