The faces of oppression are, and always will be, UGLY.

This week has been intellectually and emotionally challenging for me. And this is something that I don’t see changing through the course of this class. To be honest with you, I don’t want it to either. While I know that class got tense and discussion was passionate, I think conversations like these are healthy and necessary. Everyone needs to form opinions and be able to express them, even when things may get on the more uncomfortable side. Truth be known, when we are out in the field we will not have the comfort of a classroom to discuss issues like dominant and subordinate groups, oppression, and inequality; it will be real and it will be hard. As social workers we will have to stand up and deal with it.

A heavy piece of this week’s material that has sat in my brain ever since I read it was the explanation of the five faces of oppression. It was something that made my throat hard to swallow and my blood boil. Even as I sit here now, writing the words makes me unsettled and wishing people did not have to confront these nasty faces of oppression. Exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence… each one just as disgusting as the last. Let’s see, taking the results of one social group’s work and unjustly giving it to another. Or to banish participation in social life leading to deprivation and possible extermination. Then you have denying right and standing. Or being blind to a group’s perception and then giving them some other classification. And lastly, brutality, aggression, harassment all with the objective to harm in some way. How unbelievably nauseating is that?! My five terrible and horrible summaries of such ugly faces.  I have tried to pick one of these to discuss separate from the others, but I cannot. After reading the chapters, going over the slides, sitting in class, and taking real world experiences into consideration, I feel like they are a circle; a cycle if you will. This circle then makes me think of an actual face. How there are no two identical faces, they can range from anything;  round, oval, more square-like, large and small eyes, noses, and mouths, wider foreheads, and pointed chins. These five faces of oppression while different, have a similar characteristic; they come in all shapes and sizes.  Oppression can come from a wide variety of sources, and more times than not, you have to deal with more than one.

So here I am thinking of these five faces and all I can think of is how gross. How ugly is that. These are five faces that are and will ALWAYS be ugly. Period.

Here’s a quote I came across a couple years ago that is ever so true…

“He who allows oppression shares the crime.” - Desiderius Erasmus