How To Create a System of Oppression

Today we’re looking at what it means to create structural oppression - a system that does the work of oppression for those in power. Note that Pharaoh is gaining so much money and power that he builds two more storehouse cities to hold it all, meanwhile, the people of Israel are pushed further and further down.

From the message yesterday, these are the 4 steps that scholars Rita Hardiman and Bailey Jackson say are used to create systems of oppression:

1. The more powerful group has the power to define what is ‘normal,’ ‘correct,’ or ‘real’ for themselves and others.

2. Various forms of different and unequal treatment, such as harassment and discrimination, are systemic and institutionalized, so that individual members of the more powerful group do not have to expend any personal effort or thought to maintain the status quo of inequity.

3. The oppressed group is socialized to internalize the negative messages about themselves and cooperate in their own oppression by thinking and acting like the more powerful group.

4. The culture, language and history of the more powerful group is imposed as ‘normal,’ while the culture, language and history of the oppressed groups are misrepresented, devalued or eradicated

Ask yourself how you see one or more of those in action in this passage and in your world:

So the Egyptians put slave masters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor,and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”

So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous.  And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. - Exodus 1:11-21