"Social Tyranny... leaves fewer means of escape, penetrates much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaves the soul" - John Stuart Mill

In my TC-Morality and Politics this semester, we have surveyed different cultures throughout history, and their view of determining the parameters for what society of the time deems morally acceptable. Most recently we have been reading John Stuart Mills, a radical liberal politician who wrote in England mid 1800. The whole premise for which he writes is the idea that citizens should have every right to their freedoms, and the best way to preserve a nation is to assert laws that provide protection from harm from others. One of the corollaries we discussed was the ‘tyranny of the majority’, or the concept that beyond governmental concerns, it is the chastisement of the individuals within said societies that are the most painful. The conversations then led to applying Mills’ ideas to modern society where the question was posed: In modern America, what (if any) are the social tyrannies that we face?

Throughout the discussion the primarily debated theme was of finding a tyranny that is applicable to America as a whole. For me, you cannot deem a society inept of moral dilemma, its just not possible, and to say that since there is not one major overriding despotism means we don’t have injustice is wrong. It is a hard thing to pinpoint though. Try asking a person whether they believe American’s have a problem with racism... they will probably say no. Discrimination of sexual orientation…. A hesitant but probable no. Gender? Eh not so much either. Religion? Hell, that is the freedom upon which our country was founded.

What we, my class, were able to ultimately agree upon was that as a whole, today, modern American society has progressed to a point so concerned with being open minded and accepting, that the prejudice therein lies in ignorance. How many times has someone been admonished for saying something politically incorrect? Hundreds, and it happens day-to-day. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the two young girls, Frieda and Claudia, constantly complain about their disposition, and how they are not good enough for high society, but instead of concerning themselves with ways to advance and obtain such a status, they “could find no love in it… but could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was loveable” (21), and in doing so “had one desire: to dismember it” (21). The racial discrimination that Morrison dialogues in her novel is not fundamentally entertained between white and black, but it is the INTRA-societal bias that asserts the greatest authority: blacks on blacks. Although the main characters are young girls, and their adolescent minds contribute to the immaturity of their actions, it says something that the only image of Claudia’s sister that she can summon of her being “ruined” is imagining “Frieda, big and fat, her thin legs swollen, her face surrounded by layers of rouged skin” (101) which eventually leads to Claudia not being able to “comprehend this unworthiness” (75). Alice Walker’s Am I Blue? has a similar message. She says that “perhaps children have listened to much of the music of oppressed people” that happiness and understand has been torn from their educational maturity (X322).

I have often succumb to the pressures of hate, and the negative influence that it has on the inner self. It is something very dark within me that I am not proud of, and continue to work on what Dr. Martin Luther King refers to as the “majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force” in his I Have a Dream speech. “[Society] can’t walk alone... [Society] cannot turn back” (X326) he says, we must progress as a nation to eliminate social tyrants at the most minute levels in order to really cleanse them from existence. For if we do not, Walker notes how “odd the look of hatred… [gives] the look of a beast” (X323).