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Please enter your name. The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message. Please verify that you are not a robot. Would you also like to submit a review for this item? You already recently rated this item. Likewise, it would be a mistake to view all African Americans as one monolithic cultural group without marked differences: United States Supreme Court Jus- tice Clarence Thomas is black, after all and conservative.
Somewhat similar gulfs exist between the vast mass of African Americans who remain subordinated and reduced to ghettoes and middle-class Afri- can Americans who, in some sense, have also partly abandoned the subordinated mass of African Americans.
I am reminded of a discus- sion I had with a personal friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. During our discussion, King's friend re- marked, "Donaldo, you are right. In reality, I haven't been there in over twenty years. Thus, we see again that race, itself, is not necessarily a unifying force. Freire never abandoned his position with respect to class analysis as theorized in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
However, as he continually did, he reconstituted his earlier position throughout the years, partic- ularly in our co-authored book Ideology Matters.
In it Freire argues that whereas, for example, "one cannot reduce the analysis of racism to social class, one cannot understand racism fully without a class analysis, for to do one at the expense of the other is to fall prey into a sectarianist position, which is as despicable as the racism that we need to reject. Thus, he would reject any theoretical analysis that would collapse the multiplicity of factors into a monolithic entity, in- cluding class.
Although Freire was readily embraced in societies struggling against colonialism and other forms of totalitarianism, his acceptance in the so-called open and democratic societies, such as the United States and the nations of Western Europe, has been more prob- lematic. Even though he has an international reputation and follow- ing, his work is, sadly, not central to the curricula of most schools of education whose major responsibility is to prepare the next genera- tion of teachers.
For example, the Harvard Grad- uate School of Education sanctions a graduate course called "Literacy Politics and Policies" without requiring students to read, critique, and analyze the work of Freire. In fact, one can get a doctoral degree from this school, or from others, without ever learning about, much less reading, Paulo Freire.
This is tantamount to getting a doctoral degree in Linguistics without ever reading Noam Chomsky, The fol- lowing illustrates my point. In a lecture at Harvard that analyzed Paulo Freire's theories, given by Professor Ramon Flecha from the University of Barcelona, a doctoral student approached me and asked the following: "I don't want to sound naive, but who is this Paulo Freire that Professor Flecha is citing so much?
Whereas students in the Third World and other nations struggling with totalitarian regimes would risk their freedom, if not their lives, to read Paulo Freire, in our so-called open societies his work suffers from a more sophisticated form of censorship: omission. This "aca- demic selective selection" of bodies of knowledge, which borders on censorship of critical educators, is partly to blame for the lack of knowledge of Paulo Freire's significant contributions to the field of education.
Even many liberals who have embraced his ideas and ed- ucational practices often reduce his theoretical work and leading phil- osophical ideas to a mechanical methodology. I am reminded of a panel that was convened to celebrate Freire's life and work at Harvard after his death.
In a large conference room filled to capacity and with people standing in hallways, a panelist who had obviously reduced Freire's leading ideas to a mechanized dialogical practice passed a note to the moderator of the panel suggesting that she give everyone in the room twenty seconds to say something in keeping with the spirit of Freire. Part of the problem with this mechanization of Freire's leading philosophical and political ideas is that many psudocritical educators, in the name of liberation pedagogy, often sloganize Freire by straitjacketing his rev- olutionary politics to an empty cliche of the dialogical method.
Pseudo-Freirean educators not only strip him of the essence of his radical pedagogical proposals that go beyond the classroom bound- aries and effect significant changes in the society as well: these edu- cators also fail to understand the epistemological relationship of dialogue. According to Freire, In order to understand the meaning of dialogical practice, we have to put aside the simplistic understanding of dialogue as a mere technique.
Dialogue does not represent a somewhat false path that I attempt to elaborate on and realize in the sense of involving the ingenuity of the other. On the contrary, dialogue characterizes an epistemological relationship. Thus, in this sense, dialogue is a way of knowing and should never be viewed as a mere tactic to involve students in a particular task.
