Decompiling Oppression #134
Sam McVeety
This week, I wanted to explore a few ideas from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire's study on how to build movements led by and for those who are most affected by oppressive systems. Living as we are, in a time when many people are grappling with the complexity of balancing lived experience, expertise, and power in building social movements, the book embraces this nuance. Despite being decades old, its message resonates today, presenting a complex, evolving picture of movement building, rather than a single template to be achieved.
We've discussed the ethos of "nothing about us, without us" in past issues, and that idea of collaborative problem solving figures centrally in his methodology. He presents dialogue as a central tool for learning, where people are presented with a problem and then participate in exploring possible solutions, with no outcome presupposed. In contrast to dialogue, another idea that felt particularly relevant (particularly after an election) was the rejection of "sloganizing" as a tool of achieving liberation. We can think of sloganizing as using shallow messaging to only try to win people to your side, rather than encouraging them to think more deeply about their situation.
This rejection of sloganizing captures what I've been feeling in response to post-election analyses that focus their critique on messaging strategies (e.g. less "save democracy", more of slogan X/Y/Z). Although this might seem to superficially grant agency to the electorate, it's a shallow formulation, where people are only expected to think in the frames that are given to them. In terms of truly building a participatory democracy, this worship of messaging seems like it is totally missing the point: rather than genuinely trying to understand the people as having agency in their own right, they are relegated to being a passive audience. It is constructed on a fundamental separation, between those who produce slogans and those who consume them.
Returning to the practice of dialogue, something else that jumped off the page for me was his formulation of conscientização (roughly translating to "critical consciousness"). Freire's conception of dialogue is intended to produce this kind of consciousness, where people become not only critically aware of their circumstances (e.g. people are dying of sickness and it is not just "how things are") but also cultivate the belief in themselves that they are capable of determining how to change those circumstances. Cultivating this consciousness is a primary goal of the pedagogy he advocates for, because it allows people to analyze the world on their own terms, centering their agency, rather than making them dependent on others to analyze the world for them.
While conscientização hasn't exactly taken off as a loan word, it immediately made me think of a different term: woke. Let's, for a moment, look at the actual etymology of "woke" (rather than the moral panic constructed around it), noting that it's not even a new idea. At the risk of stating the obvious: it's about waking up, or (dare I say it?) consciousness. (Tellingly, "woke" rubs shoulders with "critical race theory" in drawing authoritarians' ire.) Now, taking it a step further. If it's possible to define "woke" in multiple ways, who is served by these different possible choices?
If we look at the big picture, it is very much in authoritarians' interest to advertise an intentionally reductive view of "woke", collapsing it to a set of static beliefs ("white people bad, people of color good"), rather than a mode of inquiry. Creating this frame to parody and flatten "woke" is not an accident or reactive; it is a strategic choice. Because, while a static set of beliefs can be threatening to the ruling order, what is far more threatening is a population steeped in the practice of critical consciousness ("why are there disparities in life outcomes, across not only race, but class, and ...?").
And yes, of course, there are plenty of examples of people claiming the mantle of "woke" in self-serving or otherwise obnoxious ways. Still, I would argue that others are almost certainly reflective of a genuine attempt at growth: people attempting to expand the horizons of their world (that's at least how I've tried to be). Here again, is another strategic choice: taking the reductivist view of people's attempts at critical consciousness is intentionally stigmatizing attempts at growth, hoping that we all remain static. It's a multi-pronged strategy of oppression: target the people who are engaging in critical consciousness and undermine their work, while also making them socially undesirable, to dissuade others from following in their footsteps.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Where do you find yourself encouraged to think critically about your existing beliefs?
Communal: How can we create community spaces where we celebrate collaborative problem solving?
Solidarity: Support Rural People's Platform and their work to build a new shared vision of a thriving economy that works for working people.
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