Five Faces of Oppression

There was much I didn't understand about this reading because it was difficult for me that is to follow. There were a couple of things that I thought I might touch on because it was the one thing that I really understood and could relate to. The part on how we view oppression was interesting to me in the sense that the book, in a way, made it seem like we misuse the word in our society. They mention how oppression is "the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group" (pg. 38). In the book they mention how the Hebrew were oppressed as well as people from South Africa; as far as African Americans, it says that we were struck with some form of oppression, but not actually oppression. This got me thinking about our class discission when we talked about how sometimes the institutions in our society, mainly the government, bends the rules of the constitution or certain strong words like oppression and racism to favor for themselves. I feel that oppression is the same as murder, there is no form of murder, murder is thought out and executed; murder is murder and oppression is oppression. For them to try to justify their actions by labeling the oppression that took place in America as "some form", it takes away from what African Americans went through, what Native Americans went through, Asian Americans and any other foreign race went through.

Oppression has clouded our country as well as several other countries and comes in all forms; whether it is sexism, racism, or homophobia, we as a people will never be able to move forward until oppression is erased from our minds and our vocabulary.