Oppression? No. Calling these sorts of incidents ‘oppression’ trivializes the suffering of the disenfranchised millions who live in daily fear of beatings, lynching or rape because of their religion or ethnicity, and must try to survive while knowing that others can rob them and destroy their possessions with impunity and they have no legal recourse. You might as well call having to shake hands with a man you don’t like ‘rape’.
I was going to upvote this until I got to the last sentence which seems both needlessly inflammatory and not accurate. The essential point you’ve made does however seem to have some validity: There’s a scale difference in different types of mistreatment, and using the same word for all of them is something that can easily cause connotative problems.
Everyone has been treated badly by members of a different group at some point in their life, and responsible adults are expected to get over it and get on with things.
Yes, but how common are those actions? For example, as someone who is of Ashkenazic Jewish descent in the US, I occasionally get mistreatment based on my obvious ethnic heritage. But such events are extremely rare- I can literally count the ones I remember on one hand. That’s distinct from some other groups- for example if I were a black man living in the US I’d likely have a list of incidents orders of magnitude larger.
I was going to upvote this until I got to the last sentence which seems both needlessly inflammatory and not accurate. The essential point you’ve made does however seem to have some validity: There’s a scale difference in different types of mistreatment, and using the same word for all of them is something that can easily cause connotative problems.
Yes, but how common are those actions? For example, as someone who is of Ashkenazic Jewish descent in the US, I occasionally get mistreatment based on my obvious ethnic heritage. But such events are extremely rare- I can literally count the ones I remember on one hand. That’s distinct from some other groups- for example if I were a black man living in the US I’d likely have a list of incidents orders of magnitude larger.