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The Atrocious Lingering of History

The atrocities of the past have a way of lingering. For those who have experienced oppression and persecution, the pain never goes away. That historical pain is often passed down to their descendants. Take for example the Zoot Suit (US Navy) Riots in the 1940s. My grand parents often talked about how they were treated like trash in California because they dared to dress differently and speak differently. In general, they dared to be different. For that, they were singled out as un-American. The Zoot-Suiters were stereotyped and vilified in the media. My grandparents recall being refused service in many stores and restaurants. In one instance, they were both beaten by the police and called dirty wetbacks. As I write this, I feel moved by my family’s history. I feel some of their pain. I feel anger.

I think people don’t always realize how powerful these stories are. Some view such narratives of the oppressed as “dwelling” on the past. But they aren’t dwelling. They are engaging. For me, they provided a way out of my own chaos. I grew up an angry kid. I was surrounded by drugs and gangs. I moved around a lot so I lived both in the barrio as well is in the burbs. In the barrio, I was angry because I saw things that no kid should see (e.g. my uncle beating my grandmother so he could take her purse to get money to buy crack; a best friend murdered, his head blown off at close range). In the burbs I was angry because Latinos were viewed as gardeners or servants of rich white people. I remember kids laughing at hardworking Mexicanos who were picking strawberries in the fields of Orange County. In an argument, they would call you a strawberry picker to provoke a fight. For some Chicanos, myself included, the anger was coupled with shame and a secret desire to distance ourselves from those Mexicans. These feelings proved too strong for me to handle. I went down a path that would have led me to jail or the grave. But I did finally find my way.

As I began to mature, the stories of the elders in my family began to make sense: my grandmother’s experience with de facto segregation in Roswell, New Mexico prior to moving to California; my Grandmother’s cousin’s (Nancy Lopez) struggle to become a pro-golfer despite racism; the struggle of my grandparents and my uncles and aunts to find a voice in the 1940s through the emerging Pachuco (Zoot Suit) culture; my family’s trials and tribulations as conquered peoples in the Southwest after “our land was stolen.” All these struggles had one lesson in common: be yourself no matter who doesn’t like it and no matter who tries to keep you down. This realization gave me the strength to choose a new path. As destiny would have it, I crossed paths with other people who had reflected strongly on the atrocities of the past and the anger they had in their own lives (Cesar Chavez, Ernesto Vigil, Carlos Montes, Rudy Acuna, Pat Marin, and many others). The atrocities of the past do cause pain in the present. But it is important to learn from them. Acknowledging them is a first step in the healing process for descendants of conquered peoples–we, the cockroach people.

For all these reasons, I was truly proud of our President yesterday. To acknowledge and engage the history of the Muslim world was not merely an act of diplomacy. He understood that the wounds in the Middle East run deep. He understood that rebirth is only possible through reflection. He reminded everyone of the good and the bad. He reminded us of the evils perpetrated by the US against Muslim countries. He reminded us of the horrors of the Holocaust and the ridiculousness of its denial. He also reminded us of the ridiculousness of fighting violence with violence through suicide bombing and other forms of terrorism.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims have more in common than we realize. It’s true that our painful history is what has kept us apart. But learning from each other’s painful history is also what will ultimately bring us together.

Sotomayor: A Wise Choice

It’s not that a white man can’t be as wise as wise Latina. In fact, a white man that has had the experience of living among poor people of color may have more wisdom to offer–in certain cases–than an elite Latina that did not have that experience. It’s the experience (plus reflection) that matters.

What I think Sotomayor was saying is that without women and people of color on courts. it is unlikely that there will be people on the court that will have the experience of coming out of poverty or being a woman or person of color (or both) in society, hence their ability to make a wise decision in cases that would affect such people is necessarily handicapped. This is not a radical racist view of the world. As Barry Schwartz (video below) reminds us, real wisdom depends on our moral will and not on sheer brilliance. Our moral will, in turn, is shaped by our experiences. And our experiences allow us to cultivate–god forbid–empathy.

Before the “wise Latina” comment, Republicans were latching on to Sotomayor’s assertion that a good should judge should have empathy and strive to imagine the real world consequences of her decisions. All that Sotomayor is saying is what all the ancients have said–the Greeks, the Toltecs, the Romans–virtually everybody: wisdom requires not only information, but also experience, understanding, and intuition. Even the latest social neuroscience is pointing in the direction that wisdom is hard-wired into certain regions of the brain that activate during moments of altruism and empathy.

Because we have to some extent a universal human condition, it is possible that a white man can be so reflective that he will in fact grasp the implications of a decision affecting a group with which he has had no experience with. In fact, this sort of empathy was present in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, where an all hetersexual majority invalidated a state statute against sodomy based on how it affected the lives of homosexual men in Texas. But only the greatest justices have exhibited this kind of empathy. Most human beings are not that enlightened. Hence, it is practically common sense that if one includes people of varied experiences in any group, there is likely to be more understanding and empathy regarding others.

While it is a great milestone to have a Latina nominated to the court, for me it is equally important that we also have the first openly and unabashedly empathetic nominee (note: the WSJ is now calling her the “empathy nominee“).

Photo: Sophia (Goddess of Wisdom) from the Ephesus Library: http://www.livius.org

Freire was right! Freire was wrong!

Often, I’m annoyed by community organizers and educators in America who romanticize Popular Education. My problem is not with Paolo Freire. I get annoyed because these folk morph his thinking into a philosophical system that ends up being more about the educator’s own struggle to be less oppressive (perhaps that is why Popular Education is standard fare for cool non-Latino guys and gals working in Latino communities) than it is about actual pedagogy.

