Oppression

The concept of oppression has been written about by scholars and educators in various fields. Oppression has been defined as a system that allows access to the services, rewards, benefits, and privileges of society based on membership in a particular group. Oppression involves the abuse of power whereby a dominant group engages in unjust, harsh, or cruel activities that perpetuate an attitude or belief that is reinforced by society and maintained by a power imbalance. It involves beliefs and actions that impose undesirable labels, experiences, and conditions on individuals by virtue of their cultural identity.

In the counseling and psychology literatures, the term oppression is often discussed in relation to privilege. Privilege refers to attitudes and behavior that reinforce the notion that one group's beliefs and standards are superior to those of other groups. Systems of privilege and oppression operate in the workplace, education, housing, media, and the legal system, which perpetuate inequities for some and unearned advantages and opportunities for others. Social inequities, cultural imposition of a dominant group on minority groups, and cultural disintegration and re-creation of the oppressed groups characterize systems of oppression. Oppressive systems are manifest in prejudicial attitudes and discrimination in areas such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, and sexual orientation.

Fred Hanna, William Talley, and Mary Guindon describe two modalities of oppression (oppression by force and oppression by deprivation) and three types of oppression (primary, secondary, and tertiary). Primary oppression refers to overt acts of oppression, including oppression by force and oppression by deprivation. Secondary oppression involves individuals benefiting from overt oppressive acts. Individuals involved in secondary oppression do not actively engage in oppressive acts but also do not object to others who do engage in overt oppressive acts and benefit from the aggression. Tertiary oppression, also referred to as internalized oppression, refers to the identification ofthe dominant message by members of the minority group, often to seek acceptance by the dominant group. Like secondary oppression, tertiary oppression can be passive in nature.

Paulo Freire's writings on oppression have significantly influenced the fields of education and counseling. He is considered a major founder of liberation pedagogy and based his theory on his experiences with teaching peasants and disenfranchised persons in Brazil. In his best-known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire discussed the “banking” concept of education in which a knowledgeable teacher projects an absolute ignorance onto others, who are passive recipients of information, as an instrument of oppression. Such education attempts to control thinking, promote passivity, and stifle creativity. Oppression is described as any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry. Human beings are viewed as alienated from their own decision making. In contrast, the revolutionary educator uses problem posing or liberating education in which students become critical coinvestigators who are in dialogue with the teacher. Freire introduced the term conscientização, or the process of developing a critical consciousness, advocating for [Page 1246]the development of awareness of oneself within one's social context. According to Freire, a crucial component of critical consciousness is helping students understand how they learned to define themselves as their oppressors viewed them.

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