UNLEARNING OPPRESSION AND WHY I NO LONGER USE THIS MODEL

 Unlearning Oppression

By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

No child is brought into this world as a racist or sexist or homophobe.  Oppression must be learned through our childhood socialization processes.  While the home environment provided by our parents is crucial to learning both oppressive and anti-oppressive behaviors, cultural institutions such as schools, religious institutions, and mass media also play a central role.

For many years I taught classes at local college and universities I called “Unlearning Oppression”.  While the formal titles of these classes was typically “Race, Class and Gender in American Society” I insisted upon dealing with ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of oppression.

In these classes my goal is to create a climate in which students can both deal with their own issues as people who are oppressed and deal with their issues as people who are oppressors. 

My title derives from the pioneering work of Erica Shereover-Marcuse, a critical philosopher and educator who became well-known for leading workshops on “Unlearning Racism” in the Bay Area during the 1970s.  

Shereover-Marcuse, was the third wife and student of Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

While I never took part in one of Shereover-Marcuse’s workshops, her compact and insightful lecture notes formed the pedagogical core of my classes.

To unlearn oppression and to dismantle the foundations of our “dominator culture”, we must acknowledge our everyday oppressive practices.  Moreover, we must engage in critical self-reflection, get the correct information, deal with our negative emotions, gain insight into our own passivity and become actively anti-oppressive.

Oppression is the acts and effects of domination, including ideological domination and institutional control.  Oppression operates through unequal and unjust institutional constraints which bring harm to at least one other group and which serves to the benefit of another social group.  This harm comes about through coercion, or the use of unjustified force.

There are many systems of oppression in the US, including racism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ageism, ableism.  These are interlocking societal, economic, moral and religious values that keep many people down to ensure the power and advantage of a few groups of people.

There are three different forms of oppression:

institutional oppression–which occurs through the ‘normal’ ways that society operates.  No individually-motivated hatred needs to be in operation for institutional oppression to work. Example: A white real-estate agent shows a young Black couple houses in parts of town he feels they’d feel most comfortable, thus enforcing racial segregation.

interpersonal oppression–which occurs between individuals and is usually based on personal prejudice. Example: a man continually interrupts a woman while she is speaking.

internalized oppression–when members of an oppressed group oppress one another and their own group. Example: a group of gay men pick on another who is more feminine

We are all potentially both oppressors and oppressed. While we often have a dualistic logic imagining that there are those “with power” and those “without power” the reality is much more complex.

We learn oppression through our own oppression as children. Early childhood experiences are central to developing “power over” mentalities.  Essentially we hurt others because we have  been hurt ourselves.  

In our society we often experience mistreatment as young people—through physical violence but also through invalidation and disregard of our feelings. As a result, we tend both to internalize this mistreatment by accepting it as ‘the way things are’, and externalize it by mistreating others.

Thus adultism and the oppression of children are at the heart of my understanding of the nature of oppression in modern society.

Depending on the context all individuals possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege.  Because all of us have been children we have all been potentially oppressed.  Because all of us  (presumably) are adults we can all be oppressors of children.  But age is just one system of oppression.

The interlocking system of oppression in which penalty and privilege vary by race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, etc. is called the “matrix of domination” by Patricia Hill Collins.  

Intersectionality identifies the multiple overlapping sources of penalty and privilege. So someone may be disadvantaged by being African American and gay, but privileged by being male and able-bodied.

Everyday oppression refers to those practices which, while so much a part of our everyday lives that they seem normal and thus go unquestioned, discriminate against members of some “minority” group.

Everyday oppression routinely occurs within interactions and includes all actions, verbal and nonverbal, which result in negative consequences, regardless of intentionality.  Thus, oppression does not have to be blatant, conscious or deliberate.  Therefore, many well-intended people are unaware that their actions are oppressive.

Everyday oppression sometimes occurs through inaction rather than through overt actions.  The passivity of well-meaning people, fueled by ignorance and indifference, is critical to the operation of dominator cultures.  We often live in denial, refusing to acknowledge the consequences of our behavior.

Types of Everyday Oppression

stereotypes are faulty generalizations that we make about groups of people;

misinformation about group differences (ethnic groups, genders, sexual minorities, ability groups, etc)

discomfort dealing with cultural and social differences;

apprehension about different groups

taking privileges (as whites, or males, or temporarily able-bodies, or…..)

paternalistic attitudes (“we need to help those poor people”);

self-righteous liberal pride (“but I’m colorblind”, “we have gay friends”,….)

Unfortunately many people, deeply engaged in the liberation of their own group, seem not to be able to see their role in oppressing others, and how that comes full circle and perpetuates their own oppression.

