Protip: “Strucural oppression” is just jargon for “more oppression”.
That’s it.
NO IT ISN’T
like there is a meaningful difference between things of the class “people are mean to me” and things of the class “social institutions are set up in a way that hurts me”
this is a useful distinction to be able to make!
it is not MY fault people have decided to use my PERFECTLY GOOD SOCIOLOGY WORDS in WRONG WAYS in order to win arguments on the Internet
Oppression by institutions is oppression by the people who created and comprise the institutions. Institutional oppression is just oppression by more people.
“People hurt me” and “people made institutions that hurt me” are not qualitatively different things, though of course the distinction still exists.
Yes, they are, and in important ways. Let’s take two people. One of them is a stereotypical Italian gangster, and the mafia he’s part of is losing a long underground war. He suffers the threat of violence, death, etc, for who he is.
The other is a black woman in modern America. Less chance of dying, better chance of going to college, probably a longer life expectancy. There is still a meaningful sense in which her life is hard in ways that our gangster’s life isn’t.
Structural oppression points at the use of formal mechanisms to implement oppression. For the same amount of misery, you will expect it to take different forms, and crucially, one will be more visible.
The following three paragraphs are stylized exaggerations of differences that I believe exist.
In modern urban America, anti-semitism still exists, but I wouldn’t call it structural. There aren’t laws against you, if you can point to anti-semitism (and your opponent can’t point to a stronger oppression narrative) you can expect to ‘win’ a case in public, and you can bet the and society in general is not actively screwing you over, having largely concluded overt attempts at that in the 60s and 70s and knowing that the 1/3 Jewish SCOTUS would probably put a stop to it.
Women are fairly unlikely to be killed for being women, but face many smaller challenges at every stage. Your partner expects you to do more cleaning at home, and you probably expect this to happen as well. Male instructors in your sport won’t touch you if they can avoid it. You’re paid less at work, and if you ever look like you’re going to have kids, your boss is going to assume that you’re going to quit.
If 1/100 people is an open anti-semite, you can notice them as a deviation: you can complain to their superior to fix it and have a 99% chance of that working, or you can go to the local paper, or just notice that they’re wrong and you can talk to other people instead. If literally every single person is part of the discrimination, it’s a lot harder to notice that something is wrong and harder still to do anything about it. This is true, even if oppression of women mostly takes the form of “expected to conform to a set of assumptions” and, when anti-semitism occurs, it’s extremely bad.