Perspective and Oppression

It’s been a minutes since I’ve written a blog post. Thank you, faithful readers, for your patience. Now that I’ve a sense of what life will be like this semester, I should be blogging more frequently.

I return to blogging recognizing the need to say something about the connection between people’s perspectives and whether or not they see the forms of oppression before them. Rather than offer you my words, I share Sister Simone Weil’s from her essay “Are We Struggling for Justice?”

Someone who does not see a pane of glass does not know that he does not see it. Someone who, being placed differently, does see it, does not know the other does not see it.

When our will [i.e. what we want] finds expression outside ourselves in actions performed by others, we do not waste our time and our power of attention in examining whether they have consented to this. This is true of all of us. Our attention, given entirely to the success of the undertaking, is not claimed by them as long as they are docile . . . .

Rape is a terrible caricature of love from which consent is absent. After rape, oppression is the second horror of human existence. It is a terrible caricature of obedience.

Join me in meditating on the multifaceted truths these three paragraphs house.

Gracias, Dios, por la hermana Weil.