#interlocking systems of oppression

[utsage-blog]

Social Justice Must Be Complicated, Because Oppression Is Never Simple

There is no one-pager solution to systemic oppression.

Systemic oppression is built throughout all of our most important systems — our education system, our workplaces, our government, our arts and entertainment. It is in the air that we breathe and it is upheld with almost every action we take. That is how it has lasted so long.

[bellemaddox]

To the racist white female professor who says, "If I have to watch everything I say I wouldn't say anything," I want to say, "Then get out of teaching."

To the white female poet who says, "Well, frankly, I believe that politics and poetry don't necessarily have to go together," I say, "Your little taste of white privilege has deluded you into thinking that you don't have to fight against sexism in this society. You are talking to me from your own isolation and your own racism. If you feel that you don't have to fight for me, that you don't have to speak out against capitalism, the exploitation of human and natural resources, then you in your silence, your inability to make connections, are siding with a system that will eventually get you, after it has gotten me. And if you think that's not a political stance, you're more than simply deluded, you're crazy!'

Merle Woo, “Letter to Ma,” This Bridge Called My Back (1981)

[bellemaddox]

[T]he dominator pattern of patriarchy does not exist separately from race and class domination. At the level of social and political reality, these patterns of domination are integral to one another and work together in intricate patterns of oppression.

Eimear O'Neill and Edmund O'Sullivan, "Transforming the Ecology of Violence"