“Oppression” is not a word you can just throw around when a small inconvenience makes itself present in your life. Women and minorities have gone through a myriad of problems they have been forced to face over hundreds and thousands of years, so the word oppression can best describe what they may have gone through.

However, the word “oppression” attempting to fit into today’s language is like a large puzzle piece being shoved into a tiny space that kind of fits but doesn’t really.

I have heard people recently misuse the word “oppression” for something that’s really just a misunderstanding or inconvenience in their lives. I personally don’t use the word unless absolutely necessary. We have seen the way African-Americans were oppressed for hundreds of years leading into the Civil Rights Movement. These people, with blood, sweat, and tears, gave their lives to make the lives of white racists easier, they have been icons for the word. Not the best thing to be icons for, but icons just the same.

With years of torment, torture, subjugation, and injustice, one can safely say African-Americans have been oppressed. This is a proper use of the word. Someone saying, “I am an oppressed human being because I have a belief and people treat me differently because of this belief” is not using the word correctly. They are merely using the word as a more “sophisticated” way of saying, “people don’t get me and they put me down for what I say and think.” Oppression is not the same as bullying. If it were the same, the word “bullying” would take the place of “oppression” and it would basically not exist.

Women are also victims of oppression. The term “sexism” falls under the umbrella of oppression. Women have been treated as objects for hundreds of years. Men at one point believed that women did not feel sexual pleasure and that they were merely there to carry and bear children. Over the years, women were constantly sexually assaulted and harassed, treated as unequal human beings, and often belittled by society (mostly men). Women were only meant to get married, have children, stay at home with their children and were not given that sense of freedom and ambition they deserved.

This is what I’m saying: The word “oppression” can be used in today’s society, but its definition is sacred and its examples are something to pay much more attention to before throwing the word around (especially carelessly).