We have to make this point very clear. I engage in dialogue not necessarily because I like the other person. I engage in dialogue because I recognize the social and not merely the individualistic character of the process of knowing.
In this sense, dialogue presents itself as an indispensable component of the process of both learning and knowing. I believe that it is for this reason that some of these educators invoke a romantic pedagogical mode that "exoticizes" dis- cussing lived experiences as a process of coming to voice. At the same time, educators who misinterpret Freire's notion of dialogical teaching also refuse to link experiences to the politics of culture and critical democracy, thus reducing their pedagogy to a form of middle-class narcissism.
This creates, on the one hand, the transformation of dia- logical teaching into a method invoking conversation that provides participants with a group-therapy space for stating their grievances. On the other hand, it offers the teacher as facilitator a safe pedagog- ical zone to deal with his or her class guilt. It is a process that bell hooks characterizes as nauseating in that it brooks no dissent.
Simply put, as Freire reminded us, "what these educators are calling dialog- ical is a process that hides the true nature of dialogue as a process of learning and knowing. Understanding dialogue as a process of learning and knowing establishes a previous requirement that always involves an epistemological curiosity about the very elements of the dialogue.
Thus, dialogue is never an end in itself but a means to develop a better comprehension about the object of knowledge. Otherwise, one could end up with dialogue as conversation where individual lived experiences are given primacy. I have been in many contexts where the over-celebration of one's own location and history often eclipses the possibility of engaging the ob- ject of knowledge by refusing to struggle directly, for instance, with readings involving an object of knowledge, particularly if these read- ings involve theory.
As Freire himself decidedly argued, Curiosity about the object of knowledge and the willingness and openness to engage theoretical readings and discussions is fun- damental. We must not negate practice for the sake of theory. To do so would reduce theory to a pure verbalism or intellectual- ism. By the same token, to negate theory for the sake of prac- tice, as in the use of dialogue as conversation, is to run the risk of losing oneself in the disconnectedness of practice.
It is for this reason that I never advocate either a theoretic elitism or a practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory and practice. In order to achieve this unity, one must have an epistemological curiosity—a curiosity that is often missing in di- alogue as conversation. If students are not able to transform their lived expe- riences into knowledge and to use the already acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge, they will never be able to partic- ipate rigorously in a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing.
In truth, how can one dialogue without any prior apprenticeship with the object of knowledge and without any epistemological curiosity? For example, how can anyone dialogue about linguistics if the teacher refuses to create the pedagogical conditions that will apprentice stu- dents into the new body of knowledge?
By this I do not mean that the apprenticeship process should be reduced to the authoritarian tradition of lecturing without student input and discussion. What be- comes very clear is that the bureaucratization of the dialogical process represents yet another mechanism used by even some progressive educators to diminish Freire's radical revolutionary and transformative proposals through a process that gives rise to politics without content.
Thus, it is not surprising that some liberals join conservative educators to critique Freire for what they characterize as "radical ties.
Before any intervention, however, an educator must have political clarity—posture that makes many liberals like Graff very uncomfortable to the degree that he considers "Radical educational theorists such as Freire, Henry Giroux, and Stanley Aronowitz. Such a call often ignores how language is being used to make social inequality invisible.
It also assumes that the only way to deconstruct ideologies of oppression is through a discourse that in- volves what these academics characterize as a language of clarity. When I was working with Freire on the book Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, I asked a colleague whom I considered to be politically aggressive and to have a keen understanding of Freire's work to read the manuscript.
Yet, during a discussion we had about this, she asked me, a bit irritably, "Why do you and Paulo insist on using Marxist jargon? Many readers who may enjoy reading Paulo may be put off by the jargon. In fact, I reminded her that Freire's language was the only means through which he could have done justice to the complexity of the various concepts dealing with oppression.
For one thing, I reminded her, "Imagine that instead of writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire had written "Pedagogy of the Disenfranchised. This leaves the ground wide open for blaming the victim of disenfranchisement for his or her own dis- enfranchisement.
