Structural Violence AC
I affirm the resolution resolved: A just government ought to recognize the
unconditional right of workers to strike.
Framework
To clarify the round I would like to provide the following definitions.
Merriam-Webster defines “unconditional” as:
Merriam-Webster, “Unconditional,” no date, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unconditional, AT
Definition of unconditional 1: not conditional or limited : ABSOLUTE, UNQUALIFIED
unconditional surrender unconditional love
As an observation, the above definition should not be interpreted to suggest that the
Affirmative has to defend violent chaos
As the Supreme Court of Minnesota explains:
Faribault Daily News, Inc. v. Internat. Typog. Union, 236 Minn. 303 (1952), https://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/supreme-court/1952/35744.html, AT
Section 7 of the federal act gives employees the right to strike, without any conditions or
strings attached to it, where there is not in effect a collective bargaining contract. Where there is in effect a collective bargaining
contract, § 8(d) of the federal act requires a notice. The Minnesota act in every case requires a ten-day notice of intention to strike. If the
Minnesota act in this respect "impairs, dilutes, qualifies or in any respect subtracts from any of the rights guaranteed and protected by the
There can
be no question *323 that under the federal act the employees under the facts of our case have
an absolute right to strike. The federal act permits peaceful strikes for lawful objectives
without qualifications. The state act gives a conditional or qualified right. Both acts cover the same field. Under the decisions, it
federal Act," using language found in the Allen-Bradley case (315 U.S. 750, 62 S. Ct. 826, 86 L. ed. 1165), can it still be sustained?
would seem that the state statute cannot impose a conditional right on employees in interstate commerce where the federal law gives an
absolute right. The state act says to the employees: "You have the right to strike only if," and then specifies the limitation or condition. The tenday notice of intention to strike may be considered a very salutary provision in connection with the preservation of industrial peace, and
therefore very material or something quite so immaterial that the federal act or courts would take no offense; but in either case it must be
admitted that it places a restriction on an otherwise unqualified right to strike. The strike here involved is a peaceful strike for a lawful purpose,
and affects employer and employees engaged in interstate commerce.
It is not a case where the strike or picketing is
for an unlawful purpose or where there is violence or threats of violence.
Structural violence is defined by Butler 13 as
Butler 13
Adam Butler, documentary filmmaker, humanist, and the United States Citizen Ambassador to the United Nations, ,copyright, 2013 [“structural violence”,http://www.structuralviolence.org/structural-violence/, 11-12-2021] AKA
Structural violence refers to systematic ways in which social structures harm or otherwise disadvantage individuals. Structural
violence is subtle, often invisible, and often has no one specific person who can (or will) be held responsible (in contrast to behavioral
violence). I also hold that behavioral violence and structural violence can intertwine — some of the easiest examples of structural violence
involve police, military, or other state powers committing violent acts; of course one can blame the individual soldier, but the factors that lead
to a soldier killing a civilian are far more complex than that explanation would imply.
I value morality, because the word ought in the resolution prescribes a moral
obligation or duty. Therefore morality is the most topical value.
Ethical theories must directly address structural violence first, otherwise they cannot
be considered moral, therefore mitigating structural violence must be our value
criterion
Mitigating structural violence is necessary to prevent flawed moral exclusion.
Opotow 11 (Susan Opotow is a social psychologist and justice researcher at the City University of New York.
