In order to understand oppression as a subconscious thing, let's take a couple of examples.
Many women complain that they express an idea that is immediately dismissed, only for a man to be cheered for saying the exact same thing, minutes later.
I have witnessed time and again a woman pointing to the correct explanation or solution for a bug and a man just ignoring her repeatedly, only to exhaust all other solutions before arriving to the same conclusion and solution.
There is a ton of lab research to show this goes beyond anecdotal evidence. Some researchers recently showed that for the same length of speech, women speakers were judged as being overtaking the dialog.
In fact, the balance that the average listener gauged as fair was 70% male speech vs 30% female speech.
Don't get me started about bias of doctors, not only against women and transgender people, but, let's face the elephant in the room, black people.
A recent study had found that doctors hold outdated racist tropes, for instance, that black people are more resistant to pain. Doctors are also more likely to discount complains from any marginalized group, and send them home with a "have less stress" tap on the back, when in reality they do have something serious.
The list goes on and on.
There is a whole book, called "Dying of Whiteness", which shows that white people are opposed to welfare measures, when they think that black people will benefit from welfare too.
The number of leftist and anarchist people who maintain some blatant form of medicalized cisgenderism is astonishing.
And this is not about transphobia only. The track record of many collectives with sexism is harrowing.
Someone recently wrote "Why I am not giving to your mutual aid project", TL;DR because every collective has a couple of skeletons of sexual abuse in their closet.
Haven't we all seen the silent machismo and the solidarity between male authority figures in these spaces? Whenever a story like this pops up, the whole repertoire of discount tropes for sexual abuse allegations is taken out from the secret place it is kept for emergencies like this.
This is consequential for broader organization as well, not only gendered and racialized oppression. In a strict Bakunian sense, the informality of a circle of buddies pulling the strings on any topic of field of activity is a form of State. A kyriarchy, or oppression.
And there are more oppressions that we don't even know, in jobs, universities, hobbies, and more. Some of them can be traced back to sexism, like the hard-science superiority complex has sexist undertones, but wherever there is inequality, there is oppression.
It seems that people have a predisposition to form groups and make rules that reify social categories, for instance when some universities are considered elite and others shitholes, or some squat is seen as true hardcore anarchists and the others as alternative lifestyle hippies.
ALL of this operates subconsciously.
For quite some time I thought that the channels of anarchist organization would remedy human predisposition towards inequality, oppression, and bias. I now realize that this can not happen automatically, but a serious component of self-reflection to transcend internalized kyriarchies must be necessary.
But we now see the prevail of the most vulgar and raw inequality instincts, enabled by systemic capitalist indoctrination and consent manufacturing campaigning. And we know that this seed is also present in leftists and anarchists.
I believe that something horrible is about to happen the following five to ten years. We will then reflect, as we did in the aftermath of the two first world wars, on human predisposition to outgroup, other, dehumanize and eliminate.
We might as well reinvent the science of the human psychology of obedience, conformity, prejudice, oppression and kyriarchy. And anarchists might have to reinvent the principles of political organization, this time to include the understanding of subconscious oppression, and embrace procedures to address and transcend all kyriarchies.
That would stay truth to the spirit of complete abolition of all State, including internalized states of mind. (The pun is not intended.) In fact, I finally tend to agree with some anarchist pedagogists, that preparing people to be active members in an equal society, free of oppressions, the work must start in childhood, to eradicate the instincts of property, selfishness, power and supremacy.
So, although it might seem there could not be a bleakest time to raise such issues, that in fact the struggle for visibility, for the normalization of queer lives, for the subversion of verbal sexism, and so on and so forth, all were important and integral to the anarchist cause.
The white male racist kleprocratists might shed ours and many of our siblings' blood over the next ten years. But 2030's anarchism will re-discover the procedures that engender these demands and bake the relentless struggle for complete equality right into the channels of anarchist social organization and generational reproduction.