This example is a clear case in which the object of oppression can also be understood as the subject of oppression. Lan- guage like this distorts reality. And yet, mainstream academics like Graff seldom object to these linguistic distortions that disfigure reality. I seldom hear academics on a crusade for "language clarity" equate mainstream terms such as "disenfranchised" or "ethnic cleansing," for example, to jargon status.
The mass killing of women, children, and the elderly and the rape of women and girls as young as five years old take on the positive at- tribute of "cleansing," which leads us to conjure a reality of "purifi- cation" of the ethnic "filth" ascribed to Bosnian Muslims, in particular, and to Muslims the world over, in general.
Although these academics accept the dominant standard discourse, they aggressively object to any discourse that both fractures the dominant language and bares the veiled reality in order to name it. Thus, a discourse that names it becomes, in their view, imprecise and unclear, and wholesale euphemisms such as "disadvantaged," "disenfranchised," "educational mortality," "theater of operation," "collateral damage," and "ethnic cleansing" remain unchallenged since they are part of the dominant social construction of images that are treated as un- problematic and clear.
I am often amazed to hear academics complain about the com- plexity of a particular discourse because of its alleged lack of clarity. It is as if they have assumed that there is a mono-discourse that is characterized by its clarity and is also equally available to all. If one begins to probe the issue of clarity, we soon realize that it is class specific, thus favoring those of that class in the meaning- making process.
The following two examples will bring the point home: Henry Gi- roux and I gave a speech at Massasoit Community College in Mas- sachusetts to approximately three hundred unwed mothers who were part of a GED graduate-equivalency diploma program. The director of the program later informed us that most of the students were con- sidered functionally illiterate.
After Giroux's speech, during the ques- tion-and-answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said, "Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn't have a language to express what I have felt. Today I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you.
He gave an African American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read to see how she would receive it. Not only did I read it, but I gave it to my sixteen-year-old son to read. He read the whole chapter that night and in the morning said, 'I want to meet the man who wrote this. I believe that the answer has little to do with language and every- thing to do with ideology.
That is, people often identify with repre- sentations that they are either comfortable with or that help deepen their understanding of themselves.
The call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one. The sixteen-year-old and the semiliterate poor woman could readily connect with Freire's ide- ology, whereas the highly literate academics are "put off by some dimensions of the "same ideology.
It is, perhaps, for this reason that a university professor I know failed to include Freire's work in a grad- uate course that she taught on literacy. When I raised the issue with her, she explained that students often find Freire's writing too difficult and cumbersome. It could also be the reason that the Divinity School at Harvard University offers a course entitled "Education for Liber- ation," in which students study Freire and James Cone extensively, whereas no such opportunities are available at Harvard's School of Education.
For me, the mundane call for a language of "simplicity and clarity" represents yet another mechanism to dismiss the complexity of the- oretical issues, particularly if these theoretical constructs interrogate the prevailing dominant ideology. It is for this very reason that Gayatri Spivak correctly points out that the call for "plain prose cheats.
The conflict must be anchored in those competing histories and ideologies that generated the conflict in the first place. David Goldberg captures this problem when he argues that Graffs suggestion: presupposes that educators—even the humanists of Graffs ad- dress—occupy a neutral position, or at least can suspend their prejudices, in presenting the conflicts, and that the conflicts are fixed and immobile.
One cannot teach the conflicts or anything else, for that matter by assuming this neutral "view from no- where," for it is no view at all. In other words, the Assumption of a View from Nowhere is the projection of local values as neu- trally universal ones, the globalizing of ethnocentric values, as Stam and Shohat put it.
As a result, Graff demeans the ability of oppressed people to name their oppres- sion as a pedagogical necessity and, at the same time, he dismisses the politics of pedagogy that "could empower 'minorities' and build on privileged students' minimal experience of 'otherization' " to help them imagine alternative subject positions and divergent social designs.