Her research examines the scope of justice over time, as well as exclusionary and inclusionary change in a range of
contexts that include: environmental degradation, societal changes after the USA Civil War and World War II, and
museums that represent past injustice. She was Editor of Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology)
“Social Injustice,” Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology for the 21st century, Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2001, BE)
Both structural and direct violence result[s] from moral justifications and rationalizations. Morals are the norms,
rights, entitlements, obligations, responsibilities, and duties that shape our sense of justice and guide our behavior with others (Deutsch, 1985). Morals operationalize our sense of
justice by identifying what we owe to whom, whose needs, views, and well-being count, and whose
do not. Our morals apply to people we value, which define who is inside our scope of justice (or
“moral community”), such as family members, friends, compatriots, and coreligionists (Deutsch, 1974, 1985; Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1989). We extend considerations of fairness to them, share community
resources with them, and make sacrifices for them that foster their wellbeing (Opotow, 1987, 1993). We see other kinds of people such as enemies or strangers
outside our scope of justice; they are morally excluded. Gender, ethnicity, religious identity, age, mental capacity, sexual orientation, and political affiliation are
. Excluded people can be hated and viewed as “vermin” or “plague” or they can be seen as expendable
non-entities. In either case, disadvantage, hardship, and exploitation inflicted on them seems normal, acceptable, and just—as
“the way things are” or the way they “ought to be.” Fairness and deserving seem irrelevant when applied to them and harm befalling them elicits neither remorse, outrage, nor demands for
some criteria used to define moral exclusion
social issues and controversies, such as aid to school drop-outs, illegal immigrants, “welfare moms,” people who are
are essentially moral debates about who deserves public resources, and
thus, ultimately, about moral inclusion. When we see other people’s circumstances to be a result of their moral failings, moral exclusion seems warranted. But when we see others’
circumstances as a result of structural vio- 4 lence, moral exclusion seems unwarranted and unjust. Psychological Bases for Moral Exclusion While it is
psychologically more comfortable to perceive harm-doers to be evil or demented, we each have
boundaries for justice. Our moral obligations are stronger toward those close to us and weaker
toward those who are distant. When the media reports suffering and death in Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, we often fail—as a
nation, as communities, and as individuals—to protest or to provide aid. Rationalizations include insufficient knowledge of the political
dynamics, the futility of doing much of use, and not knowing where to begin. Our tendency to exclude people is fostered by a number of normal
perceptual tendencies: 1. Social categorization. Our tendency to group and classify objects, including social
categories, is ordinarily innocuous, facilitating acquisition of information and memory (Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963). Social categorizations can become invidious,
however, when they serve as a basis for rationalizing structural inequality and social injustice. For example, race
is a neutral physical characteristic, but it often becomes a value-loaded label, which generates unequal treatment and outcomes (Archer, 1985; Tajfel, 1978). 2. Evaluative judgments. Our tendency to
make simple, evaluative, dichotomous judgments (e.g., good and bad, like and dislike) is a
fundamental feature of human perception. Evaluative judgments have cognitive, affective, and moral
components.
restitution; instead, harm inflicted on them can inspire celebration. Many
homeless, substance abusers, and those infected with HIV
Thus, the value criterion is mitigating structural violence .
My burden as the affirmative is to only prove that the reason workers strike
should be unconditional and will help mitigate structural violence. However, the
way they strike should have conditions and be policed. My opponent's burden as
the negative is to prove that a world without unconditional strikes is better at
mitigating structural violence.
Contention 1: Structural Violence in the
Workplace
Overview: Racism and sexism are persistent in the workplace. These are both forms of
structural violence. Structural violence is one of the most harmful types of violence in our
society today because when one is facing structural violence, their life is negated again and
again, this essentially dehumanizes them. Workers ought to be able to strike against their
employer in cases where their rights aren't being provided in an attempt to protect them.
This minimizes structural violence which is the most important impact under morality.
Minimizing structural violence comes first, and by recognizing a workers’ right to strike this is
possible.
Unfortunately, Structural violence is embedded in society.