In my classes I urge students to become “allies”—people who stand with all marginalized people, speaking out against acts of oppression wherever and whenever they happen.
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When my mother, Peggy Mellinger, was 12 years old she caught the polio virus in a local swimming hole, leading her to become paralyzed from the waist down.  

In spite of these obstacles she completed a four-year college degree (which in itself was rare for women in the early 1950s), raised three children and became a successful business woman.

I remember as a child going with her to the Eastside Mall in Springfield, Mass. and noticing how the normal exchange of eye contact between strangers (called “civil inattention” by sociologists) was absent from her presence in public life.  People would either stare or avoid eye contact all together.

I used to think that my mother had a “problem”—being “disabled” and that society needed to accommodate her problem so that she could have a chance to thrive.

Recently, in a sermon on ableism my pastor, Rev. Julia Hamilton stressed the importance of “relocating the problem”.  

Rather than the presumption that people should not be disabled we need to accept that disability is inherent part of the human condition. The problem does not reside in the differently able-bodied person but in the society that does not accept disability as just the way things are.

I had never thought of things in that way before. I realized then that unlearning oppression is lifelong task that we never fully complete and that there will always be new insights to acquire,  new facts to learn and tender emotions to process.  The important thing is to never give up!

Part IX: From "Unlearning Oppression" to "The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression" - A Theoretical Evolution

The Ricky Sherover-Marcuse Framework: A Starting Point

For many years, my understanding of how oppression operates in everyday life was shaped by the work of Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, a radical educator and theorist whose "unlearning oppression" framework proved immensely influential in social justice education circles from the 1970s through the 1990s. Sherover-Marcuse's central insight was elegant and pedagogically powerful: no one is born oppressive. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression are not natural or inevitable but must be learned through childhood socialization. If oppression is learned, it follows that it can be unlearned.

This framework offered several important contributions that continue to inform my work:

What Sherover-Marcuse Got Right:

1. The Social Construction of Oppressive Attitudes - Challenging biological determinism and essentialist accounts of prejudice, Sherover-Marcuse insisted that oppressive beliefs and behaviors are acquired through socialization in families, schools, religious institutions, and mass media.
2. The Possibility of Change - If oppression is learned rather than innate, individuals can undertake the work of unlearning it. This provided a hopeful, agency-affirming alternative to structural determinism.
3. Emotional Healing as Political Work - Sherover-Marcuse recognized that oppression damages everyone—not just its direct targets but also those socialized into perpetrating it. Unlearning required not just cognitive restructuring but emotional healing and the recovery of one's full humanity.
4. Coalition Building Across Difference - The unlearning framework suggested that people from different social locations could work together to challenge internalized oppression and build solidarity.
5. Pedagogical Practice - Sherover-Marcuse developed concrete workshop methodologies for consciousness-raising, exploring how oppression operates, and practicing new ways of relating across difference.

For years, I used this framework in teaching and activism. I conducted "Unlearning Oppression" workshops. I wrote blog posts exploring how racism, sexism, and homophobia are learned through cultural institutions. The framework provided accessible entry points for people beginning to grapple with how systemic inequality operates in their own lives.

The Growing Inadequacies: Why "Unlearning" Wasn't Enough

Yet as my theoretical sophistication deepened—particularly through sustained engagement with ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the Santa Barbara School—I increasingly recognized fundamental limitations in the unlearning framework:

1. The Internalization Problem: Where Does Oppression Live?

The unlearning model locates oppression primarily inside people's heads—in internalized attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes, and emotional patterns acquired through socialization. This creates a fundamentally psychological account of oppression where the primary work involves changing consciousness, exploring feelings, and restructuring cognitive frameworks.

But this internalist focus obscures something crucial: oppression is not primarily a matter of what people believe or feel but of what they do and how those doings are organizationally consequential. A police officer doesn't need to be consciously racist to produce racially disparate outcomes in stops and arrests. A welfare caseworker doesn't need to personally despise poor people to enact humiliating and punitive bureaucratic procedures. A hiring manager doesn't need to be aware of gender bias to systematically undervalue women's qualifications.

The unlearning model, despite its radicalism, remained trapped in what Garfinkel called formal sociology's error: treating order as something that must be imported into the plenum through cognitive structures (in this case, internalized norms and attitudes) rather than recognizing order as locally produced through members' methods.

2. The Voluntarism Problem: Individual Change vs. Structural Reproduction

The unlearning framework emphasizes individual agency and choice—you can decide to unlearn racism, to examine your privilege, to change your behavior. This creates a fundamentally voluntaristic account where social change happens through the accumulated individual transformations of enlightened people who've done their personal work.

