Privilege and Oppression

Society is broken up into groups. It is only in groups that we know how to act. Think about it. When we are in a new situation what do we do? We look at other people to see how they are acting. Then we do what they are doing. Different groups have a tendency to want to be on the top of the pile, and individual people want to be the leaders of the various groups. The most successful group in a society makes the rules.
Today the ‘White Male Group’ has dominance. White males have set all points of etiquette and appropriate behavior in our society. The dominant theories of Western Society originated with white male thinkers. Politically we have the idea of Freedom as explained by the Founding Fathers. With all due respect to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, what about the Founding Mothers? In passing, Dolly Madison and Martha Washington may be mentioned, but not on the same plane as their husbands and colleagues. Other, perhaps less enjoyable, political systems have also been set up. But men, again, have dominated them. Hitler and Lenin are prime examples. In the past kings always wielded more power than queens did. In scientific escapades the world is quick to laud Galileo, Copernicus, and Darwin. Only with her husband Pierre is Madame Marie Curie ever mentioned as the ‘co-discoverer’ of the x-ray. There are of course myriad examples of the white man being triumphant over other groups because of gender, race, ethnicity, government etc.
But even if one thousand pages of text were given over to examples and complaining about the poor oppressed state of other people in the world. So what is to be done? Should anything be done? After all the western model has worked for thousands of years ever since the ancient Greeks came up with the idea. Of course there have been some low points in our general history like slavery, the Holocaust, the Massacre at Wounded Knee and others. So maybe it would have been better if Eastern thought had prevailed in the world. The Muslim armies or the Mongols under Genghis Khan should have kept going when they had conquered everything east of the Aegean Sea. But there are problems here as well. Interpretations of Islam have produced terror groups like al-Qaeda, and the land of India, while the birth place of the Buddha, also came up with a very strict caste system where if a member of the Brahma caste is touched by the shadow of an undesirable the Brahman goes home and takes a shower to get clean again. Now those are definitely examples that we don’t want to emulate.
Maybe men are the problem. We should let women take care of everything. After all people like Joan d’Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and Margaret Thatcher were very efficient and charismatic leaders. British Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria even had whole ages of Western Civilization and the major architecture of their lives named after them. Does it matter that they were all working with ideas formed by men. What if they came up with a New Women World Order? Gloria Allred and Margaret Sanger ruling the world! AAAAHHHHHH, HELP! But putting them aside what if it was started by more ‘mainstream’ female figures? Personally I don’t think Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, or Sarah Palin would do a good job either.
As I have shown it does not matter what group is in power. The problem is the power itself. Articles we have read in class have talked about how the group in power will do anything to keep their power. If they realize that they have a privilege then they will keep it. But it is through the realizing of the privilege that the privileged group can choose to change the privilege, or use their privilege to bring other groups up.
The Liberal vs. Conservative line that has dominated political thought on power is not going to move us beyond where we are. Liberals say they want to bring down the privileged groups. But they “do” this through increasing the power of Government, Unions, and elite professors thus alienating the smaller oppressed people. By increasing the power of Bureaucracy they dehumanize the problem and lend a boost to the entity of privilege. The Marxist idea of redistribution of wealth only transfers power and privilege from one group to another. Privilege and oppression is not dealt with, only transferred. On the other side of the coin if the first conservatives had been successful in all their aims then all but the privileged few would still live in feudal castles as serfs.
To lessen privilege and get rid of oppression we need to dismantle the power structure. That does not mean total anarchy. Nature abhors a vacuum, and such a power vacuum could quickly be filled with a worse pattern of oppression than what existed before. But a reduction in the power structure is what we need to overcome oppression. A structure of some kind is needed to keep a sense of order. The people who are in this structure, male or female, white or black, will not be there because of privilege but because they have more responsibility. That is how we can overcome oppression. But those in power are not there as a privilege, but as a responsibility to protect those who gave them the position.