Freire is to blame in some ways because he viewed his pedagogical principles as humanizing lampposts in a fog of oppression. He held up revolutionary movements and supported revolutionary figures–hence, there is a sexy quality to his thinking that beats the crap out of Dewey! But whether you think Popular Education is sexy or liberating or whatever, Freire never set up a model! He clearly said this in numerous articles and interviews. His last work, Pedagogy of Freedom, also drove that point home. Yet American organizers keep talking about the Popular Education model (maybe because some funders have responded well to it) and in the process they have built up an unreasonable expectation that Freire’s thinking is an alternative to other models.

This expectation was especially high for Sol Stern in a recent article in City Journal. Stern goes on and on about Freire’s support of revolutionary movements and makes the judgment that Freire’s influence is “another reason why U.S ed. schools are awful.” While it was refreshing to be annoyed by someone who is NOT a self-titled Freire supporter, I was shocked at Stern’s utter lack of anlaysis of Popular Education principles–a lack of analysis shared by the very supporters he condemns.

I won’t bore you with the complicated concepts of conscientization or praxis, but I will offer my own thoughts regarding how Freire’s principles can be applied to organizing Latinos. Having been trained as a community organizer in what people call the Alinsky model (badly named since the model really was developed after his death), I always felt that while some of the curriculum was immensely powerful and liberating, certain aspects of the delivery (especially via the Gamaliel Foundation where I was first exposed to a version of it) felt like brainwashing. This is universally a problem with training that involves deep reflection and sharing (in Gamaliel’s case it borders on cultish catharsis), but with Latino immigrants it is particularly problematic.

Latino immigrants (not all but many) in America are often hard-working people with little formal education–in some cases not even middle school. I of course believe that all people are capable of learning and participating in society (why else would I choose this vocation?). But many immigrants with limited education often internalize the idea that they are somehow less prepared or less capable of participating in society. To we the educated they say: “tu que estas preparado–hazlo tu, yo no se nada (you are prepared/educated–you should do it, I don’t know anything).” This deference is not a merely a function of self-confidence. There is a culture of deference in many rural parts of Latin America where the teacher, the priest, and even the bureaucrat are considered specialists who know better than everyone else. While this attitude is not necessarily bad–many a schoolteacher would love such respect and reverence–it is something that can create an obstacle in training environments.

Most Western education has some lecture component. This perhaps goes as far back as the Scholastics. Freire frowned upon the stereotypical Western educator that spews her knowledge on students and requires them to regurgitate back on a test. This banking method as he called it where students are treated like accounts that receive deposits does not feed a person’s need to be a critical thinker that can act in the world. Freire especially hated this method as it worked in Latin America because of the fact that all education systems pass on shared traditions and usually reflect some status quo (e.g. in the U.S. almost all children learna about the greatness of the Founding Fathers and not about the greatness of King George). This truth coupled with the banking method creates a stuation that prevents the oppressed from critically challenging the colonial or imperial standing of the dominant classes.

That insight is usually what confuses people who only have a superficial knowledge of Freire’s thinking (partly becuase they only read part of Pedagogy of the Oppressed without looking at his other writings). People make the non-sequitur conclusion that any form of conveying content in the medieval-scholastic sense is bad and that all education should be discovered jointly among teachers and students. In Pedagogy of the Freedom, Freire refutes this point. He basically says that if a teacher has nothing to transmit (e.g. experience and learned research) then that person is not a teacher at all.

This of course is what Stern is railing against in the City Journal. It is also what cool non-Latinos (in some cases privileged Latinos as well) latch on to in forming their community organizer identities (I’m not going to be “that guy,” i.e. an imperialist conduit of instutional history–I’ll avoid any implementing of my view and will only facilitate dialogs).

Freire is heplful to me as I organize with Latino immigrants, by forcing me to be conscious of my power as a teacher/organizer in leadership development situations. Instead of creating a cultish catharsis environment where I step in to provide a path out if only one accepts my organizing philosophy, I try dialog with people immediately until they begin to generate their own solutions to better their community. Once leaders actually internalize that they have the capacity to get involved in policy decisions that affect them, then and only then, do I offer my quasi-expert opinion. At this stage, they are also ready to sit through an advanced lecture-type training without agreeing that the organizer is right and that they need only do everything he or she says in order for life to get better. They will instead challenge and question the trainer and the material with the same critical attitude that the formally educated organizer once did when he or she went to school. Ultimately, the romanticizing of Freire deprives people of the opportunity for an intense education like the one “we” have received. It’s a lot like a rich person telling a poor person that “money isn’t everything”–easy for them to say!

What organizers qua educators should do is make sure that they are creating environments where community people can develop a questioning, critical attitude coupled with a stronger sense of self. Once this is done, then there is no reason to keep them from learning in other environments whether it be through Alinsky workshops or formal schooling. If the organizer/educator does his or her job–a community leader will be perfectly able to absorb what is useful from those “other” workshops while discarding what is not.

Freire’s unique contribution to education is not the idea that the classroom or organizing project should support revolution (this has always been said during during revolutionary times). His contribution is–contra Sol Stern–perfectly pedagogical: the teacher/organizer should take into account power differentials when shaping a learning environment so as not to merely transmit information that reinforces the status quo and in the process stifles critical thinking. This pedagogy includes dialog and consciousness raising but it need not be tied to a specific ideology. Freire asks us to notice little things like whether we speak from a podium (or via a power point), creating a expert-trainee relationship (even dependence) in our first encounter with people or whether we dialog with them as capable human beings creating a mutual learning environment. This does not replace other ways of educating people, but it does signal pitfalls to us that we can avoid in any pedagogy.

Paulo Freire – Dimensión política de la educación
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