Unlearning Oppression by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Unlearning Oppression
Unlearning Oppression
Originally posted July 10, 2008. Since this piece was written, I've developed a fuller theoretical account, the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression, which provides the larger structural framework within which the argument below can now be situated. Readers who want that fuller treatment can find it in "The Layered Moral Economy of Oppression: Completing the Santa Barbara School's Unfinished Revolution."
In the summer of 2008 I taught Racism and Sexism in America at Antioch University Santa Barbara. I called the class "Unlearning Oppression" because it dealt with the interconnections of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and immigration status — not as separate topics to be covered in sequence, but as interlocking systems that implicate every student in the room. My goal was to create a climate in which students could work through their own experience of being oppressed and, just as importantly, their own complicity as oppressors. Almost no one occupies only one of those positions.
To unlearn oppression and dismantle the foundations of what bell hooks and others have called dominator culture, we have to do more than feel bad about inequality. We have to acknowledge our everyday oppressive practices, engage in real critical self-reflection rather than performative guilt, get accurate information to replace the misinformation most of us are working from, sit with the negative emotions that surface rather than deflecting them, see our own passivity clearly, and move from awareness into active anti-oppressive practice. Each of those steps is harder than it sounds, and each one is regularly skipped.
Oppression, as Ann Cudd (2006, p. 52) defines it, is "the existence of unequal and unjust institutional constraints." Those constraints harm one group on the basis of a social institution that benefits another group, and the harm is enforced through coercion — through unjustified force, whether that force is physical, legal, economic, or simply the quiet withdrawal of opportunity. The United States runs on many such systems simultaneously: racism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ageism, ableism. These aren't parallel, independent tracks. They're interlocking societal, economic, moral, and religious arrangements that keep the many down to secure the advantage of the few.
Oppression takes three distinct forms, and distinguishing them matters because each calls for a different kind of intervention:
Institutional oppression operates through the normal, unremarkable functioning of society. No individually-motivated hatred needs to be present for it to work — that's precisely what makes it so durable. It is often the hardest form to see and among the most consequential precisely because it requires no individual villain.
Interpersonal oppression occurs between individuals and is usually rooted in personal prejudice — the slur, the slight, the door held for one person and let slam on another.
Internalized oppression occurs when members of an oppressed group come to oppress one another, and themselves — turning the logic used against them into a logic they apply from the inside.
My thinking here draws on Patricia Hill Collins, Ricky Sherover-Marcuse, and Anne Bishop, supplemented by the broader sociological literature on stratification, race relations, gender inequality, and LGBT studies. Paul Kivel's "The Power Chart Revisited" is useful precisely because it dismantles the comfortable binary of those "with power" and those "without" — a dualistic logic baked into Western thought that obscures how thoroughly most of us are both.
Learning Oppression as Children
One important place we learn the practical grammar of domination is childhood. Several authors point to early childhood as a site where "power over" mentalities first take root. As Sherover-Marcuse puts it: people hurt others because they themselves have been hurt. In this society, nearly everyone experiences systematic mistreatment as a young person — not only through physical violence, but through the invalidation of our intelligence, the disregard of our feelings, the discouraging of our abilities. We tend to internalize that mistreatment, accepting it as simply "the way things are," and we externalize it by, in turn, mistreating others. Adultism — the systematic oppression of children by adults — is one mechanism, among others, in how hierarchy gets socialized into us long before we're old enough to name it as hierarchy at all.
The Matrix of Domination
Patricia Hill Collins urges us to reconceptualize race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression — what she calls the "matrix of domination." As she writes, placing Black women and other excluded groups at the center of analysis opens up a both/and conceptual stance, in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege within one historically produced system. White women, for instance, are penalized by gender but privileged by race. Depending on social position and context, a person may be privileged along one axis, oppressed along another, and sometimes participate in the oppression of others. These positions are neither mutually exclusive nor socially equivalent.
Everyday Oppression
Everyday oppression refers to practices so woven into daily life that they seem normal and go unquestioned, even as they systematically disadvantage members of subordinated or marginalized groups. It occurs within routine interactions and includes all actions — verbal and nonverbal — that produce negative consequences, regardless of intent. Oppression does not have to be blatant, conscious, or deliberate to do its work. Most well-intended people never register that their own everyday conduct is part of the problem.
Oppression also operates through inaction as much as through overt action. The passivity of well-meaning people — fueled by ignorance, comfort, and indifference — is critical to how dominator culture keeps running. We live in denial far more often than we admit, refusing to reckon with the actual consequences of what we do and fail to do.
Everyday oppression shows up as:
- Stereotypes — faulty generalizations projected onto entire groups of people.
- Misinformation about group differences — across ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and more.
- Discomfort dealing with cultural and social difference.
- Apprehension toward people from different groups.
- Taking privileges — as white, as male, as temporarily able-bodied, as whatever position one occupies without having to think about it.
- Paternalistic attitudes — "we need to help those poor people" — which position the helper as agent and the helped as object, without ever asking what the other party actually wants.
- Self-righteous liberal pride — "but I'm colorblind," "we have gay friends" — a performance of innocence that forecloses the self-examination the moment actually calls for.