Ansell 17 - David A. Ansell, Senior Vice President, Associate Provost for Community Health Equity, and
Michael E. Kelly Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center (The Death Gap: How
Inequality Kills, p. 7-10)
There are many different kinds of violence. Some are obvious: punches, attacks, gunshots, explosions. These are the kinds of inter- personal violence that we tend
to hear about in the news. Other kinds of violence are intimate and emotional. But the
deadliest and most thoroughgoing kind of
violence is woven into the fabric of American society. It exists when some groups have more access to
goods, resources, and opportunities than other groups, including health and life itself. This violence
delivers specific blows against particular bodies in particular neighborhoods. This unequal advantage and violence is built
into the very rules that govern our society. In the absence of this violence, large numbers of Americans would be able to live fuller and longer lives. This kind of
violence is called structural
violence, because it is embedded in the very laws, policies, and rules that govern
day-to- day life.
With structural violence in our world, we can not even begin to think about trying to create a
moral world.
Women everywhere are facing sexism in the workplace.
Parker 17
Kim Parker, Pew Research Center, 12-14-2017, ["42% of US working women have faced gender discrimination on the job",
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/12/14/gender-discrimination-comes-in-many-forms-for-todays-working-women/, 11-12-2021]
AKA
About four-in-ten working women (42%) [of women]in the United States say they have faced
discrimination on the job because of their gender. They report a broad array of personal experiences,
ranging from earning less than male counterparts for doing the same job to being passed over for important
assignments, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data. The survey – conducted in the
summer before a recent wave of sexual misconduct allegations against prominent men in politics, the media and other
industries – found that, among employed adults, women
are about twice as likely as men (42% versus 22%) to
say they have experienced at least one of eight specific forms of gender discrimination at work.
One of the biggest gender gaps is in the area of income: One-in-four working women (25%) [of women] say they
have earned less than a man who was doing the same job; [whereas only] one-in-twenty working men (5%) say
they have earned less than a female peer. Women are roughly four times as likely as men to say they have been treated as if they were not
competent because of their gender (23% of employed women versus 6% of men), and they are about three times as likely as men to say they
have experienced repeated small slights at work because of their gender (16% versus 5%). There are significant gaps on other items as well.
While 15% of working women say they have received less support from senior leaders than a man who was doing the same job, only 7% of
working men report having a similar experience. One-in-ten
working women say they have been passed over
for the most important assignments because of their gender, compared with 5% of men. The survey,
which was conducted July 11-Aug. 10, 2017, with a nationally representative sample of 4,914 adults (including 4,702 who are employed at
least part time), also asked about sexual harassment in a separate question. It found that while similar shares of women and men
say
sexual harassment is at least a small problem in their workplace (36% versus 35%), women are about
three times as likely as men to have experienced it personally while at work (22% versus 7%). In more
recent surveys conducted by other organizations, the share of women reporting personal experiences with sexual harassment has fluctuated,
depending in part on how the question was asked. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey conducted Oct. 12-15, for example, 54% of women
said they have received unwanted sexual advances from a man that they felt were inappropriate whether or not those advances were workrelated; 30% said this had happened to them at work. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted Nov. 13-15, 35% of women said they
have personally experienced sexual harassment or abuse from someone in the workplace. The Center’s survey asked about sexual harassment
specific to the workplace. The survey was conducted as part of a broader forthcoming study on women and minorities in science, technology,
engineering and math (STEM) fields. Among employed women, the share saying they have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace is
roughly similar across racial and ethnic, educational, generational and partisan lines. But when it comes to specific forms of workplace
discrimination tested in the survey, there are significant differences among women that are rooted mainly in their level of education. Women
with a bachelor’s degree or more education report experiencing discrimination across a range of items at significantly higher rates than women
with less education. And in some regards, the most highly educated women stand out. While 57% of working women with a postgraduate
degree say they have experienced some form of gender discrimination at work, for example, the same is true for 40% of women with a
bachelor’s degree and 39% of those who did not complete college. Roughly three-in-ten working women with a postgraduate degree (29%) say
they have experienced repeated small slights at work because of their gender, compared with 18% of those with a bachelor’s degree and 12%
with less education. Similarly, working women with a postgraduate degree are much more likely than their less-educated counterparts to say
they have received less support from senior leaders than a man doing the same job (27% of postgraduate women, compared with 11% of
women with bachelor’s degrees and 13% of women with less education). The pattern is similar when it comes to being passed over for
promotions and feeling isolated at work. When it comes to wages, working women with a bachelor’s degree or more are much more likely than
those with less education to say they have earned less than a man who performed the same job. Women with family incomes of $100,000 or
higher stand out here as well – 30% of them say they’ve earned less than a man who was doing comparable work compared with roughly onein-five women with lower incomes (21%). But overall, women with higher family incomes are about equally likely to have experienced at least
one of these eight forms of gender-based discrimination at work. There
are differences by race and ethnicity as well.
