Internalized Oppression: A Reading List

I define internalized oppression as the conscious and unconscious acceptance of intersecting social hierarchies that reinforce and reproduce negative intragroup and intergroup relations (e.g., discrimination, stereotypes, stigmas, prejudice).

Throughout my dissertation huakaʻi, I have been reading fiction and non-fiction literature from different sociocultural contexts. I use this page to document examples of the phenomenon found in novels, memoirs, poems, and short stories. 

As a resource for scholars and educators interested in learning more about the manifestations and consequences of internalized oppression, this reading list serves as a starting point for critical analyses and dialogue about how oppression is reinforced and reproduced at individual, institutional, and systemic levels.

This page is not meant to be a comprehensive list. Furthermore, any faults, errors, or omissions in the literary analysis are my own.

If you have recommendations for me to read and analyze, please click here to add them to my bookshelf.

The Bluest Eye (1970)

Author: Toni Morrison

Genre: Historical fiction

Keywords: race, racial socialization, familial socialization, colorism, misogyny, anti-Blackness, internalized racism, prose and poetry

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: race/ethnicity-based genocide, gender-based violence, racial slurs, sexual assault

Brief overview: Told from the perspective of a young Black girl over the course of four seasons, this story humanizes racial socialization processes in Black American and white American families and communities during and after Jim Crow segregation. It is a story of how racial self-contempt and self-hatred are born within children and youth.

Relevant character descriptions

  • Claudia MacTeer: narrator, young Black girl who has yet to internalize anti-Blackness

  • Pecola Breedlove: dark-skinned Black girl who wishes for blue eyes and suffers abuse from family and community members

  • Maureen Peal: light-skinned, wealthy-Black girl who has internalized colorist views and treats Pecola cruelly

Example of internalized oppression: Pecola wishes for blue eyes and prefers playing with white dolls after "adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured" (p. 20).

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (2020)

Author: Isabel Wilkerson

Genres: History, non-fiction, social critique

Keywords: U.S. society, caste, case study, Nazi Germany, India caste system, Jim Crow segregation, legalized discrimination, racism, race

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: race/ethnicity-based genocide, slavery, gender-based violence, race-based violence, sexual assault, racial slurs, eugenics

Brief overview: Wilkerson combines historical analysis, investigative journalism, and a comparative case study methodology to argue that U.S. society operates under a caste system in which white, upper-class males are the dominant caste, and poor, Black, women are the subordinate caste. She uses social norms and laws under Nazi German rule and religious doctrine and practices of India's caste system to make a case that a caste system exists in the U.S.

Key assertions

  • Race is salient; caste is latent. "Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin" (p. 19).

  • Eight pillars of caste: (1) divine will and the laws of nature, (2) heritability, (3) endogamy and marriage/mating control, (4) purity (sacred) versus pollution (profane), (5) occupational hierarchy, (6) dehumanization and stigma, (7) terror (enforcement) and cruelty (control), (8) inherent superiority and inferiority

Real-world example of internalized oppression: A Dalit Ph.D. scholar from India living and working in the U.S. is unable to shed the remnants of caste when interacting with upper-caste Indian immigrants, saying "I can't look them straight in the face. I can't look them in the eye. I don't know what to say. These were our masters" (p. 289).

Evidence of conscious and unconscious acceptance of hierarchy by subordinate caste members

  • "One cannot live in a caste system, breathe its air, without absorbing the message of caste supremacy. The subordinated castes are trained to admire, worship, fear, love, covet, and want to be like those at the center of society, at the top of the hierarchy. In India, it is said that you can try to leave caste, but caste never leaves you" (p. 289).

  • "At the bottom of the hierarchy, the message of inferiority comes at you in whispers and billboards. It burrows into your identity. The violence and terror used to maintain the hierarchy keep you in your place without signage" (p. 290).

The Electrical Field (1998)

Author: Kerri Sakamoto

Genre: Historical fiction

Keywords: post-World War II, Japanese Canadian identity, loss, grief, family relations, memory, sexuality, loneliness

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: relationship-based violence, Japanese internment, racial slurs, murder, suicide, grief and loss

Brief overview: This book follows Asako Saito, a single, Japanese Canadian woman who survived the internment era during World War II. Through her eyes, readers come to learn about Asako's loneliness and grief as they intersect with her tragic acquaintance with her neighbors Chisako and Masashi Yano, the latter of whom commits a murder-suicide of his entire family (including his teenaged twin son and daughter) after learning of his wife's infidelity with her white boss. Ultimately, The Electrical Field captures the trauma that survivors carry following legalized internment.

Examples of internalized oppression

  • Chisako is Japanese and married to another Japanese but feels her children are "insignificant" (p. 27) and possesses a negative view of Japanese as "stiff" (p. 118)

  • Following internment, Yano's brother "can't stand the sight of an Oriental" (p. 100) and "goes nuts" when he sees one (p. 101)

Consequences of internment

  • "She doesn't know what it's like to get herded up. She doesn't know what it feels like to be ashamed to be nihonjin [Japanese]" (p. 94, Yano speaking to Asako of Chisako).

  • "We're so full of shame, aren't we Asako. We hide away, afraid that they'll lock us up again" (p. 231, Yano to Asako).

