The Oppressor’s Copout: The Problem of Pervasive Ignorance
In my experience, the scariest words to white Americans are, indubitably, why and because. In the wake of both nationwide disease and division, “it seems the victims of the American experiment remain exploited, their fellow lab rats getting fat from the treats unfairly given to them” (Jones, “The Miseducation of…”). And this exploitation is made possible by white America’s aforementioned irrational fear. It would seem that asking our fellow Americans to question why, and then to generate a thoughtful response, is akin to prying open Pandora’s box. As if you’re tearing down their world and setting loose evils of which they seem never to have heard.
To ask why is to question the very system from which the oppressor’s power is derived, and to answer is to bring them face to face with their own evil, their own iniquity. Yet this remains the only way to address the here-now implications of what should have been bygone belief systems. People are protesting and unrest fills the streets because the oppressed are rejecting the system designed to domesticate them. And only by asking why that is, what role miseducation and domestication have in shaping identity and inspiring civil unrest, are we able to spark the change we so desperately deserve.
Growing up my family moved around quite a bit. As we moved from California to Baltimore to Kentucky, it seemed as though we had finally gone far enough south by the time we ended up in North Carolina. Showing up there at the end of elementary school I didn’t make a great deal of friends, although it soon wouldn’t matter. I had gotten into a gifted program and I was going to a middle school with other so-called “students like me.” I’d love to tell you that I was surprised to find that I was one of only three black people in the program of sixty or that a great deal of those kids really loved the N-word… but I wasn’t. My mother had damn sure prepared me for that. And I thrived nevertheless, spending my free time with kids who looked like me and going to school with kids who didn’t.
As I got older, I found a way to navigate both spheres fairly well. This ability to code switch was in no small part aided by my joining a local Boy Scout Troop. It was made up mostly by white young men whose fathers were police officers or former military. I wasn’t the token, but that did little to avoid certain situations. My troop was full of some of the best guys I know, but often certain camps weren’t. And one such encounter changed the way I understood how “the attempt to domesticate reality” (Freire 75) shapes who we are.
At some campsite in the mountains where my troop was staying I recall running into another set of boys camping there as well. One of them was discussing with another how evil Obama was, claiming that he was more than just the worst president, he was, in fact, a Muslim terrorist. So I stopped, and unable to resist the impulse to find out where this conversation was headed, I asked, “Obama’s a terrorist, no way?” He and his friend stared at me blankly for a moment, giving me that “if I’m racially insensitive in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make me a racist,” look. Then I said, “No. No. Go on. I didn’t know that he was a terrorist. Really?”
So he plunged headfirst into his discourse, what Obama was, how all black people voted for him even though he’s a Muslim puppet, and so on. Then I stopped him, “Well, why do you think he’s a terrorist? Or, even if he is a terrorist, why do you think black people would want a black president so bad they’d ignore that? Why is it he’s the worst, not Andrew Jackson or Ronald Reagan?”
He froze. And I mean literally. I’ve only ever seen two people freeze in my whole life and, compared to that one kid during his class president speech, this was the worse of the two. He was a product of what he was taught but never understood why he was taught it. I’d grown up around both black and white people my whole life and all of a sudden I realized that this was the great copout of white America. Never to question, never to ask why, and certainly never to see the contradictions within what they claim. And this is what makes the protests and unrest so unfathomable to white America. White people are rarely inclined to question themselves as the oppressor, let alone genuinely ask about the rationale of the oppressed.
This copout allows the miseducation of the populace to affect white people as well as their racial counterparts. By way of the banking model Paulo Freire becomes so concerned with, our schools underplay the systematic killing of indigenous populations, teach us to celebrate the rape and pillage of the American continents, and force us into believing we live in a post-racial landscape. As white people grow up subtly being taught to view themselves as superior, people of color learn only to try and survive within the oppressive system. And don’t be fooled, this system plays out over our entire lifetime.
The system in which we live, from kindergarten through our professional careers, is littered with attempts to have us accept the most hideous injustice. And quite frankly, the system is damn good at it. As a kid, I was madder at the fact that I didn’t get Columbus Day off than I was at the fact that his voyage led to the enslavement of countless indigenous peoples. In fact, rather than discussing other travelers who are debated to have made it to the continent first, we ignore them in favor of the one who destroyed the greatest number of lives. The one who led the way for slavery in the Americas. And we’re taught to celebrate him.
While the Columbuses of history go on being venerated, we passively learn to ignore the contradictions evident in this system of teaching. We’re taught to shun evil while celebrating its perpetrators; slave masters and seafaring scoundrels become our heroes. As Freire suggests, “Sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality.” (Freire 75) And these contradictions exist everywhere, controlling young men and women as if the strings on a marionette.
For instance, there is no scientific link between race and a genetic predisposition to crime, yet black people are incarcerated at rates far higher than their white counterparts. Or surely there’s a problem when in this year (2020) alone black people account for approximately 13% of the population and 20% of police shooting victims, yet white people account for approximately 75% of the population but only 40% of police shooting victims. This says nothing of other minority groups either.