While roughly half of employed black women (53%) [of black women] say they have
experienced at least one type of gender discrimination at work, fewer white and Hispanic women
say the same (40% for each group). One area in particular where black women stand apart is in their reporting of having been passed
over for the most important assignments because of their gender – 22% of employed black women say this has happened to them, compared
with 8% of whites and 9% of Hispanics. Women’s experiences with discrimination in the workplace also differ along party lines. Roughly half
(48%) of working Democratic women and Democratic-leaning independents say they have experienced at least one form of gender
discrimination at work, compared with a third of Republican and Republican-leaning women. These party differences hold up even after
controlling for race. The partisan gap is in keeping with wide party differences among both men and women in their views of gender equality in
the U.S.; a separate 2017 Pew Research Center survey found Democrats largely dissatisfied with the country’s progress toward gender equality.
About the survey: These are some of the findings from a survey conducted among a nationally representative sample of 4,914 adults, ages 18
and older, from July 11-Aug. 10, 2017. The survey, which was conducted online in English and in Spanish through GfK’s Knowledge Panel,
included an oversample of employed adults working in science, technology, engineering and math-related fields. The margin of sampling error
based on the 4,702 employed adults in the sample is plus or minus 2.0 percentage points. The margin of sampling error based on the 2,344
employed women in the sample is plus or minus 3.0 percentage points. See the topline for exact question wording.
Both racism and sexism are prevalent in our workplace. The statistics for racism are
unbearable as well.
Akhtar 20
Allana Akhtar, Business Insider, 2-10-2020, ["42% of US employees have experienced or seen racism at work. It's the latest example of how
diversity efforts are falling short, especially in America.", https://www.businessinsider.com/glassdoor-42-of-us-employees-have-witnessed-orexperienced-racism-2019-10, 11-7-2021] AKA
The country's minority population keeps growing, but racism continues to plague workplaces
across the U.S.A survey from job site Glassdoor found large portions of the American workforce experience discrimination at work. About
three in five workers experienced discrimination based on their age, race, gender, or LGBTQ
identity. Many use Black History Month to celebrate equalizing treatment toward black Americans and other racial groups, but minorities
say workplaces need to make more of an effort to address racism. Americans experience more racial discrimination at work than their peers in
France, the U.K. and Germany. Glassdoor surveyed 5,241 adults in the US, UK, France, and Germany . American workers were
more likely to experience discrimination than all other countries: 42%
of American workers said they have experienced
or seen racism at work, which was 12% higher than the overall average. In turn, 55% of US workers say their company should do
more to increase diversity and inclusion. Glassdoor hoped the survey would be a "wake up call" for US employers to bulk up their diversity and
inclusion programs. Many are already starting to, as Glassdoor found hiring for jobs related to D&I increased 30% since last year. "While it's
troubling to see that a majority of people have experienced or witnessed discrimination at work, with more awareness comes more action to
ensure greater inclusivity in the workplace," the company's chief people officer Carina Cortez said in a statement. American companies have a
diversity problem. The report is just one sign US work is lagging for minority groups. A report from Lean In and McKinsey, found men of color
make up 10% of corporate C-suite roles, while women of color make up just 4%. White men and white women, meanwhile, respectively make
up 68% and 18%. White employees and workers of color also have different views on how diversity programs at their companies fare. A survey
by the Associated Press and tech giant SAP recently found over half of black and Hispanic workers considered diversity and inclusion programs
before accepting a job, compared to just 27% of white employees. Research says that institutional challenges, including conscious and
unconscious bias, lead to racial minorities being passed up for promotions or big projects. In turn, about four in 10 workers think white and
male employees have more advantages at their workplace compared to other groups, AP and SAP found. Research shows diversity and
inclusion programs make companies better as a whole. A report in the Harvard Business Review found that diverse companies are more
innovative, objective, and careful. Mock jury experiments famously found that being in diverse groups actually made the white group members
consider more evidence. Workers who feel like they "belong" even stay with companies longer and are more productive, according to a survey
from leadership development company BetterUp. Employees who felt "excluded," meanwhile, were 25% less productive. "Beyond dedicating
specific people and roles to address diversity and inclusion, employers must do more," said Cortez, the head of people at Glassdoor. "This can
start by introducing employee resource groups, instituting company-wide speaker series that dive into real experiences, and educating
employees on the resources available within and outside of a company."
