October 7, 2012

• Oppression IS quantitative.

  JDN 2456208 EDT 13:13.

   

  There’s something you’ll hear from a lot of social justice activists which sounds really nice and egalitarian, but actually has the potential to completely undermine the entire project of social justice.

  This is the idea “Oppression can’t be measured quantitatively. We shouldn’t try to compare different levels of oppression.”

  This sounds nice, because it means we don’t have to ask hard questions like, “Which is worse, sexism or racism?” or “Who is worse off, people with cancer or people with diabetes?” These are very difficult questions, and maybe they aren’t the right ones to ask—after all, there’s no reason to think that fighting racism and fighting sexism are mutually exclusive.

   

  But we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Oppression is quantitative. Some kinds of oppression are worse than others.

  Why is this important? Because otherwise you can’t measure progress. If you have a strictly qualitative notion of oppression where it’s black-and-white, on-or-off, oppressed-or-not, then we haven’t made any progress on just about any kind of oppression. There is still racism, there is still sexism, there is still homophobia, there is still religious discrimination. Maybe these things will always exist to some extent. This makes the fight for social justice a hopeless Sisyphean task.

  But in fact, that’s not true at all. We’ve made enormous progress. Unbelievably fast progress. Mind-boggling progress.

  Sexism used to mean that women couldn’t own property, they couldn’t vote, they could be abused and raped with impunity. Now sexism just means that women aren’t paid as well and they sometimes sexually harassed or raped—but when men are caught doing this they go to prison for years. This change happened in only about 100 years. That’s fantastic.

  Racism used to mean that Black people were literally property to be bought and sold. They were slaves. They had no rights at all, they were treated like animals. They were frequently beaten to death. Now they can vote, hold office—one is President!—and racism means that our culture systematically discriminates against them in the legal system. Racism used to mean you could be lynched; now it just means that the cops will sometimes harass you. This took only about 200 years. That’s amazing.

  Homophobia used to mean that gay people were criminals. We could be sent to prison or even executed for the crime of making love in the wrong way. If we were beaten or murdered, it was our fault for being faggots. Now, homophobia means that we can’t get married in some states, we’re depicted on TV in embarrassing stereotypes, and a lot of people say bigoted things about us. This has only taken about 50 years! That’s astonishing.

  And above all, the most extreme example: Religious discrimination used to mean you could be burned at the stake for not being Catholic. It used to mean—and in some countries still does mean—that it’s illegal to believe in certain religions. Now, it means that Muslims are stereotyped because, well, to be frank, there are some really scary things about Muslim culture and some really scary people who are Muslim leaders. (Personally, I think Muslims should be more upset about Ahmadinejad and Al Qaeda than they are about being profiled in airports.) It means that we atheists are annoyed by “In God We Trust”, but we’re no longer burned at the stake. This has taken longer, more like 500 years. But even though it took a long time, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this progress is wonderful.

   

  Obviously, there’s a lot more progress remaining to be made on all these issues, and others—like economic inequality, ableism, nationalism, and animal rights—but the point is that we have made a lot of progress already. Things are better than they used to be—a lot better—and keeping this in mind will help us preserve the hope and dedication necessary to make things even better still.

  If you think that oppression is either-or, on-or-off, you can’t celebrate this progress, and as a result the whole fight seems hopeless. Why bother, when we’ve always been on, and we’ll probably never get to off? But we started with oppression that was absolutely horrific,and now it’s considerably milder. That’s real progress. We have gone from 90% oppressed to 15% oppressed, and we can bring it down to 1% or 0.1% or even 0.01%. Those aren’t just numbers, those are the lives of millions of people.

  Oppression is quantitative. And our goal should be minimizing that quantity.

   

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