Working on USer Oppressor Patterns
The following is an edited transcript of an online RC class for USers working on USer oppressor patterns. It was led by Jo Saunders, former International Liberation Reference Person for Owning-Class People; Seán Ruth, International Liberation Reference Person for Middle-Class People; Olivia Vincenti, Regional Reference Person for London East and County of Essex, England; and Leslie Kausch, an RC teacher in North Carolina, USA.
Jo Saunders: I want you to close the door on being a victim. I want you to close the door on feeling bad about yourself. You came into the world perfect. You remain perfect. You are not damaged. Nothing about you is bad.
When we were young people, our bodies were treated without respect. Our minds and how we thought were treated without respect. Our wishes were treated without respect. Everything about us was trivialized and sometimes ridiculed. To a greater or lesser extent, the oppressor material [distress] that came down on us was mean and cruel. And we know that if it goes in mean, it’s going to come out mean.
If we didn’t discharge at the time—and we didn’t—it’s in there. It’s not of our choosing. We were not born with mean, or critical, or exclusive thoughts about other people. But we carry them.
I know how hard we owning-class people have had to work to come clean [be honest] about our oppressor material—our contempt for people, how we dismiss them, our desire to stay ignorant. We’re often not interested in learning about people because we have no respect for them.
And we’ve been taught that our owning-class conditioning is okay. We’ve been made to believe that it is desirable to be “superior,” arrogant, in control—to think that we are “better than,” and know more and better, and therefore it is natural and correct for us to express our thinking while disregarding that of other people.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Being a USer is like being English. We English behaved in the British Empire as if we were God’s gift. Your country has behaved in this way, and still does. You’ve planted your military bases in fifty-seven countries, with complete disregard for the economics, social structure, and culture of the countries you’ve plopped yourself into. And that’s only the military. There are also the corporations and all the controlling things you do—as we did as English people.
At best, you USers are unaware and ignorant. That’s certainly true of the owning class. And that’s true of many English people. We don’t know our own history, and we don’t know what’s happening in the present. We have hoarded the COVID vaccines in the same way that your country has. We have privatized and hoarded the medical equipment and other resources needed to handle the pandemic. That’s the nature of our oppressor material.
I dare you to show each other the horribleness that’s in your mind—whether it’s criticism, exclusivity, contempt for other peoples, not wanting to know, or indifference.
I’ve been working on oppressor material with an owning-class group. I’ve said, “If you have food poisoning and you’re smart, you’ll throw up [vomit] quickly. If you don’t do that, you’ll be sick for several days.” I’m inviting you to throw up tonight—throw up the horribleness that’s in your head, that you’re ashamed of, that you try desperately not to act on, that you don’t tell anyone about.
I don’t care how oppressed you are in other identities; you are here as a USer. This distress is in you, through no fault of your own. And it hasn’t damaged your goodness one bit.
You can do this. Let’s get it out.
Seán Ruth: I want to remind you as USers that you are inherently and completely good. The United States has a long history of progressive activism—for example, in relation to trade unions and the International Workers of the World; to the anti-slavery movement, the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement. There’s a long history of such movements in the United States, and that says something important about you as a people.
I always think that it’s not by accident that RC originated in the United States. It says something, again, about the United States—that there was fertile ground for something like RC to grow there. I think it’s useful to remember that.
And, as Jo has mentioned, you also have internalized domination. It sits on you in all kinds of ways. As with other oppressor groups, much of it is unaware. However, it’s obvious to people who are on the receiving end of it. (It is useful to think about what we know about men. We have figured out some things about male domination. There are ways U.S. oppressor material is like that.)
I’ve noticed the following three ways that U.S. internalized domination shows up [appears]:
- Entitlement: As USers you have a wide-ranging and deep-seated sense of entitlement to resources, to attention, to leadership; a sense that your needs are more important than anyone else’s. When you’re in the middle of entitlement, it’s hard to put your finger on it [see it clearly yourself], but it shows up in all sorts of ways. U.S. RCers soak up a huge amount of resource compared to people from other countries.
- Superiority: Your sense of superiority shows up in many ways—that your thinking is better, that your needs are more important, that your leadership is more valuable, that other people don’t think well enough and need your help. It shows up in the struggle to back [support] the leadership of non-USers.
- Being “professional allies”: I’ve noticed that some of you collect people to be allies to and pride yourself on being allies to them. That can be patronizing—that they need your help.
- Disconnection: When I’m with you, I sometimes can’t see the person in there. I see a veneer of confidence and certainty, of knowing what you’re talking about and of being capable and competent. But sometimes it’s hard to find the struggle. With your other identities, you can show it.
All the above sits on top of people who are completely good. You have to look at both pieces.
Olivia Vincenti: The direction for us as humans is toward connection and cooperation. That’s the only way we’re going to survive—through our relationships and our connection with each other.
It is about caring. Every human is valuable. When acted out, USer material, U.S. domination, is that no one else is important. It’s only about “what I want,” and “what I need.” We need to go toward connection, toward being interested in others, toward cooperation rather than greed and hoarding.
Feelings like “I’m not going to make it [succeed],” and “I’m going to do everything, regardless, to survive,” are things to work on. We can work on where we felt we weren’t going to make it and had to do whatever was necessary to survive—and the way we did that on our own [alone].
Again, the direction is toward caring and cooperation.
Leslie Kausch: I want to say something about the importance of this work. We’re only in the early stages of it—which is unfortunate, because USer oppressor material plays a big role in slowing down and interfering with liberation movements.
In the current and coming periods, the solutions for what we’re up against [dealing with] are probably not going to come from white USers, probably not from USers at all. Our arrogance and internalized domination will prevent us from seeing clearly and acting effectively.
The more we clean up this material, the more we will be able to back [support] movements of, and initiatives from, people who are able to think more clearly than we do. I think that’s our best shot [opportunity] for making a decisive difference in the next period.
Without moving this material, we are vulnerable to being a speed bump (something that slows down forward movement) instead of a propellant (something that speeds up or supports forward movement).
Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
(Present Time 207, April 2022)