On conflating oppression

I want to focus on I.M. Young’s reading on the "Five Faces of Oppression". I feel it is important to understand the nature of oppression and what it means to be within an oppressive system. I think that oppression is often conflated with discrimination or marginalization. I view oppression as the greater system that alienates us as human beings, whereas discrimination and marginalization of some groups are a result, or symptom, of oppressive systems. For example, many workplaces with anti-discrimination policies will seek to ensure their employees are aware of differential experiences of marginalized groups. “Sensitivity trainings” are not uncommon. However these workshops do little more than create awareness of “white male privilege” and, I feel, create a situation of “white [male;straight;wealthy] guilt.” And let me get this straight, there is nothing wrong with awareness, but if we think that is the extent to which social justice should occur we are dead wrong. Imparting guilt on people who experience privilege does not solve the problem and, I would argue, makes the problem worse by making people feel negative and not giving people a sense of self-efficacy to be able to transform the world.

In effect we are all oppressed in systems of capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy. We are also all complicit in reproducing these systems, whether we experience marginalization or not. We may be the (generalized) beneficiaries of an oppressive system, but it is oppressive to all nonetheless. For example, women are the ones who are more greatly affected by poverty due to patriarchal systems (i.e. “ the dual day”, equity in roles of marriage, expectations of the female gender), but we must realize that men are also constrained by patriarchy and expected gender roles (i.e. popular conceptions of masculinity, expectations of being the main economic provider). And while men, overall, are the beneficiaries of patriarchal systems (as compared to women), they are still oppressed people from the unjust nature of patriarchy. Women who do not address, seriously, the problematic of systemic oppression of gender duality and heterosexism (for all genders) cannot call themselves practitioners of "anti-oppression". 

As practitioners of “community development”, we cannot have tunnel-vision in our understanding of the multi-layered and universal nature of oppression. Such a myopic move would produce movements such as “Black Capitalism” (seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Capitalism) which seeks to have a marginalized group make gains by ‘working-the system’ rather than deconstructing the system which creates ‘winners’ and inevitably ‘losers’. 

“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed,instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.
But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired but their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole” (Freire 1970: 29-30, emphasis added).