How Linked Are Various Forms of Oppression--and Does it Matter?

This week I have been attending and speaking at Vegan Summerfest, an annual conference that I attended regularly in the pre-pandemic days. The conference is marketed to the public mostly by touting the medical professionals who speak, but there are also numerous presentations on animal ethics and the environment. It's wonderful to be back among old friends and to make some new ones.

I'm giving three talks. I gave one yesterday titled Effective Activism, in which I first discussed the effective altruism movement (including some cringing about the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried is a vegan) and then pivoted to activism. There are quite a few resources out there that provide advice about why and where to give away one's money. For example, Peter Singer--who has been advocating philanthropy directed at the world's neediest people for decades--offers tips about how to donate money effectively at his organization's website. The main focus of my talk was on the emerging body of research on what sorts of methods of activism are most effective under what circumstances and the challenges for measuring outcomes.

I'll also be giving a talk based on my co-authored paper with Sherry Colb, If We Didn't Eat Them They Wouldn't Exist: The Nonidentity Problem's Implications for Animals (Including Humans). The paper itself goes pretty deep into the philosophical literature, so I'll have to try my best to make the arguments accessible.

My third talk (second in the order of the program and later today) is an updated version of one I've given before, called Intersectional Vegan Activism. I described the core of the presentation in an essay on this blog in 2017, which was the first time I delivered it. Obviously, a lot has happened since then: hence the updates.

Of course, in addition to giving my presentations, I'm also attending workshops by numerous other speakers. I attended a terrific talk yesterday by Dawn Hilton-Williams, a multi-talented chef, author, entrepreneur, and activist. Her talk was titled Calling All Allies: A Recipe for Successfully Presenting Health-Wealth within BIPOC Communities. It was chock full of useful tips and perspectives. As a 60-year-old straight white guy talking about intersectionality, I was and am very appreciative.

I want to focus now on something Ms. Hilton-Williams said as an aside--something I've heard a great many other people say on various occasions. Explaining one version of intersectionality (as described in my earlier essay on the topic), she said that "all oppressions are linked." Having heard numerous people make this claim before, I tried to trace it to its source. It's quite possible that there are much earlier versions, but the one to which I found the most back-citation is the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement by a self-described "collective of Black feminists." It includes the following: "we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking."

I take "interlocking" to be a synonym for "linked."

Is the claim true? Certainly, many forms of oppression are indeed interlocking or even simply different manifestations of the same ideology. For example, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism are all rooted in a conception of fixed sex/gender roles. That's not to say that there's nothing specific about each of these forms of oppression or that they are exactly the same. But the claim that various forms of oppression are linked does not assert anything quite that radical.

Forms of oppression can be interlocking in other ways. Consider slaughterhouses. They obviously oppress animals slaughtered in them, but they also are terrible for the human workers. And one can see the linkage by noting a common cause: the market imperative to produce as much meat as possible at the lowest possible cost, treating both animal and labor inputs as commodities to be exploited.

To be sure, one can run a bit far with that last form of analysis. Thus, I have encountered Marxist activists and scholars who argue that all oppression is simply the result of applying market logic. But this strikes me as plainly wrong. Some of what we might regard as "cultural" oppression has little to do with the market and is often manifested even as against the economic interests of those who hold the strongest prejudices.

I suspect that all forms of oppression share some characteristics, but that is not the same thing as saying that they are all linked. Think of prominent examples of sexism among the leadership of the civil rights movement. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael infamously said that the only position of women in the movement was "prone." Or consider that the #MeToo movement led to changes in leadership at major animal rights/welfare organizations after credible accusations of serious sex-based misconduct.

Perhaps one could say that the people who fought racism or speciesism while acting as sexists didn't realize that sexism is linked to these other forms of oppression or that particular individual leaders were hypocrites. But that doesn't ring true to me. Rather, the simpler explanation is that not all forms of oppression are strongly linked. Some are. Others are only weakly linked or merely share some characteristics.

Having said all of that, I nonetheless think that the slogan (if that's what it is) that "all" (or as in the Combahee statement, "all major") "forms of oppression are linked" is useful as an organizing principle for advocacy. Finding out that someone opposes racism provides a point of leverage for persuading them also to oppose sexism, homophobia, etc., so long as one can identify reasons for their anti-racism that apply also to those other forms of oppression. And because the primary focus of my revised talk on intersectional vegan activism is how to be persuasive, I end up concluding that it doesn't really matter whether the claim that all forms of oppression are linked is fully true.