Few who invoke his name make the distinction. To be sure, neither does The Oxford English Dictionary. That is, they willfully refuse to understand that the very term "pedagogy," as my good friend and colleague Panagiota Gounari ex- plains it, has Greek roots, meaning "to lead a child" from pais: child and ago: to lead. Thus, as the term "pedagogy" illustrates, education is inherently directive and must always be transformative.
As Stanley Aronowitz so succinctly argues, "Freire's pedagogy is grounded in a fully developed philosophical anthropology, that is, a theory of human nature, one might say a secular liberation theology, containing its own categories that are irreducible to virtually any other philosophy. Although I was immobilized when I received the devastating news that Paulo Freire, my friend, my collaborator, my teacher, and my mentor, had died, I found comfort in the certainty that Pedagogy of the Oppressed had indeed "outlived its own time and its author's.
In his work and in his life, Paulo teaches us and the world—with his hallmark humility—what it means to be an intellectual who fights against the temptation of be- coming a populist intellectual. As always, he teaches us with his pen- etrating and unquiet mind the meaning of a profound commitment to fight sopial injustices in our struggle to recapture the loss of our dignity as human beings. In other words, those who cannot compete, die.
This is a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics. I insist on saying that I continue to be human. I would then remain the last educator in the world to say no: I do not accept.
I embrace history as pos- sibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fa- talism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century. I always accepted with humility Paulo's challenge through the co- herence and humility he exemplified.
With much sadness, magoa, but also with much affection and hope, I say, once more, thank you Paulo: for having been present in the world, for having given us Pedagogy of the Oppressed, for having taught us how to read the world and for challenging us to humanize the world.
Paulo Freire, Letters to Cristina. New York: Routledge, , p. Henry A. Giroux, "Radical Pedagogy and Educated Hope. Forewoid Over the years, the thought and work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire have spread from the North East of Brazil to an entire continent, and have made a profound impact not only in the field of education but also in the overall struggle for national development. In fact, those who, in learning to read and write, come to a new awareness of selfhood and begin to look critically at the social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative in acting to transform the society that has denied them this opportunity of participation.
Education is once again a subversive force. In this country, we are gradually becoming aware of the work of Paulo Freire, but thus far we have thought of it primarily in terms of its contribution to the education of illiterate adults in the Third World. If, however, we take a closer look, we may discover that his methodology as well as his educational philosophy are as important for us as for the dispossessed in Latin America.
And the sharpness and intensity of that struggle in the developing world may well provide us with new insight, new models, and a new hope as we face our own situation.
For this reason, I consider the publication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in an English edition to be something of an event. Born in in Recife, the center of one of the most extreme situations of poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World, he was soon forced to experience that reality directly.
As the economic crisis in in the United States began to affect Brazil, the precarious stability of Freires middle-class fam- ily gave way and he found himself sharing the plight of the "wretched of the earth. His early sharing of the life of the poor also led him to the discov- ery of what he describes as the "culture of silence" of the dispos- sessed.
He came to realize that their ignorance and lethargy were the direct product of the whole situation of economic, social, and political domination—and of the paternalism—of which they were victims.
Rather than being encouraged and equipped to know and respond to the concrete realities of their world, they were kept "submerged" in a situation in which such critical awareness and response were practically impossible. And it became clear to him that the whole educational system was one of the major instruments for the maintenance of this culture of silence.
Confronted by this problem in a very existential way, Freire turned his attention to the field of education and began to work on it. Over the years, he has engaged in a process of study and reflec- tion that has produced something quite new and creative in educa- tional philosophy. His thought on the philosophy of education was first expressed in in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Recife, and later in his wbrk as Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education in the same university, as well as in his early experiments with the teaching of illiterates in that same city.
Freire has written many articles in Portuguese and Spanish, and his first book, Educagdo como Prdtica da Liberdade, was published in Brazil in His latest and most complete work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is the first of his writings to be published in this country. In this brief introduction, there is no point in attempting to sum up, in a few paragraphs, what the author develops in a number of pages. But perhaps a word of witness has its place here—a personal witness as to why I find a dialogue with the thought of Paulo Freire an exciting adventure.
