Drawing on relevant reading and your own experiences, discuss your understanding of the above quotation and its implications for anti-oppressive practice in community education.

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Community Education Ma                                Peter Bazeley

Anti-oppressive practice                                

“Only an understanding of internalization makes sense of the incredible fact that most external controls work most of the time for most of the people in society. Society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thoughts and our emotions. The structures of society become the structure of our own consciousness. Society does not stop at the surface of our skins. Society penetrates us and envelops us” (Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology 1966:140)

Drawing on relevant reading and your own experiences, discuss your understanding of the above quotation and its implications for anti-oppressive practice in community education.

Berger's school of thought suggests that the society in which we live has a direct correlation to who we are as individuals. This positivist perspective of the world suggests that there is no free will and that human beings are rational individuals who obey external laws without question. Such a positivist paradigm limits socialist politics and restricts our understanding of oppression from the outset.

If I adopt a more critical paradigm and focus the approach on oppression and discrimination I will begin to unravel the complex relationship between power and powerlessness that exist between certain groups within society. This critical perspective will allow me to explore the view that human beings have a potential for adjustment and are not as Berger suggests independent of human consciousness. Also if I apply this critical perspective to the area of disablism, I will hopefully go some way of combining the relevant readings and research and my own experiences so that anti oppressive practice within community education can be fully explored.

Freire (1970) saw oppression as the engine in the cycle of poverty, violence, and illiteracy that plagues so much of the world. The poor do not see they can be anything but poor. This system of social control when enhanced with political and economic structures creates:

"a state of affairs in which life chances are constructed, and as the process by which this state of affairs is created and maintained" (Mullender and Ward 1993: 148).

Likewise, Thompson describes oppression as,

“Inhuman or degrading treatment of individuals or groups; hardship and injustice brought about by the dominance of one group over another; the negative demeaning exercise of power. Oppression often involves disregarding the rights of an individual or group and is thus a denial of citizenship.” (Thompson 2001:34)

In addition, because the only models they have available to them are those of the oppressors, the oppressed will exploit each other in their attempt to gain some measure of independence. Reiser et al (1990) explains how disabled people struggle against society for their own identity:

"Almost every activity of daily living can take on the dimension of trying to make you less like yourself and more like the able-bodied. The world is often quite happy to reinforce this rather than being objective." (Pg. 25)

This ideology when combined with the ideology of the Medical Model of disability has an almost complete hegemonic dominance within most Western cultures (Oliver, 1991). It is a dominance supported by almost all other forms of cultural and social discourse; be it in social policy (Oliver and Barnes, 1998), charity (Hevey, 1992) or legislation (Barnes, 1991). The aim of the medical model ideology is to restore the disabled person to normality, whatever that may be. Under this ideology the pain and suffering of disabled people is always justified and the power and dominance of the medical profession is transferred across society.

Very recently a member of my own family was seriously considering the termination of their pregnancy on the advice of doctors because in the doctors opinion she had a 16:1 chance of having a baby with downs syndrome. At no time during this process were they sign posted to disability organisations or provided with any information about downs syndrome, other than the medical causes of the condition. The power that doctors have is a result of the historical and political medicalisation of disability.  It is only through the redistribution of power that disabled people will be able to affect decisions that affect their lives. This balancing of power will only come about as part of the process of political empowerment of disabled people as a group.

It is naïve to expect anything different, yet it is unfair to be overtly critical of those individuals with impairments who choose isolation. Freire (1970) also saw the lack of self-worth of oppressed groups as a function of their oppression.

"Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything-that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive-that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness" (Pg. 49).

Many of the disabled people I work with feel that their non-disabled peers are valued more highly within and by society. As a result they want to become like them, not because they want to lose their impairment as this often makes them who they are, but because they feel that they are not living life on a level playing field.  This is the process or phenomenon of "internalised oppression."

Reiser and Mason (1990) explain that all disabled people suffer from internalised oppression:

"internalised oppression is not the cause of our mistreatment, it is the result of our mistreatment. It would not exist without the real external oppression that forms the social climate in which we exist.

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Once oppression has been internalised, little force is needed to keep us submissive. We harbor inside ourselves the pain and the memories, the fears and the confusions, the negative self images and the low expectations, turning them into weapons with which to re-injure ourselves, every day of our lives" (p. 22)

Inequality and oppression are socially constructed phenomena, when these ideas are accepted as natural, right and proper by individuals who are oppressed it is referred to as internalised oppression. The process of internalising oppression means that those in power will not have to resort to external control to ...

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