In On Becoming an Ally (2001), Anne Bishop names a pattern many of us recognize once it's pointed out: people deeply engaged in the liberation of their own group who cannot see their role in oppressing others — and who don't notice how that blindness circles back and perpetuates their own oppression too. Bishop lays out six steps toward becoming an ally: understanding oppression itself — how it arose, how it's held in place, how it stamps its pattern onto individuals and institutions that keep recreating it; understanding how different oppressions resemble, differ from, and reinforce one another; consciousness and healing; becoming a worker for one's own liberation; becoming an ally to others; and maintaining hope, without which none of the preceding steps survive contact with how slow this work actually is.
Bishop rejects any hierarchy of oppression. Oppressions function as an interconnecting web, reinforcing one another — none of them can be solved in isolation, because none of them exists in isolation. At the root of these systems, Bishop argues, are "power-over" elites who took over other societies and accumulated resources for their own use that had formerly sustained life for the wider population. Class, she writes, is both the result and the foundation of the other forms of oppression. And critically: no one chooses to become an oppressor. "We do so unconsciously out of our scars." Most of us occupy positions of both penalty and privilege, often along different social axes — and it's precisely that dual experience we have to draw on if we want to step outside the domination worldview rather than just rearranging our place within it.
Understanding oppression's different forms requires real exploration of difference — the visible and the invisible, the varied histories of people unlike ourselves. It requires appreciating how oppression operates through common mechanisms across very different targets: power and hierarchy, stereotyping, violence, and the impulse to separate and distinguish "us" from "them."
Learning about ourselves as oppressors is genuinely difficult — part of what it means to become a member of an oppressor group is being cut off from the ability to identify with the experience of the oppressed. That invisibility doesn't require anyone to have designed it. It's an accomplishment of ordinary social organization: the routine workings of institutions, categories, and everyday interaction reproduce it without any architect needing to exist. Alongside that, we have to learn to name our own privileges honestly. Collins's both/and stance requires seeing every group, including our own, as carrying some mix of penalty and privilege at once. The goal isn't guilt. It's consciousness — learning to see what ordinary social life has arranged to keep invisible.
Unlearning Oppression and Critical Interactionism
Throughout my writing I've advocated a critical interactionist (CI) perspective — one that links close inspection of everyday life to a critical theoretical concern with domination. I've described critical interactionism as the microsociology of domination: an interest in how a world of gross inequality, multiple oppressions, and ideological hegemony gets produced and reproduced through the concrete, mundane moments of social activity. That's not an abstraction. It happens in a hallway, at a counter, in the two seconds before someone decides whether to speak up or let something pass.
Applying the CI framework to unlearning oppression opens several live research questions: How exactly do we learn oppression in the moments of our everyday lives? How exactly is it unlearned? What does "becoming an ally" actually look like, moment to moment, in the instances of daily conduct rather than in the abstract commitments we make about ourselves?
I've already argued for using CI to study "doing inequality" — paying close attention to the social processes through which inequality gets produced and reproduced in real time. The same approach applies to studying resistance to oppression and domination, and to understanding how consent to unjust arrangements gets manufactured, turn by turn, often with the full cooperation of people who would say, if asked, that they oppose it.
The point of calling this a critical interactionist project is not to reduce racism, patriarchy, class domination, heterosexism, ableism, or other large-scale systems to interpersonal encounters. Quite the opposite. It is to ask how those larger arrangements become consequential in actual situations. Structures do not float above everyday life. They become real when categories are invoked, when some accounts are believed and others discounted, when one person is treated as entitled to speak and another as troublesome, when institutional rules are applied in ways that appear perfectly routine, or when people recognize something wrong and nevertheless allow the moment to pass.
This is why intentionality cannot be our primary test for oppression. Much of domination is reproduced by people who do not experience themselves as dominating anyone. They are following procedures, exercising discretion, making commonsense judgments, avoiding awkwardness, protecting organizational routines, or simply doing what seems normal. Critical interactionism asks us to slow those moments down. What categories became relevant? Who was recognized as what kind of person? Whose version of events acquired credibility? What alternatives became unavailable? Who was expected to accommodate whom? And how did participants make the resulting arrangement appear reasonable, natural, or inevitable?
The same questions can be turned toward resistance. If inequality is something people continually reproduce in practice, resistance cannot consist only of possessing the correct beliefs. Becoming an ally must itself be something people learn to do: noticing when a category has been made consequential, declining an unearned privilege, challenging an apparently innocent assumption, making room for another person's account, interrupting an institutional routine, accepting correction without converting the encounter into a defense of one's own innocence. These are small acts, but "small" does not mean sociologically insignificant. Institutions themselves are sustained through innumerable ordinary acts.
This is where my more recent work on the Layered Moral Economy of Oppression extends the argument developed here. The present essay looks closely at oppression and its unlearning as practical accomplishments of everyday life. The later framework asks how such encounters are nested within larger and overlapping moral, institutional, organizational, political, and historical arrangements. The two arguments therefore operate at different scales. We need both. A theory of oppression without attention to everyday practice can make domination seem like an abstraction hovering above actual people. A microsociology without attention to larger structures can mistake locally produced inequality for nothing more than individual prejudice.
The challenge of unlearning oppression consequently reaches further than changing our attitudes. It requires changing practices, relationships, institutions, and the conditions under which some ways of treating people come to seem ordinary in the first place. It requires learning to recognize domination while it is happening — and developing practical alternatives for what we might do next.
If oppression is an ongoing social accomplishment, then unlearning oppression must also be an accomplishment.
Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. — originally 07-10-08, revised 2026
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