I was struck this morning by this excerpt from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

I shall start by reaffirming that humankind, as beings of the praxis, differ from animals, which are beings of pure activity. Animals do not consider the world; they are immersed in it. In contrast, human beings emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand it and transform it with their labor.

Animals, which do not labor, live in a setting which they cannot transcend. Hence, each animal species lives in the context appropriate to it, and these contexts, while open to humans, cannot communicate among themselves.

Animals are “beings of pure activity,” but animals “do not labor.” Only human beings – through their self-awareness, through their naming of the world – only human beings labor and thus transform the world.

Harry Boyte has written extensively about “public work,” an approach which seeks to move civic activity beyond the voluntary sector, to bring work and workplaces into an understanding of active citizenship.

This approach powerfully considers the ability of people to physically and creatively transform their world – not only through their thoughts and ideas, but through their work: through their work imagining, building, and creating something together. This public work, Boyte argues, is the true heart of civic efforts, the core of what it means to live and co-create together.

Freire’s understanding seems importantly related, yet subtly different.

Freire argues that “human activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action. It cannot…be reduced to either verbalism or activism.”

in many ways, that argument seems near the core to an understanding of public work. To be is not simply to be, to think does not simply imply I am. To be, to think, to exist as a free and conscious agent – this is synonymous with action.

I think. I am. I do.

For the “fully human,” as Freire would say, for the liberated person, these things are synonymous. They cannot be separated.

For Freire, the power of “public work” comes from the connection of thinking and doing:

…the revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers….true commitment to the people…cannot fail to assign the people a fundamental role in the transformation process. The leaders cannot treat the oppressed as mere activists to be denied the opportunity of reflection and allowed merely the illusion of acting.

While Freire never uses the phrase “public work,” all this seems very much in line with the views of Boyte and other proponents of the approach.

But Freire adds another piece to the puzzle. For Freire, communication is a critical piece of understanding, it is a critical piece of liberation. In his view, human beings first express their freedom as they name their world. As beings of consciousness, humans recognize the world around them. By naming, they identify themselves as as free beings of agency, with power to shape the world around them.

This power of communication has important implications for the value of deliberative dialogue as a tool to transform, as a tool of liberation, as a tool of action.

Dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution, Freire writes.

Sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue. It cannot fear the people, their expression, their effective participation in power. It must be accountable to them, must speak frankly to them of its achievements, its mistakes, its miscalculations and its difficulties.

And make no mistake, this dialogue isn’t “just talk.” For Freire, this dialogue is the embodiment of action:

Let me emphasize that my defense of the praxis implies no dichotomy by which this praxis could be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of of action. Action and reflection occur simultaneously…Critical reflection is also action.

The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people no by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakeable solidarity. This solidarity is born only when the leaders witness to it by their humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people. Not all men and women have sufficient courage for this encounter – but when they avoid encounter they become inflexible and treat others as mere objects; instead of nurturing life, the kill life; instead of searching for life, they flee from it. And these are oppressor characteristics.

Some may think that to affirm dialogue – the encounter of women and men in the the world in order to transform the world – is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans – and some people against others, as oppressing and oppressed classes.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes of oppression as a process of dehumanization, a process which dehumanizes the oppressed and the oppressor alike., albeit affecting them in different ways.

Critically, he argues, it is only the oppressed who have the power to humanize us all:

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.

The oppressors can only conceive of liberation as a trade-off, Freire argues. Rather than seek true liberation and humanization for all, oppressors “attempt to ‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed.” An act which “almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity.” Or, in another word, paternalism.

The oppressors cannot liberate because they can only come up with solutions like affirmative action or Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. They can only come up with solutions which at their essence say, “For generations our people have oppressed your people, but we will gesture towards this trivial concession because our people are so generous. Feel fortunate to receive this from us.”

So the task of liberation must fall to the oppressed.

But who are exactly “the oppressed”?

Freire seems to draw this line so clearly, but our society is not so neatly bimodal.

There are, of course, fractures of clear comparison: in the United States, black people are oppressed and white people their oppressors. Generations of slavery and generations of paternalism have seen to that.

But there are other fault lines as well. Women are the oppressed. Members of the LGBT community are the oppressed. Latinos, Asians, and multiethnic people are the oppressed. Those with real or perceived mental health issues – the mad, as Foucault would say – are also the oppressed.

In individual’s identity is complex. No person fits into one neat little box.

Perhaps we all are “the oppressed.”

Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino studies “covering” – the social and legal pressure to hide your authentic self, which, as Freire would agree, leads to dehumanization and the degradation of the self. As Yoshino describes:

When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the “angry straight white male” reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn’t racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help, like skin color or chromosomes or innate sexual drives. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control – wearing cornrows, acting “feminine,” or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my schizophrenia, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. …Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree.

Yoshino would argue that we all are “the oppressed.”

It important here to interject that a recognition that every one “covers” – or more boldly that everyone is oppressed – does not imply that everyone is oppressed equally.

As part of a dialogue a few months ago, we were all asked to share a story of a time we felt like an outsider. It was a powerful and humanizing experience.

But it would have been inaccurate and inappropriate for me to walk away from that conversation feeling like my experience being “othered” was comparable to an African American’s experience being “othered.” Or, really, that my experience was comparable to anyone else’s at all.

I imagine that we have all felt the fear and shame and degradation of the oppressed, but I know we have not all felt it equally and it has not affected us all the same.

I do not know what it is like to be black in America. I only know what it is like to be me.

Despite the danger of falsely equating or comparing experiences, there’s something I find promising in accepting the mass of Americans as “the oppressed.”

Perhaps as Freire argues, it is only the oppressed who have the power to liberate us all – but we cannot let them wage the war alone.

The voices, vision, and agency of people of color should lead the movement for racial equality, but I cannot let it be their job alone. It is my responsibility as well to think critically about my own privilege and to openly question structures of power.

I may be “the oppressor” but it is morally imperative that I play an appropriate role in this fight – the role “the oppressed” ask me to play.

And while I recognize myself as a person of privilege in this dichotomy, I believe it is my own identity as “the oppressed” which helps me be the person I most need to be. An “oppressor,” perhaps, but also an ally.

It seems there could be great power in this approach. If we all see our selves as oppressed. If we reject the notion of liberation as a zero-sum game and work together to ensure that all people are free to pursue the “vocation of becoming more fully human.” If we recognize our brutal histories of oppression have impacted us unequally, but we collectively refuse to rest until all people are true free.

If we truly worked together in this humanist endeavor -

Perhaps, then, change could come.