WHAT MASS OPPRESSION?

Image from "The Culture of False Oppression"

I recently got into a brief Twitter debate with a friend who is a highly intelligent author, secularist, theologian and academic. I had objected to a Tweet in which he indirectly chastised White men in Academia for being racists, based on his survey of academic articles which had low numbers of minority co-authors. 

My position was a simple one: He himself had racialized his superficial browsing of the articles with a bias against White men without measure of merit. Thereby he was being racialist.

He maintained subsequently that he was defending the oppressed, in essence. He took my criticism apparently as a denial of social inequity. The implication being that he had caught me being White in my criticism. Touche, I thought.

I countered that I would support his supposition of oppression if it were in reference to the unfair prejudice against (meritorious) Asian-Americans in admissions to Harvard University. The debate was over at that point. Neither of us "won" the exchange, but I feel I gained something from it.

I began to more seriously question what all this oppression nonsense is about. Who is being oppressed in the U.S. today? Or is this oppression simply constructed as a rationalization of the generally false claim of universal White privilege? Part of an old Marxist paradigm in search of an unnecessary bloody class struggle, a gamble by sociopaths to take what they can seize.. 

Have I been oppressed? Yes, I was, when I was a young gay man. My own father held a loaded gun to my head in 1970 after I told him I was homosexual. Policemen entrapped and prosecuted gay men regularly. Gay bars were regularly raided. Newspapers published walks of shame as patrons were led out to police wagons. Later gay men were placed on sex-offender lists for being caught having sex in places where heterosexuals could have sex without interference. Still true in some places in the U.S.. 

That is oppression. Having the weight of government authority or social conformity out to get you really is oppression. And, that is a good reason for LGBTQ people to protest in league with other groups when oppression actually occurs. But, trying to collude with government to oppress those who disagree with your choices of lifestyle at the expense of the freedoms of others is not a good reason to protest at all. The latter is authoritarianism, the antithesis of what Gay Liberation was about.

What mass oppression is observable in 2019 America's day-to-day? Are public accommodations segregated? No. Are schools legally segregated by race or ethnicity? No. Are religious congregations prevented from worship or building a place of worship? No. Are police forces and the the military monoliths of race, religion or ethnicity? No. Are government offices monoliths in this way? No. Is housing segregated? No. Are bathrooms even segregated, male and female, in many places? No. Are there any outrageous things banned from our media? No. 

The fact is that the oppression in society that is most prevalent is self-oppression, not group oppression. The only flagrant attempt at group oppression by a minority of deranged folks today is being carried out by academics, religious groups, political groups and media pundits against White people. Flagrant anti-White racism is allowed in the U.S. without prosecution or general social condemnation. That is how non-oppressive our "White" Western society is. 

How about all this talk about White supremacy and White nationalism? Where is it? 

I always find this line of diatribe amusing because it comes from those who have found a blunt tool to justify their own dysfunction. The way some actual racists used to speak about Black radicals. Look at society. Why are there Asian neighborhoods, Italian neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods in some places? Oppression? WASP supremacist ideology? Are troops ushering these groups together? No.

Freedom of association still trumps integration in many places. Before vast civil rights legislation, my hometown transitioned from a diffusely integrated small city of many ethnic and religious groups to an Hispanic colony of Caribbeans and Central Americans. These people were not marshaled into my city by the government. Many were illegal immigrants. They chose to live with their own identity group. And their relative mono-culture caused those used to a vibrant multi-culture to move away. 

Nobody stopped these Latino immigrants from creating their own mono-culture in the U.S.. Nobody kept them from exhausting public school budgets with their children's ESL needs while insisting that they speak Spanish to their children at home. Yet some of the descendants of those children now claim status as oppressed in America by White people. Think of it. 

This must end before it leads to the inevitable fracture of our societies in The West. There are those who cannot or will not function in orderly society. Their visibility has grown due to the absence of suitable public education and public mental health care. They are being exploited by those who always exploit them: Those with an agenda to overcome the conservative, the responsible and the successful for their own gain. 

By ripping society apart, they hope to rise in the chaos by being loudest and most hypnotically manipulative. They are the Napoleons, the Hitlers, the Trotsky's, the Stalins, the Maos. They are not saviors of the oppressed. They are oppressors of the worst kind. They use their minions then abandon or massacre them to gather the spoils of the chaos for themselves.