Tools of Oppression in Relationships: Welcome to the Series

Sustainable Relationships

Dec 04, 2024

“Tools of Oppression” is a concept that Dr. Sundiata Soon-Jahta created as part of his Theory of Indivisibility, an anti-oppression framework for social sustainability. These tools serve as mechanisms of control within power-over systems, perpetuating harm and divisiveness in our relationships and communities.

Over the next few months, I’m going to publish a series of articles here that explore how the Tools of Oppression affect our relationships.

Tools of Oppression are everywhere. They are embedded in our lives so deeply and insidiously that we often fail to recognize their presence, let alone their impact. They shape our behaviors, our perceptions of ourselves, and our interactions with others — sometimes without our awareness. While it’s impossible to address every way these tools show up, this series will highlight some key examples and explore their nuances as they manifest within relationships.

Recently, I’ve been writing a lot about polyamory, which focuses more on romantic relationships, but it has always been my intention to include many types of relationships on Sustainable Relationships. In this series, I will use the term relationship more broadly, encompassing all forms of connections — whether personal, professional, or environmental. If you’d like more context, you can read this article. You can also check out this previous piece of mine about types of relationships for a deeper understanding of this perspective.

The goal of this series is to help us collectively see and name the tools of oppression at work in our lives. This is an important first step toward dismantling the systems that perpetuate harm and division. When we learn to recognize these patterns within ourselves and our relationships, we can begin to disrupt them.

Seeing and naming these tools is the first step that opens the door to building relationships rooted in power-with systems, rather than power-over systems, so that we can be empowered to transition intentionally toward more sustainable and equitable ways of relating, which in turn will transition us to a more sustainable and equitable world.

Through this series, I will invite you to reflect on how these tools of oppression might manifest in your own life and relationships. Together, we can illuminate the ways we perpetuate them, and more importantly, the ways we can break free from them: we can imagine a world where all relationships are rooted in power-with and liberation, instead of power-over and oppression – a very different world from our current one indeed.

I hope this will be a journey toward understanding, unlearning, and ultimately, liberation.