Five faces of oppression and Tony AbbottElizabeth Tunstall with images for wikimedia

In this moment, we are in “the struggle.”

When I first moved to Australia nearly six years ago, I thought it was a more progressive place than the USA. Issues that seem intractable in the United States such as universal healthcare, active labour unions, bans on assault weapons, even an apology to the Indigenous communities had been addressed, designed into policy, and implemented, or at least funded, in Australia.

But now I see I was wrong—so wrong about Australia. What we in historically and contemporarily oppressed groups call “the struggle” continues.

What do I mean by the struggle? The recently departed African writer and Nobel Prize winner Chinua Achebe explains it best in his paraphrase of African American writer, James Baldwin:

He wants to lift from the back of Black people the heavy burden of their blackness, to end the oppression which is visited on them because they are Black and for no other reason . . .To define the struggle the way he does, Baldwin has to see it from a whole range of perspectives at once—the historical, the psychological, the philosophical, which are not present in a handful of statistics of recent advances . . . Most important of all, Baldwin has had to wrestle to unmask the face of the oppressor and, seeing him clearly, call him by his proper name.

I have never been naïve about Australian history. Before I arrived, I read up on Australia’s Indigenous genocide, use of convict labour, gender discrimination, and xenophobia of Asian, Middle Eastern, and now African immigrants. Yet in 2009, it felt like the many communities engaged in the struggle had become effective in making their daily conditions better.

But it seems that with the current Abbott government policy proposals in relationship to Indigenous communities, women, migrants, and refugees, the struggle is serious. The question is how do we engage in the struggle against the faces of oppression.

American feminist philosopher, Iris Marion Young lists five faces of oppression:

1. Exploitation, the theft of a group of peoples’ labour through unfair compensation;
2. Marginalisation, the relegation of a group of people to lower social standing or the edge of society;
3. Powerlessness, the domination of a group of people by ruling groups who prohibits their participation in decision making or their ability to change the conditions of their lower status;
4. Cultural imperialism, the establishment by the ruling groups of their cultural practices as the social norm; and
5. Violence, the threat of harm to a group of peoples’ bodies or property as a means of control.

Elizabeth Dori Tunstall does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.