Language, Power, Oppression and Obfuscation

[jhereg]

I’ve been mulling over these topics for some time now. I want to start a discussion here on how language is used to exert power over others, and how that language relies on directing attention away from the acts of oppression.

Also, I’d really like to explore how we can undo the power of this language of oppression, particularly by redirecting attention to it’s proper place.

I think there are many examples we could all look to very relatively minor to utterly horrible, and I have little doubt that many of us could bring a great deal of personal experience to this particular table. And that’s good. But I would like to ask that, since this is likely to be a sensitive subject for at least a few, to keep all comments respectful.

With that in mind, how can we “crawl inside our own minds” and dismantle the expressions of oppression in cases of child abuse? rape? casual “statements-in-passing”?

[TonyZ]

represent tolerance, love, and acceptance. without acceptance, you have no chance to express your love. without tolerance, you have no chance to make your love specific. without love, tolerance and acceptance become token pleasantries to avoid confrontation with strangers.

with toleranance, you learn to accept others beyond your boundaries, and camp out in that undiscovered love landspace.

with acceptance, you move beyond tolerance, and are able to build a home in the way those in the new land build a home

with love, you are finally home.

[Willem]

With that in mind, how can we "crawl inside our own minds"

In the spirit of telling our stories, I’d like to hear, instead of ‘how can we’, rather ‘in our own lives, how have we’?

represent tolerance, love, and acceptance

Then I get to hear a potentially beautiful story behind an idea like this. Who can argue with tolerance, love, and acceptance, really? It goes in one ear, and out the other, for me. If you tell me a story, however, I just may experience something new.

So, in your own life Tony, where and when have you experienced this cycle, of tolerance-love-and-acceptance?

[TonyZ]

I would say on a regular basis I tolerate passive-aggressive questions from New Orlineans like ‘are you from HERE?’, which leads to acceptance, as I use wit to get me out of standard language patterns which encourage real conversation, beyond small talk. Through wit, I have gained acceptance, and can begin to share my love with the person who originally made the tolerance check. I think in New Orleans, the tolerance check oftentimes happens because it is a small city, many people know each other, and because of the transiency of relief workers, they don’t want to spend time making a new best friend that is only going to last a new weeks. Hence, my acceptance and tolerance of the tolerance check, one, because I recognize my northern European height and beard, as well as a traveler’s accent contrast with the Creole and Cajun facial hair, height, and language patterns.

Many people consider the question 'are you FROM here?; to be rude and condescending, but because I have chosen to empathize with the emotions of others, rather than react from my own experiences, I have made a lot more friends and created more business relationships than some of my less socially agile coworkers and cohorts.

The tolerance check is something we all use. We ask things like ‘how are you?’, to test the tolerance of our being upon others. Those who don’t have the time or the space to tolerate, curtly or politely answer and go on their way. People who do tolerate the initial question are then set into motion for acceptance. If someone says something witty like ‘I’d be doing a lot better if this civilization would collapse already’, then you move into acceptance, and the various shades of love, filial, brotherly, matronly, romantic, and agape, to name a few…

And so I have through my observations been able to give myself a choice. Do I give into language of hostility towards outsiders and accept my own conditions for listening, or do I extend my personal conditions and allow my deeper needs, like love and building relationship, triumph over segregationist speaking patterns?

It’s obvious what I have chosen, and now I am involved in facilitating work projects all with twists on sustainability for an entire school system. I was in the pattern of saying ‘fuck the man’ for a long time, but once I got to know ‘the man’ I realized he was simply not listening to himself, not realizing how his words were causing negative reactions to people he genuinely wanted to share with but didn’t trust.

Through tolerance, through letting go of my carefully crafted righteousness, I became empowered to fully listen, and therefore, be able to fully engage, and create a street of two-way acceptance.

But I had to yield tolerance, I had to be the one to ask for this dance, I had the plan to love and build relationships, it was up to me to be the first one to tolerate.

Because one cannot make one’s enemy change their behavior, one must then not work on winning the war against one’s enemy, because the willing always lose to the unwilling. One must drop the enemy-enemy relationship, and learn tolerance than will blossom into friendship.

When turning the cheek, so to speak, on tolerance, it is a very humbling experience.

When gaining acceptance, the gratitude I feel can be overwhelming

When I am finally able to love, and be in a relationship with someone I was formerly in dispute, I literally feel the grace of god.

and so, one could take my three steps and turn them into three values, grace, humility, and gratitude.

Grace is what prevents the gods from destroying this world in this very moment as we have violated their wishes time and again. On a smaller scale, as above, so below, we must also extend grace to those reason and accountability would punish or destroy. Finding the grace of the gods in our own heart is simply a matter of listening, one hears it or they don’t

Humility is what ingratiates us to those which we are suspect. By accepting ourselves as humans who must all work together, not gods in isolation, not wolves who hunt in packs, we see our situation for what it really is: Master and slave both locked into roles where righteousness is the largest building block of the wall that prevents us from being brother and sister. We can only get out of the master-slave story by telling a new story, not by uprooting ‘the man’, but by honoring the rootsystems of each individual. Humility is a place of truth and honor, not deception and miscommunication.

