THE PROTESTORS wouldn’t leave the field.
Football players from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California watched, confused. Their game—a nationally televised rivalry matchup—was supposed to begin. But just after the coin toss, 15 protestors stormed the 50-yard-line and ran to the center of the field.
This was Saturday, October 28, 2023. Viewers watching on TV assumed the protest was about Gaza, where Israel was retaliating for Hamas’s October 7 attacks. The protestors on the Berkeley football field certainly looked like they were protesting war: They shouted wildly, hooking their arms tightly together, ignoring the police. One young man appeared to be in tears.
The protest, it turned out, had nothing to do with Gaza. Most of the protestors were UC Berkeley students, and they were protesting the university’s decision to suspend Professor Ivonne del Valle—a woman who had admitted to stalking and harassing a male professor at another school. Why were they protesting the suspension? Because del Valle, a colonial studies professor, is a Mexican American immigrant. The man she stalked, UC Davis English professor Joshua Clover, is white.
“I don’t want UC Berkeley to think that they can do this to a minority woman in order to protect a white, senior professor,” del Valle told news site KQED.
What matters in this framework is not what a person does, but to which group he or she belongs.
Students took her side. Besides storming the football field, they also wrote an angry open letter to the chancellor and threatened a hunger strike.
“[F]or del Valle’s supporters,” Josh Barro writes at Substack, “the issue is not objective facts, like the contents of voicemails she left for Clover, the number of times she called his office phone line, or the tweets she posted encouraging the FBI to ask his romantic partner about him; it is del Valle’s subjective, lived experience as a Latina immigrant in a society dominated by white men.”
The Oppressor-Oppressed Framework
WHEN YOU LOOK AT the bare biographical etchings of two people’s lives—sex, age, nationality, and ethnicity—can you tell which person has a better life? Which one has more power? Who is the oppressor and who is oppressed?
Some say yes, they can automatically tell. They see certain groups as oppressors and others as oppressed. For these people—many of them on college campuses and in government offices—human interactions can be understood only through this framework: by putting people into buckets based on flawed assumptions about who has power.
In The Three Languages of Politics, Arnold Kling calls the oppressor-oppressed framework the language of progressivism. “For a progressive,” Kling writes, “the highest virtue is to be on the side of the oppressed and the worst sin is to be aligned with the oppressor.”
The oppressor-oppressed framework relies on broad generalizations. If you’re white, you’re an oppressor; if you’re black or Hispanic, you’re oppressed; if you’re male, you’re an oppressor; if you’re female, you’re oppressed; if you’re a landlord, you’re an oppressor; if you’re a tenant, you’re oppressed—and so on, with every ethnicity and identity mapped out along this binary scale until the vast, dizzying diversity of human experience is reduced to a cartoon. There are good guys and bad guys, and you can tell who’s who just by looking at them.
It’s a morally inadequate way to perceive the world. What matters in this framework is not what a person does, but to which group he or she belongs. People who apply this framework “discard the idea that people are individual moral actors with responsibility for their actions,” Barro writes, “[i]nstead… awarding culpability in any conflict to the person who ranks as less oppressed, regardless of actual existing evidence about who did what and why.”
It’s the inverse of “might makes right” and it’s just as wrong. The oppressor-oppressed framework assigns the moral high ground to individuals based on a rudimentary diagnosis of certain identity groups as victims—and it doesn’t allow for the individuality and unpredictability of real human beings.
One UC Professor Stalks Another
IN THE STRANGE CASE of Ivonne del Valle and Joshua Clover, three separate university investigations concluded that del Valle stalked and harassed Clover. The two professors knew each other professionally. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, del Valle became convinced Clover was tweeting coded references to her and had gained access to her computer—an accusation she provided no evidence for and which he denies. By her own admission, del Valle then broke into Clover’s apartment building, slid angry notes under his door, spray-painted messages in the hallway, left voicemails, sent emails to his colleagues, posted a photo of his partner online, and dumped rotten food on his mother’s doorstep. Clover had to move apartments and stop using social media to escape del Valle’s harassment.
