Each time we call someone “the oppressed,” we oppress them.

(In writing this, I can't escape the paradox of oppressing “the oppressed”).

We oppress them by reducing the complexity of who they are to merely being “the oppressed.”

We oppress them by repeating “the oppressed” so often that the weight of our words pushes them down, pressing them like a well-folded shirt worn to look fashionable.

By repeatedly invoking 'the oppressed,' we may seek to reassure ourselves and others that we are unshakably aligned with them and the “right side of history:” that we are absolutely not one of the bad ones.

Psychoanalysis is wary of overly emphatic negations, a notion that Hamlet was already aware of: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

It can be a way of yelling from the stage of the world: a shout out to “the oppressed!”

Like we are their fans.

European intellectuals from the Left have long done this with the revolutionary "noble savage" of the New World. “Go and make the Revolution, kids, you’re pure and full of energy!” they say.

But, they add: “Just don’t do it too close to my fancy and comfy French apartment in Paris!”

And one last thing: “I’ll support you with my words because words, too, are revolutionary actions—like throwing a Molotov cocktail or fighting the police!”

They romanticize the noble savage, and I think their secret expectation is to bask in the fulfillment that comes when the noble savage acknowledges them as their most formidable partner in crime. 

(Let’s not forget the famous photo of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir striking a glamorous pose with Fidel Castro and his iconic revolutionary beard. Or, more recently, the grotesquely self-satisfied Ignacio Ramonet, declaring that Maduro had definitely won the presidential election.)

It’s a perverse twist on, if not a deepening of, Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic: the Master idealizes the Slave to the greatest extent, fantasizing about the immense satisfaction they will experience once the Slave recognizes them—not just as an ally, but as a crucial source of political and intellectual revolutionary authority, a provider of powerful material resources, and, ultimately, as someone who no longer represents their oppression. A Good Object.

This dialectic applies to Master-Allies who constantly refer to the oppressed as “the oppressed.”

But have we ever asked “the oppressed” how they want to be called?

And who are the “we?” Who are the “they?”

Where do I fit in this “we” and this “they,” in this maddening cycle of repetition, this back-and-forth, this fort-da, this game of disappearance and reappearance, and so on?

Because we don’t want to be caught off guard by suddenly realizing that we, too, are seen as “the oppressed” by someone else.

3-7-2025