Structural violence has exponential negative impacts, and this form of violence dehumanizes
life.
Butler 04
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley. She received her Ph. D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984.(American philosopher). Precarious Life: The Powers of
Mourning and Violence . Verso. 2004. Pages 34-35.
If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence,
it fails to injure or negate those
lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so
must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,”
and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent
inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite
paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity
of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims.
How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first, on the level of discourse , certain lives are not considered lives at
all,
they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization
occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization
that is already at work in the culture. It is another thing to say that discourse itself affects violence through omission . If 200,000 Iraqi children
were
[like being] killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath, do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or
collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?
Structural violence is the worst form of violence
Hoivik 18
Wiley Online Library, 2018, ["Structural Violence",
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781119240716.ch7, 11-14-2021] AKA
A key aspect of structural violence is that it is often subtle, invisible, and accepted as a matter of course; even
more difficult than detecting it is assigning culpability for it, since the actors are often impossible to identify,
hidden as they are behind anonymous institutions or long disappeared while the violence continues. There are no concrete operators
directly attacking others, as when one person kills another. However, if we took into account the victim’s and not just the perpetrator’s
perspective, structural violence has similar effects as behavioral violence, including death (Morgan et al., 2014). Structural
violence, in fact, is by far the most lethal form of violence as well as the most potent cause of other forms of
violence (Butchart & Engström, 2002). The magnitude of damage warrants calling it violence rather than simply social injustice or
oppression. The excess rates of death and disability resulting from the social and economic structures of our society—that is, its division into
rich and poor, powerful and weak, and superior and inferior—are measurable using life expectancy data, as we will see later in this chapter.
Calculations show that between
10 and 20 million deaths per year can be attributed to structural
violence (Høivik, 1977), more than ten times the number due to suicide, homicide, and warfare
combined. The numbers are even greater now, and the Commission on Social Determinants of Health of the
World Health Organization (WHO, 2008) has declared that social injustice is killing people on a
grand scale.
Allowing the workers and people to fight back to strike will help us break
oppressive systems as is a form of protection for workers.
Striking is key to resisting oppression
Lim 19 Woojin Lim (Editor for the Harvard Crimson). “The Right to Strike.” The Harvard Crimson. 11 December 2019. AKA.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/12/11/lim-right-to-strike/
The right to strike is a right to resist oppression. The strike (and the credible threat of a strike) is
[a] an indispensable part of the collective bargaining procedure. Collective bargaining (or
“agreement-making”) provides workers and employees with the opportunity to influence the
establishment of workplace rules that govern a large portion of their lives. The concerted withdrawal of
labor allows workers to promote and defend their unprotected economic and social interests from
employers’ unilateral decisions, and provide employers with pressure and incentives to make
reasonable concessions. Functionally, strikes provide workers with the bargaining power to drive
fair and meaningful negotiations, offsetting the inherent inequalities of bargaining power in the
employer-employee relationship. The right to strike is essential in preserving and winning rights. Any
curtailment of this right involves the risk of weakening the very basis of collective bargaining.
