Helping Each Other with Oppressor Patterns
It can be confusing trying to figure out our own and one another’s liberation—including claiming our identities and discharging the patterns of being both oppressors and victims of oppression. (Everyone carries both sets of patterns.)
Recently I had cause to interrupt an owning-class pattern that can run even when the oppressed is mistreating the oppressor.
In this instance, an owning-class woman was relating to an owning-class man. She was a person targeted by racism; he was white. She was a Muslim; he was a Catholic.
She found herself choosing a counsellor when all the other people targeted by racism had chosen and only white people were left. She was disappointed, and she displayed feelings of irritation and contempt toward her choice. Then she opted to change her mind and reject him entirely for another person.
It was a vivid display of owning-class patterns of self-interest and entitlement.
(Interestingly, the person she had chosen and mistreated was the only person among the white people with a particular oppressed identity.)
How unawarely we play out [act out] these dynamics!
I spoke to the woman in private (she is someone I love dearly and have known for eighteen years), and I asked her, “What is it like when racism comes at you?”
She did not understand the question. I said, “I have never experienced racism and never will. What is it like?” I made clear that I was asking for her daily experience out in the world.
She said, amongst other things, that she gets treated like an animal.
I replied, “That is exactly how you treated X—, and I love you too much to let you do that.”
Her response was immediate acknowledgement, and she went and apologised to the person concerned. She took responsibility without defensiveness or denial.
I think this example could help owning-class people of colour, owning-class Jews, owning-class LGBQT people, and owning-class young people handle the pull to adopt the victim position when working-class or middle-class people interrupt their classism.
If they don’t handle the pull and become defensive, they may accuse the interrupter of racism, anti-Jewish oppression, Gay oppression, or young people’s oppression and not take responsibility for what their classist patterns have just done.
Here is what the woman I interrupted wrote to me afterward:
That was such important teaching for me.
I know my oppressor material [distress] is there and that it shows in different ways.
I am just so blessed and moved to have a sister and leader like you teaching me how to interfere with oppressor material. No judgment, no punishment, no shaming—just pure love and humanness.
I’ve never had that before! Seriously, never!
My owning-class childhood was infected with internalized racism and sexism, which included control, manipulation, and violence. To fight that, so I could be seen or even just survive, I had to be extra, extra hard.
You showed me that being hard is not necessary at all. However, I would say that for me to be able to see and hear you, you had to have built a friendship, with support and love and human perspectives, for the last eighteen years.
Winchester, Hants, England