And I am encouraged when a man of the stature of Paulo Freire incarnates a rediscovery of the humanizing vocation of the intellectual, and demonstrates the power of thought to negate accepted limits and open the way to a new future.
This world to which he relates is not a static and closed order, a given reality which man must accept and to which he must adjust; rather, it is a problem to be worked on and solved.
For Freire, the resources for that task at the present time are provided by the advanced technology of our Western world, but the social vision which impels us to negate the present order and demonstrate that history has not ended comes primarily from the suffering and struggle of the people of the Third World. Provided with the proper tools for such encounter, the individual can gradually perceive personal and social reality as well as the contradictions in it, become conscious of his or her own perception of that reality, and deal critically with it.
A peasant can facilitate this process for a neighbor more effectively than a "teacher" brought in from outside. As Freire puts it, each individual wins back the right to say his or her own wordy to name the world.
When an illiterate peasant participates in this sort of educational experience, he or she comes to a new awareness of self, has a new sense of dignity, and is stirred by a new hope.
Time and again, peasants have expressed these discoveries in striking ways after a few hours of class: "I now realize I am a person, an educated person. Certainly, it would be absurd to claim that it should be copied here. But there are certain parallels in the two situations that should not be overlooked. Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system.
To the degree that this happens, we are also becoming submerged in a new "culture of silence. Especially among young people, the new media together with the erosion of old con- cepts of authority open the way to acute awareness of this new bond- age.
The young perceive that their right to say their own word has been stolen from them, and that few things are more important than the struggle to win it back. And they also realize that the educational system today—from kindergarten to university—is their enemy. There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integra- tion of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transfor- mation of their world.
The development of an educational methodol- ogy that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society. But it could also contribute to the forma- tion of a new man and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history For those who are committed to that task and are searching for concepts and tools for experimentation, Paulo Freires thought will make a significant contribution in the years ahead.
I have encountered, both in training courses which analyze the role of conscientizagao1 and in actual experimentation with a truly liberating education, the "fear of freedom" discussed in the first chapter of this book. Not infrequently, training course participants call attention to "the danger of conscientizagao" in a way that reveals their own fear of freedom.
Others add that critical consciousness may lead to disorder. Some, however, confess: Why deny it? I was afraid of freedom. I am no longer afraid!
In one of these discussions, the group was debating whether the conscientizagao of men and women to a specific situation of injustice might not lead them to "destructive fanaticism" or to a "sensation of total collapse of their world. I cani say that I've understood everything you've said just now, but I can say one thing—when I began this course I was naive, and when I found out how naive I was, I started to get critical. But this discovery hasn't made me a fanatic, and I don't feel any collapse either.
The term consctentizagdo refers to learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. See chapter 3. In fact, however, conscientizagdo does not lead people to "destructive fanaticism.
Such an individual is actually taking refuge in an attempt to achieve security, which he or she prefers to the risks of liberty. As Hegel testifies: It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;. They give their doubts and misgivings an air of profound sobriety, as befitting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with the maintenance of the status quo; so that if conscientizagdo threatens to place that status quo in question, it thereby seems to constitute a threat to freedom itself.
The term Subjects denotes those who know and act, in contrast to objects, which are known and acted upon. This volume will probably arouse negative reactions in a number of readers.
Accordingly, this admittedly tentative work is for radicals. I am certain that Christians and Marxists, though they may disagree with me in part or in whole, will continue reading to the end.
But the reader who dogmatically assumes closed, "irrational" positions will reject the dialogue I hope this book will open. Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates.
Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Not infrequently, revolutionaries themselves become reactionary by falling into sectarianism in the process of responding to the sectarianism of the Right.
This possibility, however, should not lead the radical to become a docile pawn of the elites. Engaged in the process of liberation, he or she cannot remain passive in the face of the oppressors violence. For this individual the subjective aspect exists only in relation to the objec- tive aspect the concrete reality, which is the object of analysis. Subjectivity and objectivity thus join in a dialectical unity producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa.
