“The Internalized Oppression Worry is Morally Injurious”
Nicole Dular (Franklin College) & Madeline Ward (Georgetown University)
Central APA 2022

Internalized Oppression: when marginalized agents adopt as their own or as true dominant norms, values, stereotypes, and perspectives about themselves/their social group

Our thesis: the internalized oppression worry harms oppressed people in inexcusable, unjust ways

What is the Internalized Oppression Worry? The generic worry is a rhetorical or argumentative move from a claim that internalized oppression exists to a claim that oppressed people are deficient in some way.

Examples:

1. Autonomy
   
   1. Deferential housewife
      
   2. Some authors claim that women lack autonomy with respect to cosmetic surgery. They’ve internalized oppressive cultural practices surrounding beauty and try to conform to the oppressive norm
      
2. Propaganda
   
   1. Jason Stanley’s book How Propaganda Works 
      

1. Marginalized “adopt a flawed ideology of their own inferiority” (p. 8)
   
2. “members of the negatively privileged group will fling themselves against the high barriers erected against them, only to blame themselves for their failure to scale them” (p. 250)
   
3. “to act against the structure that oppresses them, they need to know something about the way in which it holds them back from achievement” (p. 250)
   

Why is the internalized oppression worry harmful? 

• Individual Harms: undermines epistemic agency; denigrating
  
• Structural Harms: solidifies unjust epistemic hierarchies; constructs oppressive moral narrative about what ought to be done in contexts of oppression and the characters of the marginalized and dominant