That’s not fair expresses a feeling that frequently leads to conflict.

A younger brother cries out that his older brother is getting “a bigger piece of cake than I am.” An applicant for a job feels that the selection procedures are biased against members of her race, gender, or ethnic group.

It is useful to make a distinction between injustice and oppression. Oppression is the experience of repeated, widespread, systemic injustice. It need not be extreme and involve the legal system (as in slavery, apartheid, or the lack of right to vote) nor violent (as in tyrannical societies). Harvey (1999) has used the term “civilized oppression” to characterize the everyday processes of oppres­sion in normal life. Civilized oppression “is embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules. It refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions which are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms” (Young, 1990, p. 41).

Structural oppression cannot be eliminated by getting rid of the rulers or by making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political, and cultural institutions. While specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression. (See Deutsch, 2006 for a fuller discussion on oppression.)