Del Valle told KQED she was “not proud” of everything she’d done.
Clover, 61, is from Berkeley. He teaches poetry and critical theory. Del Valle is 48 and was raised in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her academic focus is colonialism in Mexico. Both professors are established in their fields at top University of California schools. They are academic peers. Most of us would see them as equal in dignity and power—and certainly, equal under the law.
For del Valle and her supporters, Clover is an oppressor and del Valle is oppressed.
For those who believe in the oppressor-oppressed framework, the law can’t be neutral.
After Berkeley suspended del Valle, students called for her to be “reinstated immediately” and accused the university of “victim-blaming.”
“If UC Berkeley really wants to become a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), it needs to start treating our Latinx professors with respect,” declared an open letter signed by more than 300 individuals and organizations.
Del Valle told her supporters at a townhall that her life’s work was being “taken away by a white person with power.”
A False Dichotomy
IN THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED—ranked #3 in Google’s 2016 report on most-cited social science texts—Paulo Freire writes, “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed.” For those who believe in the oppressor-oppressed framework, the law can’t be neutral. They believe it needs to recognize the original sin of oppression and judge people’s actions differently based on whether they’re oppressor or oppressed.

That violates a core principle of a free society—that all of us, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, are equal in the eyes of the law. An individual’s actions should drive her destiny, not her status or background.
And even if you wanted to, you couldn’t divide human beings into two neat lines of powerful and powerless. We’re too messy, too dynamic, too free a species. That’s a good thing. We want people to rise and fall by their own merit, to defy expectations, to have full agency and responsibility for their lives.
The oppressor-oppressed framework is “a false dichotomy that leads to moral nihilism,” lecturer Remi Adekoya writes. “We need to abandon this morally misleading dualism of oppressor vs oppressed, in favor of a truly empathetic vision of the world in which everyone is recognized as having flaws and vulnerabilities, and is judged on their actions, not on which group they belong to.”
‘An Intellectual Rot’
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA system, where the Ivonne del Valle saga continues to play out, happens to be where researcher J.D. Haltigan would like to get a job: He wants to work at UC Santa Cruz as a psychology professor. But he knows he won’t be hired, because the University of California system requires all applicants to submit a statement about their contributions to so-called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The school scores applicants’ statements on a rubric that downrates anyone who only says they’ll “invite and welcome students from all backgrounds” and will “treat all students the same.” To get a high score, applicants need to support race-based affinity groups.
Haltigan, represented by Pacific Legal Foundation, sued the school. Meanwhile he’s been writing on Substack to document what he calls “an intellectual rot” in academia. As part of his Ph.D. program, he had a mandatory cultural diversity class that taught, in Haltigan’s words,
that, (a) people ought to be best conceptualized as members of groups (i.e., racial/ethnic, gender, sexual orientation), (b) some groups are victims and some groups are oppressors, (c) the oppressors are the bad people, (d) the victims are the good people, and (e) the oppressors should be punished.
This was in a class for psychologists, Haltigan emphasized. It’s absolutely the wrong way for psychologists to view people: The central approach to clients in psychotherapy should be “to treat the individual,” Haltigan said.
A Better Framework
IN THE THREE LANGUAGES OF POLITICS, the oppressor-oppressed framework is just one that Kling identifies. Another is liberty-coercion, which values individual freedom and is skeptical of efforts to curtail it.
Kling talks about ancient stories that reinforce the oppressor-oppressed way of viewing the world. They’re fundamentally stories about opposing groups locked in a struggle.
“The cultural software that aligns with the liberty-coercion axis may not be as easily located in ancient stories,” he writes, pointing to more recent stories like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and George Orwell’s 1984 instead. The drive to be free of coercion is more of an Enlightenment ambition.
Unlike oppressor-oppressed, the liberty-coercion framework doesn’t position groups in opposition to each other. It doesn’t put people into groups at all: It sees each human being as an individual equally accountable for his or her own actions and deserving of freedom.
And under this framework, PLF—which fights for individuals against unjust government encroachment—is on the right side of history. ♦