For his or her part, the sectarian of whatever persuasion, blinded by irrationality, does not or cannot perceive the dynamic of reali- ty—or else misinterprets it. Should this person think dialectically, it is with a "domesticated dialectic. The leftist-turned-sectarian goes totally astray when he or she attempts to interpret reality and history dialectically, and falls into essentially fatalistic positions. The rightist sectarian differs from his or her leftist counterpart in that the former attempts to domesticate the present so that he or she hopes the future will reproduce this domesticated present, while the latter considers the future pre-established—a kind of in- evitable fate, fortune, or destiny.
For the rightist sectarian, "today," linked to the past, is something given and immutable; for the leftist sectarian, "tomorrow" is decreed beforehand, is inexorably preor- dained.
This rightist and this leftist are both reactionary because, starting from their respectively false views of history, both develop forms of action that negate freedom. The fact that one person imag- ines a "well-behaved" present and the other a predetermined future does not mean that they therefore fold their arms and become spec- tators the former expecting that the present will continue, the latter waiting for the already "known" future to come to pass.
On the contrary, closing themselves into "circles of certainty" from which they cannot escape, these individuals "make" their own truth. It is not the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future, running the risks involved in this very construction. Nor is it the truth of men and women who fight side by side and learn together 5.
In Educagdo como Prdtica da Liberdade. Both types of sectarian, treating history in an equally proprietary fashion, end up without the people—which is another way of being against them.
Whereas the rightist sectarian, closing himself in "his" truth, does no more than fulfill a natural role, the leftist who becomes sectarian and rigid negates his or her very nature.
Thus, each considers anything that is not "his" truth a lie. As the journalist Marcio Moreira Alves once told me, "They both suffer from an absence of doubt. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it.
This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. The pedagogy of the oppressed, the introductory outlines of which are presented in the following pages, is a task for radicals; it cannot be carried out by sectarians. I will be satisfied if among the readers of this work there are those sufficiently critical to correct mistakes and misunderstandings, to deepen affirmations and to point out aspects I have not perceived.
It is possible that some may question my right to discuss revolutionary cultural action, a subject of which I have no concrete experience. The fact that I have not personally participated in revolutionary action, however, does not negate the possibility of my reflecting on 6. Furthermore, in my experience as an educator with the people, using a dialogical and problem-posing education, I have accumulated a comparative wealth of material that challenged me to run the risk of making the affirmations contained in this work.
From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love. Here I would like to express my gratitude to Elza, my wife and "first reader," for the understanding and encouragement she has shown my work, which belongs to her as well I would also like to extend my thanks to a group of friends for their comments on my manuscript.
The responsibility for the affirmations made herein is, of course, mine alone. Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality And as an individual perceives the extent of dehu- manization, he or shertiayask if humanization is a viable possibility. But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alter- natives, only the first is the people's vocation. This vocation is con- stantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation.
It is 1. The current movements of rebellion, especially those of youth, while they necessarily reflect the peculiarities of their respective settings, manifest in their essence this preoccupation with people as beings in the world and with the world— preoccupation with what and how they are "being.
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also though in a different way those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.
Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity which is a way to create it , become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to "soften" the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this.
In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them.
As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of their humanity they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who suffer the eflFects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.
This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. In this situation the oppressed do not see the "new man" as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as op- pression gives way to liberation.
For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor, they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners—or, more precisely, bosses over other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once "promoted" to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner him- self.
This is because the context of the peasant's situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in order to make sure of his job, must be as tough as the owner—and more so.
Thus is illustrated our previous assertion that during the initial stage of their struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor their model of "manhood. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly par- ticipate in revolution intend—conditioned by the myths of the old order—to make it their private revolution.
The shadow of their for- mer oppressor is still cast over them. The "fear of freedom" which afflicts the oppressed,3 a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined.
One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is 2. As used throughout this book, the term "contradiction" denotes the dialectical conflict between opposing social forces. This fear of freedom is also to be found in the oppressors, though, obviously, in a different form. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.
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