Law As Oppressor
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. There have always been examples of oppression in the history of mankind. The baffling truth is that most of the oppressions in the history are done using laws as means of discrimination to oppress certain group, race or gender. Law is a rule of conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority. The existence of laws is fundamental to a society governed by the rule of law. However, the creation and enforcement of laws does not constitute or enable a society to be governed in true justice. It is entirely possible for a legal order to be partial, securing its protections and benefits only to some and used as weapon of oppression to others. One of the reasons for this is because laws are created mostly by the privileged people or the elected officials who in some ways are puppets of the wealthy and privileged people. The minority and poor people are always victimized because the laws are created by the wealthy and privileged. Most of the third world countries suffer from this dysfunctional system of inequality and oppression. But it is surprising and irony that country like United States, which is considered to be land of freedom and equality and the country built by the oppressed people who migrated here to escape the oppression, have used law as mean of oppression.
In the civilized society, the oppression cannot be enforced directly like they used to in the past. Therefore, they often use technique of criminalizing the whole population based on the act of few. The United State Drug War is example of the authority using law to control the black population. In “Drug Policy as Social Control” Noam Chomsky writes “The so-called drug was started in the 1980s and it was aimed directly at the black population. None of this has anything to do with drugs. It has to do with controlling and criminalizing dangerous populations (1).” He compared the current United States Drug War to the nineteenth century English law which made gin illegal and kept whiskey legal. Gin was the drink of the working class and whiskey was the drink of upper class people; hence creating the margin between rich and poor by criminating poor’s drink. In 1920, United States passed law banning the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages that remained in place till 1933. The hidden targets of this law were the poor and immigrants. Another example is US legislation relating to marijuana and Mexicans. The illegalization of marijuana was done in the Border States to control immigrant Mexican population because its use was common among the Mexican immigrant and unknown to others. The article “Drug Policy as Social Control” gives these example of how civilized government have used laws created by the rich and privileged to indirectly control and segregate minority and immigrants. He writes, “The more you can increase the fear of drugs and crime and welfare mothers and immigrants and aliens and poverty and all sorts of things, the more you control people (1).”