Ethical Beings in an Unethical Society (CR 10) E
What?My identity, sense of meaning, and well-being is interdependent with that of others in that these three things cannot be the same for everyone. Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedomstates “However, I hold that my own unity and identity, in regard to others and to the world, constitutes my essential and irrepeatable way of experiencing myself as a cultural, historical, and unfinished being in the world, simultaneously conscious of my unfinishedness.” (51) My identity, sense of meaning, and well-being is what makes me, me. Freire is essentially stating that our own identity is crucial to one of the main ideas of this class — being an ethical being and what exactly that is. Our identity is what sets us apart from others, it is how we are able to experience everyone in the world as different people in terms of culture, history, and simply being in the world. Throughout life, we are constantly changing and evolving from the blank slate we were when we were born, becoming and learning to be the ethical beings we can be by learning from ourselves and our own experiences and the experiences of others.
From my specific community partner Canal Alliance and the voices of people I have worked with from there this semester, I have learned a couple different things. One thing is that sometimes people will be forced to mature due to the circumstances they are put in. For instance, a lot of the kids at Canal Alliance have to be very self-reliant because their parents have to work long hours and have to introduce them to the hard truth about their lives and what their lives could be like were their parents or family members to get deported or a similar situation were to happen. This is something other young children not of color and of higher income wouldn’t be familiar with. Another thing I learned from my community partner and the people I’m in touch with is the quote “teaching by learning and learning by teaching.” When we first came into Service Learning, we all expected to be teaching the kids as much as we could, but what we didn’t realize that they would be teaching us as well, which is the whole point of Service Learning, for us to educate the people we work with and to be educated by the people we work with.
So What? The most impacted and marginalized group of people in our society are the low-income people of color in our society, more specifically the African American and Latinx cultures and communities. This can be seen in the treatment of these groups in everyday society by the majority.
The larger contexts and histories that have shaped these conditions are so engrained into our society we forget that they exist and happened to create these conditions. The inequities that minorities (even though they are growing in size) face are shaped by the history we as a society has let happen, with everything from slavery, segregation, genocides, and the like. We as an American society are so accustomed to the inequity that minorities face that the majority barely batted an eye when our own President wanted to build a wall to stop immigration of people trying to find a better life for them and their families. Yes, everyone bears a collective responsibility to challenge and correct the structures that perpetuate inequity even if we as a single person aren’t actively doing anything to perpetuate these structures. Nothing is going to change if one person is doing all of the work, but together, these structures may actually be able to be destroyed and new ethical and fair ones can be put in place.
Now What?With this knowledge and experience, I see my role/responsibilities within the larger context to keep educating myself and others around me. It is my ethical duty to try and fight the systemic faults of our society that have been perpetuated for years and years. Me, as an 18-year old almost-sophomore in college, may not be able to do much, but if I can change at least one person’s way of thinking and education to be more ethical and fair toward minorities — the most impacted and marginalized groups in our society — I have done my job as an ethical being. We, as a collective democratic society, in order to create a more equitable and just world, can do the same. We can protest, we can fight, we can help get the rights back for the people who need help the most instead of just thinking of ourselves. We can educate each other, as Freire writes in Pedagogy of Freedom: “It is in our incompleteness, of which we are aware, that education as a permanent process is grounded. Women and men are capable of being educated only to the extent that they are capable of recognizing themselves as unfinished. Education does not make us educable. It is our awareness of being unfinished that makes us educable.” (58)