But this underestimates how oppression is structurally organized through institutional arrangements, professional practices, legal frameworks, economic systems, and spatial orderings that operate largely independent of individual consciousness or intention. You can unlearn racist attitudes while working in a police department whose very organizational logic produces racialized outcomes. You can reject sexist beliefs while participating in a workplace whose promotion structures systematically disadvantage women.

The problem is not primarily that individuals haven't unlearned enough, but that oppression is accomplished through institutionally organized practices that are "bigger" than any individual's consciousness.

3. The Depth Problem: Multiple Levels of Moral Organization

The unlearning model tends to treat oppression as operating on a single level—the level of socialized attitudes that individuals carry with them. But my ethnographic work, particularly in street outreach and harm reduction spaces, made increasingly clear that oppression operates on multiple, layered, intersecting levels simultaneously.

Consider a single interaction between a housed resident and an unhoused person on a Santa Barbara sidewalk:

• Immediate interactional level: How the housed person averts their eyes, crosses to the other side of the street, clutches their bag more tightly
• Categorical level: How the unhoused person is treated as a member of a stigmatized category ("homeless person") rather than as an individual
• Institutional level: How police, social services, and property owners coordinate to manage "the homeless problem"
• Spatial level: How sidewalks, parks, and public restrooms are designed and regulated to exclude certain bodies
• Political-economic level: How housing policy, wage structures, and social safety nets produce houselessness as a structural condition
• Moral-symbolic level: How desert, worth, and belonging are distributed according to housing status

Each of these levels has its own organization, its own practices, its own forms of accountability. You cannot address the encounter adequately by focusing only on what the housed person has "learned" or needs to "unlearn." The moral economy operating in that moment is layered, with each level shaping and being shaped by the others.

4. The Power Problem: Who Has Access to Unlearning?

The unlearning framework assumes that everyone has relatively equal access to consciousness-raising, emotional healing, and behavioral change. But this obscures how power itself shapes who can unlearn what.

Dominant groups are encouraged to "examine their privilege" and "unlearn oppression" through voluntary educational experiences that don't fundamentally threaten their material position. Meanwhile, marginalized groups are expected to do the emotional labor of educating others, to forgive, to extend understanding, to celebrate small steps of "allyship."

The framework doesn't adequately address how the ability to remain ignorant is itself a privilege, how the luxury of "unlearning at your own pace" is afforded only to those whose survival doesn't depend on navigating oppression daily.

5. The Resistance Problem: Where Is Agency?

Perhaps most troublingly, the unlearning framework locates agency primarily with those socialized into dominant positions—they are the ones who must do the work of unlearning. Marginalized people appear primarily as victims of oppression who need healing, or as educators who help dominant groups unlearn.

This misses how resistance, refusal, and alternative world-making are constantly happening in the interactions and practices of marginalized communities. The unlearning framework doesn't give us tools for recognizing and analyzing how oppressed people actively challenge, subvert, and reconstruct oppressive moral orders in their daily lives.

6. The Interaction Problem: How Does Oppression Actually Happen?

Most fundamentally, the unlearning framework cannot show us how oppression is actually accomplished in the turn-by-turn details of interaction. It can tell us that people have learned racist attitudes, but it cannot show us:

• How race is made relevant (or not) in a particular encounter
• How racist categorizations are produced as accountable features of talk
• How recipients challenge or acquiesce to racialized positioning
• How institutional authority is invoked to justify discriminatory treatment
• How moral judgments are embedded in seemingly neutral questions
• How resistance is enacted and how it's suppressed

Without ethnomethodological attention to members' methods—the actual procedures through which orderly (including oppressive) conduct is produced—we cannot develop an empirically adequate account of how domination operates. We're left with generalities about "internalized oppression" rather than specifications of locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena of order* that constitute oppression as a practical achievement.

The Turn Toward Ethnomethodology: Discovering Order in the Plenum

My engagement with Harold Garfinkel's 1988 "Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order..." proved catalytic. Garfinkel's devastating critique of formal sociology's "plenum"—the analytically empty concreteness of organizational things—applied equally to how the unlearning framework treated actual interactions.

Just as Parsons dismissed the concrete details of activity as having no inherent order (all order must be imported through formal analysis), the unlearning framework dismissed the concrete details of oppressive interactions as mere expressions of internalized attitudes (all oppression must be explained through socialization).

But Garfinkel demonstrated that there is order in the plenum—locally produced, naturally accountable, reflexively organized order that cannot be recovered through formal analysis but must be discovered through detailed empirical investigation. This suggested a radical respecification: oppression is in the plenum too.

