Stop the voices

My Boston dancers and I had a real and raw conversation in Friday's rehearsal (August 17, 2007) about our current work that is to be debuted in Cambridge, MA mid-October. We are working with the subject matter of the Osmotic and Appropriation of Racism, Sexism and Heterosexism.

This work stems from my lifelong consumption and research with the fight against oppression. I have discovered over the past 12 years of my work in Student Affairs in Higher Education that I am not only fighting the majoritive expectations that fill/filled/are filling my environment, but also myself and the appropriated oppression I subject myself to everyday. Pop culture propagates mantras and coaching through any and all of life's situations. The mantras that I subject myself too everyday reflect the community I was raised and the non-majoritive membership I maintain.

I gave each of my beautiful dancers Mark Tappan's "Reframing Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination: From the Psychological to the Socio-cultural"--Education Program at Colby College.

He writes: Traditionally, both internalized oppression and internalized domination have been viewed almost exclusively as internal, deep, unchanging, psychological qualities or characteristics of the oppressed, on the one hand, and the privileged, on the other. I believe, however, that there are serious limitations to such an overemphasis on the personal, individual, psychological dimensions of both these phenomena. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) argues “whereas for most whites racism is prejudice, for most people of color, racism is systemic or institutionalized” (p. 8). The same holds true, I think, for internalized oppression and internalized domination, in general. It is easy, particularly from a dominant point of view, to see the oppressed as “victims,” and to see their reaction to oppression as reflecting a set of “psychological problems”—-thereby obscuring the role that systemic, structural, and institutionalized forces play in the production and reproduction of oppression. Similarly, it is very easy, from a dominant point of view, to see racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., as personal, psychological shortcomings that are too easily interpreted, and thus dismissed or minimized, as the result of prejudice, bias, ignorance, etc. (“I’m not a racist!” or “I didn’t mean anything by that remark”). This view, moreover, leads to a solution to prejudice and bias that stresses the need for individual attitude change, via education, training, therapy, etc. (interventions at the individual level), and nothing more.

But privilege and oppression are the result of forces and mechanisms that go far beyond the individual, psychological level (see Hardiman & Jackson, 1997). Consequently, the social, cultural, institutional, and historical forces, that lead racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. to become systematically embedded in the structure of our social lives must be acknowledged in any attempt to challenge the status quo (Bishop, 2002). In the end, any solution to the problems of privilege and oppression must focus as much on structural/systemic change as it does on personal transformation. This is where the socio-cultural concept of mediated action can be most useful.

Mediated action entails two central elements: an “agent,” the person who is doing the acting, on the one hand, and “cultural tools” or “mediational means,” the tools, means, or “instruments,” appropriated from the culture, and used by the agent to accomplish a given action, on the other (Wertsch, 1998). In this essay I will argue, therefore, that that both “internalized” oppression and “internalized” domination are better understood as forms of mediated action--are better understood, in other words, as socio-cultural phenomena, rather than simply as psychological phenomena. Such a reinterpretation, among other things, helps to hold both the individual and the structural/systemic levels together at one and the same time.

Mark's perspective, my own research through life experience and training and teaching through my work in Student Affairs over the past 12 years pervades deeply my new choreographic endeavor.