On Witnessing Oppression
As Co-Counselors, we look at issues and feelings that many other communities ignore and even carefully avoid. We actively look at oppression and at our own oppressor patterns. We also look at the health of our planet, and the life on it.
I am a raised-poor, white, currently middle-class, Jewish/raised-Catholic, elder male. I have a long-standing pull to adapt, cope, persist, and be resilient. These skills are applauded in some of the communities to which I belong. But I am noticing that people in my communities also tend to “look away.” Looking without seeing, standing by without engaging, seems to be a widely held pattern in my communities.
At a recent RC workshop, we were asked to consider the racism we had witnessed in childhood. I could remember many incidences of “standing by” while observing racism. Then I recalled an experience in which I had fully witnessed blatant racism, had been engaged in the human interactions. I had been slapped by one of my parents, who’d thought I should avert my attention. I was similarly punished when I fully witnessed disability, sexism, and degradation of the environment. As a result, my witnessing of these things became silent.
When I was an adolescent, I “divorced” myself from my birth family and engaged more with individuals I had chosen to be family. Then in the 1980s and ‘90s, the ravages of HIV disease among young Black, Gay, and Bisexual men broke through my “shield.” And beginning in 2015, the murders of Black men and women broke through even more.
My current engagement with social issues is triggering more angry Co-Counseling sessions. I am sounding more and more like my raised-poor and (ultimately) working-class parents. They would come home from work exhausted, but ready to fight about the injustices they had experienced during the day.
USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for leaders of raised-poor people
(Present Time 207, April 2022)