ABSTRACT
At this point, people in my diversity classes or workshops are usually looking at me with a mixture of mild disbelief and curiosity, but almost all with rapt attention. Mine is a perspective they rarely hear. Typically, when a White person thinks about unlearning racism or a man has the opportunity to examine sexism, their first response is usually negative: “It will make me feel bad”, “I’ll just feel guilty”, “I’ll just be bashed and blamed for all the problems in the world.” These common reactions led me to believe that something was missing. People from privileged groups needed to understand the benefits of engaging in meaningful, ongoing unlearning privilege/oppression work. They needed a vision of what they had to gain, if they overcame their preconceptions and opened their hearts and minds. I knew my view of unlearning privilege/oppression as valuable and transforma-
tive was not unique. As I discussed this with others, people quickly offered their own metaphors and adjectives for how this work has been deeply gratifying. Most often people spoke of it as healing, freeing, and liberating. Quite the contrary to the negative associations, people who have actually participated in a process to unlearn privilege and oppression have found it to be an overwhelmingly positive and profound experience. I could see there was a bigger story to tell. I struggled with finding words to capture what I meant by unlearning privilege/
oppression. I wanted to convey that it is a multifaceted and comprehensive process which
includes both self-reflection and social analysis. Unlearning privilege/oppression includes examining one’s biases, socialization, attitudes, behaviors, and worldview. It also entails understanding 1) the historical and contemporary manifestations of the oppression, 2) how inequality is systemic and institutionalized, and 3) the privilege and oppression experienced by the dominant and subordinated groups. It means learning how to be an ally and challenge injustice. In addition, I wanted a term that was inclusive of different forms of social inequality. I decided to expand on the more commonly-used term unlearning racism and use unlearing privilege/oppression. I wanted to use both the terms privilege and oppression since for people from dominant groups, it was particularly important to be looking at privilege in addition to the oppression more generally. At the moment, this is the best word or phrase I could find to capture this complex process. I also grappled with using the word joy. I chose the title The Joy of Unlearning
Privilege/Oppression as a play on The Joy of Sex or The Joy of Cooking. I wanted to capture the irony of connecting unlearning privilege/oppression with something joyful. While not everyone got the joke, the term joy actually did speak to many people’s experiences. I do not intend for this language to be flip or trivializing of the hard work involved in unlearning privilege/oppression or of the oppression suffered by people from marginalized groups. I do hope it captures people’s attention and helps them think about what this work can mean in their lives. Theories of racial/social identity development, discussed earlier in Chapter 3,
describe changes in how people perceive themselves, others, and social issues. They capture both a sense of process and a state of more complex awareness. These frameworks describe movement through different levels of consciousness or schemas related to one’s racial or social identity, implying an unlearning process. For example, Helms (2007) refers to the evolution from a racist to a non-racist White identity. While none of these theories suggests that one reaches a final, discrete “stage”, they do describe perspectives that indicate greater consciousness and complexity. Yet, they say little about how people feel about themselves and their lives once they achieve this level of consciousness. My research on the joy of unlearning privilege/ oppression described in this chapter can be seen as building and elaborating on these theories by offering illustrations of how people experience the capacity to live with this greater awareness. I solicited people’s experiences of unlearning privilege/oppression when they are
in the privileged group through workshops, conferences, and list-serves, collecting dozens of verbal and written responses. In addition, I conducted in-depth interviews with people from various privileged groups. Responses were primarily in relation to sexism, racism, and/or heterosexism though other “isms” were referenced as well. Most people focused on one form of oppression as their basis for discussion and then added thoughts about unlearning others. In many cases, people had a deeper passion about one “ism” even though they clearly recognized and cared about other forms of inequality, and injustice in general. The quotations in this chapter are the words of the respondents.