Through the videos of violence against black and brown bodies, it is almost impossible for oppressed people not to become acutely aware that the “present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human” (Freire 75). The violence and protests, peaceful or otherwise, are exactly what Freire tells us. Formerly passive people are now turning against their domestication, seeing the contradictions inherent in their reality. This is the why behind the protests.
Couple this with another of Freire’s points, that existence in a system that has allowed the oppressors to use violence means the oppressed too will use violence, and you have an explanation for even violent protests. That is to say, the initial way the oppressed understand personhood is to be like the oppressor. In the words of Tupac Shakur on Kendrick Lamar’s Mortal Man,
“I think that niggas is tired of grabbin’ shit out the stores, and next time it’s a riot it’s gonna be bloodshed. For real, I don’t think America know that. I think America think we was just playing… It’s gonna be murder, you know what I’m saying? It’s gonna be like Nat Turner, 1831, up in this motherfucker.” (Kendrick Lamar, “Mortal Man”)
In this case, that means retaliating against indisputable videotaped violence with, well… violence.
While in one of my classes, I once heard a white young lady ask, “Why would they turn to violence? Don’t they know peaceful protests are always more effective? I looked it up. Don’t they know what they’re doing is just as wrong?” I chuckled aloud against my better judgment. I couldn’t help that it was funny to me of course, it reminded me of the same lesson my mother taught me before sending me into a school full of white faces. The same lesson Freire makes clear. To a white subject,
“The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.” (Freire 76)
So, even in questioning protestors, to her, to be fit for the world meant to passively accept it as it was. Rather than questioning herself, she instead questioned the oppressed.
Ultimately, I concluded the young lady who made these comments must have been unaware. At least I’d hope so, for her sake. She was unaware that those peaceful protests were often met with violence. It was her miseducation, and domestication as Freire puts it, that did not equip her to recall the videos of black bodies being beaten with billy clubs or hosed down with water from fire engines. Or best yet, being torn into by dogs. All she could remember was Martin Luther King Jr. recounting his dream in front of a statue of Lincoln, as his words fell on ears as deaf as the statue’s.
People were hurt, maimed, arrested, and killed just as they are being hurt, arrested, and tear-gassed at peaceful protests happening now. And the audacity she had, to ask such questions without the want for real answers, is explanation enough of my point. White America seems to expect the educated person to protest peacefully, yet it is seldom asked why. It is because they better suit the system designed by the oppressor. The narrative of the happy slave who asks for their freedom and is granted it by their gracious white master suits how white America would like to understand itself. As superior.
The truth is white America has “become the root of the contradiction inherent in the system. Challenging the oppressed to be more peaceful without calling on the oppressor to do the same. Using peace to critique the outcries of the otherwise voiceless, while you go on listening to the rhetoric of the outspoken oppressor” (Jones, “The Miseducation of…”). In other words,
“The dominant elites consider the remedy to be more domination and repression, carried out in the name of freedom, order, and social peace (that is, the peace of the elites). Thus they can condemn- — logically, from their point of view — ‘the violence of a strike by workers and [can] call upon the state in the same breath to use violence in putting down the strike.’” (Freire 78)
Thus, it becomes clear the role domestication has on how people understand themselves and others.
We are domesticated to believe in a system which keeps the oppressed under control while imbuing the oppressors with power. White Americans have been taught to see themselves as superior and their history of injustice as completely redeemed. All the while, the problems of the oppressed have been discarded. In the words of Gil Scott-Heron,
“He wonders why I tell him that America’s revolution will not be the melting pot but the toilet bowl. He is fighting for legalized smoke, or lower voting age, less lip from his generation gap and fucking in the street. Where is my parallel to that? All I want is a good home and a wife and a children And some food to feed them every night.” (Scott-Heron, “Who Will Survive in America)
The oppressors build their worldview on a chosen ignorance, opting never to question the system that benefits them and ruins the oppressed they benefit off of. Thus, I write this to inspire solidarity.
There can be no great conspiracy if there is solidarity. I cannot pull the wool over your eyes if we are standing hand in hand. I’ve been abused, mistreated, and miseducated by a white system. We all have. Black, white, or otherwise. People are being, even now, killed by this system. White people are losing their personhood too. Transforming into heartless people, full of rage and anger because of this system. Becoming aware of this system and helping to change it is only made possible by first questioning what you were taught, the systems you’ve helped to perpetuate. Understanding that, in other words, the path forward starts with asking yourself and your community members: “why”.
WORK CITED
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy Of The Oppressed. New York : Continuum, 2000. Print.
Jones, Jordyn K. “The Miseducation of…” Negritude and Other Indomitable Qualities, Medium, 9 June 2020, medium.com/pedagogy-of-black-dignity/the-miseducation-of-74c04f98c62d.
Lamar, Kendrick. “Mortal Man.” written by Kendrick Lamar, Sounwave, Thundercat, Fela Kuti. Produced by Sounwave. To Pimp a Butterfly, Top Dawg Entertainment, Interscope Records, Aftermath Entertainment. 2015, track 16. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNYlDcNGcGY
Scott-Heron, Gil. “Comment #1.” Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, 1970, track 4. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNYlDcNGcGY
