Challenge the Oppressor, Integrate with the "Other." (From Part VII of Worldviews: The Oppressions They Create and Perpetuate)
When I wrote Encounters with the “Other,” I sent it off to friends and associates, including one whose work and judgement I highly respect. His reaction was akin to my reaction to The Emperor’s New Clothes. A fine piece of work…except for the end. Too simple.
Maybe this colleague is right, maybe my aging brain has lost too many synapses to be able to handle complexity; or maybe my solutions don’t fit the image of the creator of the Power Lab (We’re expecting more from you, a system POWER slam bang transformative solution!); or maybe simple sounding solutions are deeply complex in their implementation. (For example: Instead of sucking responsibility up to yourself and away from others, be a Top who creates responsibility throughout the system. Brilliant, I’d love to do that. But where is the user manual?) Or maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe I’m half-right. I’ll work with that one.
I've become deeply skeptical of changing deep-seated worldviews. It may be that I have set too high a bar. If, as I maintained at the outset, that White racism, for example, is a worldview in which the White racist reflexively experiences Black as different from and lesser than White or as a danger to them, then the absence of racism would be: When a Black enters a room, steps out of a car, approaches you on the street, you would not reflexively experience that person as some combination of different from you, lesser than you, or as a potential danger to you. Again, I’m talking about your reflexive reaction, not your thought-through, morally satisfying response.
Black would no longer be the exception to the normal but simply a part of the normal. And the same would apply to your reaction to finding out that someone is Jewish or queer, or an immigrant, or a transexual. None of this would imply your seeing no difference, merely that that difference would be part of the normal. Of course, the person is Black or Jewish or queer or Brown or Asian, or speaking in an unfamiliar language or accent, except that the “junk” associated with these identifications would be gone. Simple. Now just do it.
I don’t believe that we humans can make that shift to classes of people, but I do know we can do it one person at a time. The formula – another simple one - is: Challenge the Oppressor and Integrate with the "Other."
Challenge the Oppressor. If you are a White person who is against the oppression of “others,” challenge the oppressors: march with the "others," speak out, write, join campaigns, donate, work to change the oppressive system, get involved in elections, find allies, build relationships, work against voter suppression, counter lies with truth, join or organize protests, work to change oppressive laws and practices, pay attention, take action, be a warrior in the struggle for justice. Yet we know that none of this happens without risk. And we know that the more powerful your actions, the more such actions challenge the deeply held beliefs of the oppressors, beliefs core to their identity. Your righteous actions will stir up righteous resistance. That is the continuing dance between freedom and oppression. You may win some battles; yet whatever the outcomes, know that engaging in the struggle, rather than observing it from your couch, brings its own rewards. That’s one half. But challenging the oppressor by itself creates a power difference between you and the other. You are doing something for them. There is an inequality in the relationship. To build a true and equal partnership, we need to move on to part two.
Integrate with the "Other." The challenge is to find ways of developing a continuing relationship with "others." Not to do good, but merely to connect. Maybe it begins by joining settings or causes where you and "others" are likely to be. The goal is to eventually get to the place in which, with some regularity, you meet, you break bread together, tell stories, relax, get to know one another's histories, discuss the news. Maybe you get to meet and know one another’s friends, families. Become a part of one another's social networks. Maybe work together on projects of common interest.Connect as equals on an ongoing basis.
Many years ago, a colleague showed me a simple exercise. Maybe you know this one, maybe you’ve even used it yourself. He asked us to describe the characteristics of a lemon. As we shouted out our answers – yellow, oval shape, bumpy skin, citrusy smell, etc. – he wrote these on the board. There must have been 25 or so members in the group. He gave each of us our own lemon. Then we had a few minutes to get know our lemon. Then we all put our lemons in the middle of the floor and my colleague asked us to face away from the lemons as he mixed them all up. Then we turned and each of us sought our lemon, which turned out to be pretty easy for us to do. When my colleague asked us to explain how we recognized our lemon, it was interesting – more than interesting – that none of us used the list of the Characteristics of Lemons written on the board. We knew our lemon by certain bumps and coloring, a mark here a dent there, idiosyncrasies. Knowing the characteristics of “lemons” fails to inform us about our lemon any more than knowing the labels of our various identities. Just realizing how much the label doesn’t tell is an important first step in knowing the “other.”
And this is what integrating can do for us, helping us get past our categories and their lists of characteristics to experience one another as we really are, our commonalities and our differences, along with our bumps and dents and other idiosyncrasies.
Challenge the oppressor and integrate with the "other." It won’t change global worldviews unless we mobilize a worldwide force up to the challenge. Short of that, it will change your worldview. And that’s a start.
Simple.
Barry Oshry, March 5, 2022, my 90th birthday
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