Why Do Oppressed People Sometimes Turn Against the Most Intellectual Among Them?

There is a painful pattern visible across many oppressed communities in history: the person most feared is often not the oppressor outside, but the dissenter within. The intellectually curious, politically articulate, philosophically restless individual from among the oppressed often becomes the object of suspicion, ridicule, isolation, or even hatred from their own people. This phenomenon appears across caste, race, class, colonized societies, and marginalized communities globally.

The tragedy is that oppression does not merely exploit bodies. It reorganizes emotions, aspirations, and social relations. It enters language itself. It teaches people whom to admire, whom to distrust, and what kind of intelligence is dangerous.

This is not because oppressed people are uniquely intolerant or irrational. Rather, systems of domination often survive precisely by shaping the psychology of the oppressed.

The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed argued that the oppressed frequently internalize the consciousness of the oppressor. Instead of developing solidarity, they may begin to reproduce the values of domination among themselves. The oppressed person starts viewing liberation with fear because freedom requires uncertainty, conflict, and transformation. Freire writes that the oppressed can become “sub-oppressors,” reproducing the same structures that harm them.

Similarly, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon showed in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth that colonialism produces psychic fragmentation. Colonized subjects often begin to see themselves through the eyes of the colonizer. The intellectual from among the oppressed becomes threatening because they expose this internal wound. They remind people of humiliation they are trying to survive, suppress, or normalize.

This creates a peculiar social tension: the intellectually independent person within the oppressed group often becomes a mirror people do not want to look into.

In caste society, this becomes even sharper. B. R. Ambedkar repeatedly noted that caste survives not merely through force but through social conditioning and graded hierarchy. In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar observed that caste prevents solidarity because every group tries to dominate someone below it while fearing someone above it. The oppressed are divided internally before they can unite externally.

The intellectually assertive Dalit, Bahujan, Black, Indigenous, or working-class individual threatens multiple structures simultaneously:

1. They reject the role assigned to them.
2. They expose the mechanisms of oppression.
3. They disrupt emotional dependence on authority.
4. They make passivity appear like complicity.
5. They create discomfort by proving that intellectual excellence is possible despite structural violence.

This discomfort is often experienced socially as arrogance.

Many oppressed communities are forced into survival-oriented cultures. Under conditions of scarcity, humiliation, violence, and social insecurity, intellectual exploration can appear suspicious or impractical. Someone reading philosophy while everyone else struggles economically may be viewed as detached or dangerous. The intellectual becomes interpreted not as a collective resource but as someone “trying to become superior.”

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu helps explain this through the idea of cultural capital. Dominant societies monopolize what counts as “legitimate knowledge.” When marginalized individuals acquire intellectual confidence, they destabilize symbolic hierarchies. But because dominant institutions define prestige, the oppressed themselves may begin policing who is “acting above their place.”

Oppression creates what psychologists call horizontal hostility: aggression displaced sideways instead of upward. Rather than confronting inaccessible systems of power, frustration gets redirected toward vulnerable people nearby — especially those who appear different, ambitious, educated, politically articulate, or emotionally independent.

This can be seen in many historical contexts:

• Black intellectuals in segregated societies being accused of “thinking they are better.”
• Dalit scholars being isolated within their own communities for becoming “too radical” or “too educated.”
• Women who become intellectually assertive being accused of abandoning tradition.
• Working-class students in elite institutions being mocked as “pretentious.”
• Anti-caste thinkers facing hostility not only from upper castes but also from conservative sections within oppressed communities.

The system survives because domination becomes decentralized. The oppressor no longer needs to constantly intervene. Society begins policing itself.

Antonio Gramsci called this cultural hegemony: power becomes durable when it appears natural. The oppressed may unconsciously defend the very norms that diminish them because those norms structure social belonging and emotional security.

There is also loneliness involved in intellectual awakening. The person who begins questioning deeply often undergoes a rupture with inherited certainties. They may stop performing obedience, ritual conformity, gender expectations, or communal silence in the same way. This produces alienation.

The community sometimes interprets this alienation as betrayal.

Yet historically, every emancipatory movement depended upon such figures:

• Savitribai Phule
• Jyotirao Phule
• Malcolm X
• bell hooks
• Periyar E. V. Ramasamy
• Angela Davis

All of them faced resistance not only from dominant groups but also from sections of the communities they sought to liberate.

This reveals something profound: oppression damages collective imagination. It narrows what people believe is possible. The intellectual from among the oppressed becomes dangerous because they expand the horizon of possibility.

And possibility is frightening.

Because once a person realizes that hierarchy is historical rather than natural, obedience becomes difficult. Once someone learns to name humiliation structurally rather than individually, shame begins transforming into political consciousness.

That transformation is never socially smooth.

The oppressed intellectual occupies a contradictory position:
they are born from collective suffering but often become estranged from collective habits shaped by that suffering.

Their task is difficult because they must resist two temptations simultaneously:

• the temptation to abandon their people for elite acceptance,
• and the temptation to reduce themselves merely to remain socially acceptable within their community.

The challenge is not simply becoming intellectual. It is remaining ethically connected while refusing intellectual surrender.

Perhaps this is why genuinely emancipatory thinkers are often lonely figures. They carry both memory and rupture. They belong and do not belong at the same time.

But history repeatedly shows that without such individuals, systems of oppression become eternal.

References:

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed — Paulo Freire
• Black Skin, White Masks — Frantz Fanon
• The Wretched of the Earth
• Annihilation of Caste — B. R. Ambedkar
• Distinction — Pierre Bourdieu
• Selections from the Prison Notebooks — Antonio Gramsci
• Teaching to Transgress — bell hooks