Oppression is not primarily internal (attitudes, beliefs, feelings) but is accomplished in and as the concrete details of situated interaction. It exists in:

• How turns at talk are constructed and timed
• How categories are invoked and applied
• How accounts are demanded and provided
• How institutional identities are made relevant
• How space is claimed and contested
• How bodies are positioned and moved
• How moral judgments are embedded in routine practices

These are not expressions of something internal but are the phenomena themselves—locally produced, naturally accountable achievements that constitute oppression as a practical, observable reality.

The Santa Barbara School: Structure-in-Action

Simultaneously, my deep engagement with the Santa Barbara School—particularly Don Zimmerman, Harvey Molotch, Deirdre Boden, and the "Doing Gender"/"Doing Difference" tradition—showed how power and inequality operate through the sequential organization of interaction.

Candace West and Don Zimmerman's "Doing Gender" (1987) was revelatory. Gender is not something people have (an internalized identity) or something they express (an attitude). Gender is something people do—they accomplish it through situated practices that are accountable to normative conceptions of appropriate conduct for category members.

This framework could be extended: oppression is something people do. Racism, sexism, classism are not primarily states of consciousness but are interactional accomplishments—they are produced through categorization practices, asymmetrical distributions of interactional rights, differential treatment made accountable to category membership, moral judgments embedded in institutional procedures.

West and Fenstermaker's "Doing Difference" (1995) pushed further, showing how race, class, and gender operate simultaneously—they are "omni-relevant" features of interaction that can be invoked, foregrounded, or suppressed depending on context and purpose. This suggested that oppression operates on multiple, intersecting levels—not as separate systems but as mutually constitutive moral economies.

Developing the "Layered Moral Economy of Oppression"

Through sustained theoretical work and empirical investigation (street outreach, harm reduction spaces, housing activism, institutional encounters), I developed the framework I now call the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression (LMEO). This framework attempts to synthesize:

• Garfinkel's ethnomethodology: Oppression as locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena
• The Santa Barbara School: Structure-in-action, doing difference, institutional talk
• Critical theory: Attention to power, domination, and structural inequality
• Intersectionality: Multiple systems operating simultaneously
• Spatial analysis: Urban geography, embodiment, material arrangements

Core Principles of LMEO:

1. Moral Economies Are Organized Accountability Structures

Every social setting involves a moral economy—a locally organized system of rights, obligations, entitlements, and accountabilities. Who has the right to speak? Who can make demands? Who must provide accounts? Whose presence is legitimate? These are not abstract norms but are practically accomplished through members' methods.

2. Moral Economies Are Layered

Oppression operates on multiple, intersecting levels simultaneously:

• Immediate interactional level: Turn-by-turn production of categorization, asymmetry, moral judgment
• Categorical level: How people are treated as instances of social categories (race, gender, class, housing status, etc.)
• Institutional level: How organizational procedures, professional practices, and bureaucratic routines produce systematically disparate outcomes
• Spatial level: How material arrangements, architectural design, and geographic organization enable and constrain interaction
• Political-economic level: How resource distribution, property relations, and policy frameworks structure possibilities for action
• Moral-symbolic level: How worth, desert, and belonging are distributed according to category membership

Each level has its own organization, but they operate simultaneously and reflexively—what happens at one level shapes and is shaped by what happens at others.

3. Oppression Is Accomplished Through Members' Methods

Rather than locating oppression in internalized attitudes, LMEO examines the practical procedures through which oppressive order is produced:

• Categorization practices (how people are recognized and treated as category members)
• Asymmetrical interactional rights (who can initiate, interrupt, question, command)
• Differential accountability (whose conduct requires explanation, whose is taken for granted)
• Institutional knowledge (who knows the system, who must navigate it blindly)
• Spatial positioning (who belongs, who is out of place)
• Resource control (who has access, who is excluded)
• Moral gatekeeping (who judges, who is judged)

These methods are not expressions of internal states but are observable, describable, analyzable practices.

4. Oppression Is Reflexively Organized

The methods through which oppression is produced are simultaneously the methods through which it becomes visible, recognizable, and accountable (or invisible, naturalized, and unaccountable). Oppression makes itself evident in its own production—in how silence is produced in response to a racist comment, in how a welfare applicant is positioned as morally suspect through questioning practices, in how an unhoused person is rendered invisible through averted gazes.

5. Resistance Is Also in the Plenum

If oppression is locally produced, so is resistance. LMEO attends to how marginalized people:

• Refuse oppressive categorizations
• Challenge asymmetrical rights
• Demand accountability from power
• Create alternative moral economies
• Reconstruct space and place
• Enact alternative orderings of worth and belonging

Resistance is not primarily about changing consciousness (though that may happen) but about doing things differently—practically reconstructing the moral economy through alternative methods of organizing interaction.