Racial Microaggressions: Using Critical Race Theory to Respond to Everyday Racism (2020)

Authors: Daniel Solórzano and Lindsay Pérez Huber

Genres: Academic non-fiction, social critique

Keywords: critical race theory, everyday racism, racial microaggressions, critical race hypotheticals, racial microaffirmations, visual microaggressions, internalized racism, legalized segregation

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: race/ethnicity-based genocide, slavery, gender-based violence, race-based violence, racial slurs

Brief overview: This book applies a critical race theoretical framework to define and contextualize racial microaggressions in the educational experiences of Students of Color in the U.S. It introduces a tree model to visualize the white supremacist roots of racial microaggressions and their subsequent influence on institutions and social systems like the healthcare industry and criminal justice system.

Internalized racism: "a learned process of socialization where one internalizes and acts out the negative perceptions of People of Color created by racism and white supremacy. These negative perceptions can be internalized and enacted through intragroup and intergroup conflict that reinforces institutionalized racism and the racial hierarchies it produces" (p. 67)

Real-world example of internalized oppression: PoC support for the Blexit campaign, which used anti-immigrant, nativist rhetoric like "Build the Wall" and "Americans before illegals" ultimately pitting "one racial group against another" to maintain the existing racial hierarchy in the U.S. (p. 80)

The Red-Headed Hawaiian (2014)

Authors: Chris McKinney and Rudy Puana

Genre: Memoir

Keywords: race/ethnicity, culture, Hawaiʻi, exceptionalism, multiculturalism, schooling vs. home cultures, formal & informal learning, schooling effects, racial/ethnic essentialism

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: death, verbal abuse, cancer, racial slurs

Brief overview: Written from the perspective of a part-Hawaiian, this memoir tells the story of how Rudy Puana moved from Kahaluʻu, Oʻahu to the U.S continent to pursue medical school before coming back to Hawaiʻi to practice medicine. The memoir speaks to local culture and stereotypical tropes about different racial/ethnic groups. It also touches on Native Hawaiian health issues, educational stereotypes, and the impact of intergenerational trauma and settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi. While Chris McKinney frames Puana's life as one of American and Hawaiian exceptionalism, the book normalizes the impact of familial dialogue on students' lives.

Example of internalized oppression within Kanaka ʻŌiwi families: belief that sovereignty activists are lazy, being ashamed of Hawaiian identity due to internalized colonialism

Racialized experiences of Students of Color in Hawaiʻi

  • racial passing: a phenomenon in which an individual from one racial group may be racialized as a member of another racial group, usually to the individual's benefit in society

    • "[Bill the Cajun] also spent a large part of his life "passing" like me. We both knew when to act haole [white] and when we could let our guards down and be ourselves" (p. 117).

  • race/ethnic essentialism: belief that racial/ethnic groups have natural, inherent physical, intellectual, or biological characteristics, often leading to racial/ethnic stereotypes 

    • "My father only embraced The Hawaiian Way, while my mother, perhaps in reaction, subscribed to The Haole Way. ... My mother stressed the importance of doing well academically whereas my dad, who labored with his hands and fished for extra cash on weekends, taught me the value of physical labor like his father before him" (p. 11).

    • "I know that The Hawaiian Way may sometimes mean anger and toughness in today's world, but it is still rooted in the tradition of aloha and generosity. Like all poor Hawaiian towns, Kahaluʻu may have its share of abusers and petty criminals crushed by a sense of futility, but it is also populated by some of the most generous people I've ever come across" (p. 175).

Their Eyes were Watching God (1937)

Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Genre: Historical fiction

Keywords: marriage, gender, feminism, Blackness, spirituality, self-revelation, loneliness, grief and loss, hope, rural life, African American vernacular English

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: spousal abuse, racial slurs, death, slavery, colorism

Brief plot summary: This novel focuses on Janie Crawford and her journey toward self-revelation following three marriages to three different men. Her first marriage — made for financial securement — leaves Janie bored and unsatisfied. Her second marriage results in physical, mental, emotional abuse but ends with her acquiring a stable amount of savings. The novel dedicates the most time detailing her third marriage to a younger, dark-skinned, working-class man nicknamed Tea Cake. Through this relationship, Janie enjoys a fierce, passionate love that ends tragically after Tea Cake is attacked by a rabid dog. 

Examples of internalized oppression in character discourse

  • "Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de Black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see" (p. 14, nanny to Janie).

  • "Ah got white folks' features in mah face. Still and all Ah got tuh be lumped in wid all de rest. It ain't fair. Even if dey don't take us in wide de whites, dey oughta make us uh class tuh ourselves" (p. 142, Mrs. Turner to Janie).

  • "Dey don't always know. Indians don't know much uh nothin', tuh tell de truth. Else dey'd own dis country still" (p. 156, Tea Cake to Lias)

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996)

Author: Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Genre: Semi-autobiography

Keywords: family relations, Hawaiʻi, coming-of-age, local vernacular English, "local" culture, politics of identity and immigration, bullying, racial/ethnic essentialism, racial/ethnic stereotyping, intersections of race, gender, and class

Trigger warnings/sensitive topics: racial slurs, racial microaggressions, bullying, suicide, intergenerational trauma

Brief overview: This is a coming-of-age story about a local Japanese girl born and raised in Hilo, Hawaiʻi at the turn of the twenty-first century. Viewed through the eyes of Lovey Nariyoshi, the novel is a series of interconnected vignettes about Lovey's childhood and the trials and tribulations concerning identity, sexuality, gender, acceptance, and family that she experiences. Through Lovey's numerous external and internal conflicts, readers experience the toll of poverty and the impact of racialized and gendered microaggressions. The novel covers serious topics, including suicide, trauma inflicted by teachers, public harassment, and bullying.

Example of internalized oppression among protagonist: Lovey's sense of shame of her Japanese identity in post-internment Hawai'i, her low SES background, and her use of pidgin English as a result of verbal oppression by her white teacher and her upper class peers