The right to strike challenges the oppression inherent to the class system
Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch (Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University). “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” American
Political Science Review, Volume 112, Issue 4, November 2018, pp. 905 – 917. JDN. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/americanpolitical-science-review/article/abs/right-to-strike-a-radical-view/8B521F67E28D4FAE1967B17959620424
To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the
relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or
restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that
matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the classbased oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to
work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and
who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers.
There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly
drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is
meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not
change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of
each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project.
The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some
who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—
have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative
but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on
adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only,
way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no
reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending
on how we measure income and wealth,
about 60–80% of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9
This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That
minority
has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable
alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the
fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that
asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive
is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such
forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing
certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore
oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies.
Oppression is immoral; thus outweighs under the value of morality
Donahue 07
Donahue, T. J., Why Oppression is Wrong (November 4, 2007). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1027481 or
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1027481
I am going to argue that what makes oppression wrong is that it violates principles of wrongful
benefit and institutionalized harm. But these principles are relatively unfamiliar, so I shall first say
something about their meaning and implications. The wrongful benefit principle holds that no one
should benefit from her own wrong. It is a principle familiar in equity, but less so in moral and
political theory.5 The idea behind the principle is that no one should, as a result of a wrong for which
she is responsible, enjoy consequences which provide her with significant social goods. Suppose, for
instance, that I blackmail the world’s greatest cosmetic surgeon into performing on me an operation which makes me one of the world’s most
attractive men. I use my newfound attractiveness to become a star television presenter for the Tiffany network, enjoying the prestige and
riches that come with the position. These last are, of course, significant social goods. My enjoying them as a result of the blackmailing violates
the principle of wrongful benefit. And the principle entails that if society or somebody knows that I got these goods as a result of the
blackmailing, they ought to do something about it. Another clear violation of this principle was considered in the famous case of Riggs v.
Palmer. Elmer had murdered his grandfather, whom he knew had willed him much of his estate. Elmer intended by the murder the more
quickly to enjoy his inheritance. Let us suppose that the intended legacy was substantial. So had the courts then awarded it to Elmer, he would
have enjoyed a significant social good as a result of his own wrong. This would have violated the principle, with Elmer, society, and especially
the courts being the chief violators. Tom Donahue Why Oppression Is Wrong 6 Even less familiar than the wrongful benefit principle is the
This principle holds that no social group should be subjected to an
unjustified institutionalized harm. What social groups and unjustified harms are we discussed in Part 2. A harm is an
principle of institutionalized harm.
institutionalized harm just in case it is a harm which regularly results from a practice conducted by a particular social group, where this social
group entertains collective beliefs which make sense of the practice. A clear violation of the institutionalized harm principle is the United
States’s policy, from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s or so, of assimilative education of Native American children. A major goal of this
policy was to rid Native American children of any commitment to customs and practices indigenous to Native Americans and not accepted
by White America.6 This practice resulted in a harm because it instilled in the children who underwent it, and their families, a sense of
unchangeable inferiority because (i) they saw that they could not so easily discard these customs and practices, and (ii) they felt powerless
to oppose the policy. The practice was institutionalized because it was supported by the collective beliefs of White Americans that Native
Americans, as well as their customs and practices, were uncivilized, that the Natives needed to adopt White customs and practices, and
discard all incompatible Native customs and practices.
Thus, the only way to fight oppression, inequality, and mitigate structural
violence, the most important impact under morality, is by voting aff in today's
round.
For all the reasons above I strongly urge an affirmative ballot, affirm the
resolution, and stand open to three minutes of cross ex.