The Rate of Oppression (ROp): The Apartheid Studies Approach to the Study of Harm

We know that the world is saturated with harm, yet in fact the world does not collapse on its foundations, nor does daily business necessarily grind to a halt. Rather, life goes on. Harm persists, in fact, because life persists. I propose an original definition of harm which posits that, if we have to understand the persistence of harm, it is important to study how life goes on. Life went on the day after the Lonmin Massacre on August 16, 2012. Indeed, life went on in neighbouring places of the world during the massacre itself, just as life went on in the world as Hurricane Katrina took place in August 2005, or as Steve Biko in September 1977, Malcom X in February 1965, Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, and Martin Luther King Jr in April 1968, were being murdered. What we are saying is that harm-at-scale and life-going-on are essentially compatible. How? I argue that this is because the harm and violence primarily appear not as physical objects, necessarily, but as two main elements of the same phenomenon: a constantly adjustable anomalous “rate” and a conflict of interest. This is what I call the Rate of Oppression (ROp), a construct within the Apartheid Studies framework which explains how harm persists and how the oppressed behave. Apartheid Studies (AS) is an emerging approach from the global south which I developed which utilises the hitherto neglected notion of apartheid as a paradigm, theoretical framework, heuristic, and methodology. Apartheid Studies examines the persistence of harm and oppression in human society and human relations, arguing that apartheid is not only commutative and co-extensible but is the highest stage of oppression and is present wherever human beings live in harm’s way and in a “good neighbourly” relation with harm. In the end, the highest stage of oppression is when harm is reconstituted as merely a Rate of Oppression, itself expressible as the difference in everyone’s experience of the same phenomena of oppression – essentially how much harm an individual can marginally absorb and live with such that life goes on. Such a rate can be measured simply by asking, “Where we you when X (event) happened?” or “What were you doing when X happened?” Wherever you were and whatever you were doing when X = your Rate of Oppression. It is a fundamental conflict of interest for a person to live with harm and to live in harm’s way.