Black Feminist Oppression Paper
Primarily it’s important to define the concept of oppression. Oppression implies to "any way in which humans as individuals or as groups, are treated with less than complete respect." (McCullough, p6). Many people engage in conversations that discuss various oppressions such as racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism, but rarely do we discuss how these oppressions interact with each other.
In the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statements” the women write about the importance of identifying connections among various kinds of oppression; “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our …show more content…
Thus instead of focusing on which system is more oppressed than the other it focuses on how they interact with various individuals in different situations.
“Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities for new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity.”(Charles C. Lemert)
Most individuals prefer to see their own victimization as the most major oppressions and value others as less important. Thus if each individual creates a major oppression, the result is a society with multiple systems of oppression that surrounds everyone’s lives. Thus for example in a system that we place African American women in the center analyzing, white women would be benefited by their race but punished by their gender. Thus an individual can be both oppressed or an oppressor depending on his situation in
In the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statements” the women write about the importance of identifying connections among various kinds of oppression; “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our …show more content…
Thus instead of focusing on which system is more oppressed than the other it focuses on how they interact with various individuals in different situations.
“Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities for new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity.”(Charles C. Lemert)
Most individuals prefer to see their own victimization as the most major oppressions and value others as less important. Thus if each individual creates a major oppression, the result is a society with multiple systems of oppression that surrounds everyone’s lives. Thus for example in a system that we place African American women in the center analyzing, white women would be benefited by their race but punished by their gender. Thus an individual can be both oppressed or an oppressor depending on his situation in