Casteism

In the worst of these conditions, knowledge is wielded as a tool of power through which education systems can actively oppress entire populations, preventing the awareness of their own agency in their lives.

The same goes, of course, for human beings. The distancing effect of language facilitates exploitation, cruelty, murder, and genocide. When the other party to a relationship is a mere member of a generic category, be it “customer,” “terrorist,” or “employee,” exploitation or murder comes much more easily. Racial epithets serve the same purpose: we

When oppressed people become complicit in their oppression, joining the dominant class in their ideas about what we are, it is symbolic violence.

We can say, to put it briefly, that up to the present mankind has known two principal forms of oppression, the one (slavery or serfdom) exercised in the name of armed force, the other in the name of wealth thus transformed into capital; what we have to determine is whether these are not now being succeeded by a new species of oppression, oppression