The Compartmentalization of Oppression

In my last post about bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom, I wrote about the need for teachers and students to be considered whole human beings. We live our lives as a summation of all of our experiences, and the groups that we self-select or are selected for us do not tell the entire story of us as people. hooks writes of her struggle in academic settings to assert herself as an African-American feminist writer/English professor/advocate for critical consciousness; she was repeatedly denied admission to a workshop led by Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) for fear that she would "disrupt the discussion of more important issues by raising feminist critiques". This prioritization of certain issues over others is omnipresent in our society today-- the general understanding is that people can focus on only one human rights injustice. I think back to classes offered at my predominantly white University: "Women in Politics", "Literature of Women of Color", "Race and Ethnic Relations", and I realize how this makes things simpler and more comfortable for us. Especially at the college level, students are seeking out more specific courses of study and maybe this just makes sense to those making decisions. Let's absolutely offer some "diverse" options for students, but ensure that the material covered in these classes is confined to 300 and 400 level classes that must be sought-out, even dug-for.


So what's wrong with that? Let's remember the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as the Black struggle, today as the Gay struggle. Feminist struggle? Ongoing. But it's way better now! It's just simpler for the dominant group to compartmentalize the oppression and study it in fragmented bits. But when you stand in front of the oppressed every day, asking them to value themselves as whole people, what does it mean to compartmentalize a history? Who does simplicity help?

The answer is, of course, the dominant group: White folks. White people come to understand racism as a historical norm when we are taught over and over that other groups had to struggle and we didn't. The underlying truth is that they were struggling against the White, hetero, patriarchal norm, but we prefer to know only a few emotional stories of underdog victory and the positive outcomes that succeeded. That's just how it's always been. In that statement lies the crux of hooks' argument in her persuasive essay "A Revolution of Values": when White folks continue to educate the way they were educated, things will continue to be the way they've always been. Which is simple...for us. When we break oppression into units, semester-long courses, 45-minute discussions, we lose the power we have as educators to present the true flaws of our world to our students. If education is truly a practice of freedom, we should have a class called "Literature" where Toni Morrison is read and valued and critiqued alongside Ernest Hemingway because they are authors, and they are very different human beings who shared their ideas with the world. So let's compare their realities and see where the discussion takes us.

 What this "Literature" class shouldn't be is a place where Toni is heralded as a great African-American female author and Ernest a great author, period. And while we're at it, the discussion should never end with everyone walking away feeling united and comfortable; when discussing the different realities faced by these people and the characters they brought to life on their pages, students should feel uncomfortable. When we teach mostly-White and mostly-Black and multicultural classes about various vantage points and experiences and pain and victory, we allow a younger generation to know they're not just a long-removed remnant of "I Have a Dream".

Our students may connect passionately to one part of their own identity, but it's not ours to choose for them. hooks' freedom is to know enough about the world to choose what you care about and passionately pursue it. It kind of takes my breath away to think that the change-makers are 12 years old and seeking validation right now; I pray that we present our world and history to them, and they struggle with it, and that struggle becomes what they passionately pursue.

(PS- this is a picture of my students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas-- historic site of integration. We had a lot of discussions about whether schools afterward about whether schools are truly integrated today, many of which ended with disagreements and more questions than answers. It was one of my favorite days as an educator.)

How can you de-compartmentalize teaching about oppression? I need some more think time about how I will do so in my math classroom, but I'm excited to start thinking.

--Noel Price