Rejecting the Group-Based View of Oppression

Abstract This chapter argues that we should reject the standard, group-based view of oppression. On the standard view, groups are taken to be the primary subjects of oppression, and individuals are only oppressed by virtue of their membership in an oppressed group. While this view is so standard as to frequently be taken to be definitional of oppression, surprisingly little has been said to elaborate or defend it. In this chapter, the author elaborates the group-based view in more detail and argues that we should reject it on intersectional grounds. She starts by identifying what she takes to be the central commitment of the group-based view—that groups are the primary subjects of oppression—and argues that it gives rise to an additive and falsely universalizing picture of oppression that fails to do justice to important intersectional insights. The author then considers a revised version of the group-based view that abandons the claim that groups are the primary subjects of oppression, and instead centers the explanatory claim that individuals are oppressed by virtue of their membership in certain groups. On this revision, individuals are oppressed based on their social position, understood as the overall combination of groups that the individual is a member of. The author argues that while we should go in for a positional view, we should not analyze these positions in terms of group membership, because group membership fails to do the relevant explanatory work. She concludes that we should reject the group-based view of oppression.