6. The Layering Is Ethnographically Discoverable

The multiple levels of moral organization are not theoretical abstractions imposed on data but are ethnographically discoverable features of settings. They emerge through:

• Detailed observation of naturally occurring interaction
• Audio/video recording and transcription
• Sequential analysis of how actions are produced and responded to
• Attention to how participants themselves orient to and make relevant different levels
• Tracing connections between local practices and broader institutional/structural arrangements

What LMEO Offers That "Unlearning" Cannot:

1. Empirical Tractability: Rather than speculating about internal attitudes, we can inspect actual practices—record them, transcribe them, analyze them in detail.

2. Institutional Analysis: Rather than focusing only on individual consciousness, we can examine how professional practices, organizational procedures, and bureaucratic routines produce oppression as their routine operation.

3. Spatial-Material Dimension: Rather than treating oppression as purely symbolic, we can examine how built environments, resource distributions, and embodied positions constitute oppressive order.

4. Intersectional Complexity: Rather than treating different forms of oppression as separate systems requiring separate unlearning, we can examine how they operate simultaneously and mutually constitute each other.

5. Agency and Resistance: Rather than locating agency primarily with dominant groups who must unlearn, we can recognize and analyze the constant micro-resistances through which marginalized people challenge and reconstruct oppressive orders.

6. Political Consequence: Rather than focusing on individual transformation, we can identify the specific practices, procedures, and arrangements that produce oppressive outcomes—and therefore what must be changed to produce justice.

An Example: From Unlearning to LMEO

Consider how these frameworks differently approach a police stop of a young Black man:

Unlearning Framework Would Ask:

• Does the officer have racist attitudes?
• What stereotypes has the officer internalized?
• Has the officer examined their implicit bias?
• Can the officer unlearn racist assumptions through training?

LMEO Framework Asks:

• How is race made relevant in the stop?
• How is suspicion produced and displayed?
• What interactional rights does the officer claim (to stop, question, search)?
• What accountability is demanded from the young man?
• How are institutional identities (police authority vs. suspicious person) invoked?
• How is public space constructed as territory the officer controls?
• How do broader systems of racialized policing organize this particular encounter?
• How does the young man resist or acquiesce to this positioning?
• What alternative moral economy would this encounter require?

The unlearning framework focuses on changing the officer's consciousness. LMEO focuses on how the stop is actually accomplished as a practical, accountable matter—and therefore what practices, procedures, policies, and spatial arrangements would need to change to prevent such stops from happening.

Why This Matters for Critical Interactionism

The shift from "unlearning oppression" to "layered moral economy of oppression" represents a maturation of my theoretical framework from psychological/educational to ethnomethodological/critical. It represents:

1. Taking Garfinkel Seriously: Recognizing that oppression is in the plenum—locally produced, naturally accountable, only discoverable through empirical investigation
2. Completing the Santa Barbara School's Project: Extending "structure-in-action" and "doing difference" into a comprehensive framework for studying how power operates turn-by-turn
3. Making EMCA Political: Showing that ethnomethodological rigor and critical political analysis are not just compatible but mutually necessary
4. Providing Research Methodology: Offering concrete guidance for how to study oppression empirically rather than just theoretically
5. Informing Activist Practice: Identifying what actually needs to change (specific practices, procedures, arrangements) rather than relying on consciousness-raising alone

Honoring Sherover-Marcuse While Moving Beyond

I do not repudiate the unlearning framework. It served important political and pedagogical functions in its time and continues to offer valuable entry points for people beginning to grapple with systemic inequality. The recognition that oppression is learned (not natural) remains foundational.

But Critical Interactionism requires more theoretical sophistication and empirical rigor than the unlearning framework provides. We need to be able to show—in concrete, inspectable detail—how oppression is actually accomplished in the turn-by-turn organization of interaction, in the routine operation of institutional procedures, in the material arrangements of space and resources, in the layered, intersecting moral economies through which worth, rights, and belonging are distributed.

The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression framework attempts to provide this. It honors Sherover-Marcuse's commitment to understanding how oppression operates while adopting Garfinkel's insistence that we study locally produced, naturally accountable phenomena and the Santa Barbara School's demonstration that structure is accomplished in action.

The work continues—not by asking people to unlearn what they've been taught, but by making visible the actual methods through which oppression is produced so that those methods can be challenged, interrupted, and replaced with alternative ways of organizing our lives together.

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Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.