Gratitude is what keeps the conversation going and helps fight away negativity and zero-sum behavior. Having created the intention for oneself to be gracious and full of humility, the only thing left is for one to be grateful for every experience you have the chance to have. If one has the chance to share these core values with someone telling the master-slave story, then one has the chance to rewrite that story. If one has a chance to share these values with someone who has no story at all, then one has the chance to inspire them to write their own. By being grateful of every present moment, love of all things, living and not appearing to be alive, is simple to extend to those who we have written off as the unlistening, the deafened ear, the impossibly stubborn.

Navigation is key. Steer too hard, and your passengers will get sick, steer too softly, and the wind will blow you off course.

Only the unprepared brush off genuine outreaches to make a friend.

[darl]

I’m not sure whether this fits what you’re talking about, Jhreg, but I just turned on the television and observed an exchange in which a writer fielded a challenge to her beliefs about non-violence by saying, one, that when you ask a question like that you’ll get her “preacher’s voice”, two, that no one would ask such a question if they had read her book, and three, that in order to resist the oppressor you have to be fundamentally different from him/her.

The latter statement especially seems, to me, like an example of the way in which language wields power over people–in this case by claiming a monopoly, or by claiming ownership, of the phrase ‘fundamentally different’ but also by ducking the audience member’s question, a question about efficiency, and diverting the discussion to one she would prefer to have. In other words, her remarks defined and controlled the situation, dismissed and, I think, demeaned the questioner and thereby qualify as abuse.

Put another way, the vagueness of language seems to operate in favor of the power base and always provides a cover for the repression of the system. The persons in charge can attach the connotations that serve their purpose and exclude all others, saying, for example, that they’re spreading democracy instead of stealing resources with force or they can hide behind abstractions like non-violence to dismiss a question about how to most effectively stop oppressive behavior. If you can claim ownership of the words a person uses (to define themselves, justify their actions, etc.) or use words to define any situation to your liking, then you can own and abuse the person, or word-user, to a degree, as well–in the same way that a building owner can force a person to behave in a particular way when that person uses her building. If you think of language not as a property that you use to obtain something but as a means of entering into a relationship with someone or something, then you wouldn’t want to use language sloppily; you’d be more clear and precise about your meanings–it seems to me.

I suppose we can counter “the language of oppression” by re-creating language, either through practicing e-primitive or post-modern deconstruction or by calling out passive aggressiveness when we see it–but the task seems like a daunting one. As long as a repressive power structure exists, it will find a way to define reality in a way that justifies top-down oppression–so … resist and keep resisting, point out oppression when you see/hear it, challenge and un-define common ideas about reality… Not a very good answer, I know. But I can’t think of anything else.

[timeLESS]

maybe it helps when i speak from and about myself and my experiences only. This will be hard for me. I cannot tell what YOU should do. Or what would work for “us”. I can tell you what works for ME though.

[jhereg]

i apologize for not keeping up on this thread, i’ve had a lot to do in the past few months and have mostly kept up w/ this forum thru the RSS feeds. a lot of posts slip thru that process…

Willem, I’ll make an attempt to keep this to personal stories, and strictly avoid anything resembling unsolicited advice, but I think we could all benefit from looking at “hypotheticals”, as long as we don’t get too carried away with it.

TonyZ, I have relatively little wit ;), but I have seen first hand what you describe. An honest and empathetic approach has opened many, many doors for me, and given me a range of exposure to a very large cross section of the US population, an exposure that I very much appreciate. And, like you, I’ve found that people tend to be pretty reasonable, most of the time.

It seems that when I’ve seen this method break down is when the relationship isn’t just about the people, but extends into how people live. For example, a manager may not agree with firing someone, or putting an employee in an uncomfortable position, but they’ll do it anyway for the business/corporation because it’s their job. It seems to me that similar things are at work whenever we find widespread fear that person or group A could impact how person or group B lives (no matter how justified or unjustified said fear is).

I agree that wit is one way that we can break down that wall. I’m very interested tho’, to see if there are anyone else has used other methods…?

darl, i didn’t have that scenario in mind when I started this thread, but I think it’s a good example of how we often engage in power struggles via speech. And I think it raises some good questions, like “What, if anything, could the questioner (or the writer) have done differently to get a better outcome for both parties?”, “Should we even participate in discussions like that?”, and “Is there ever a time when we should use similar dismissive tactics?”.

timeLESS, that’s find with me. I’m less in search of “The Answer™” than I am of a discussion. I think we abuse language in many more ways than e-Prime states.

[TonyZ]

each person, each jobholder and householder, each free spirit, they all unfold differently, and empathy is a good way to discern that. Most people make decisions using good and bad and the two strategy. I think introducing to people strategies that require more than a yes/no check opens up their mind and their hearts, and let the real person come out of the shell of expectation a job our a household may put on a person, which while participating in the white man’s world, is generally a right-wrong check.

Jarl, you’ve got some ideas that I wanted to respond to, especially when it comes to power and language clarity.

The power you speak of is real, but it isn’t limited to that use. It can be expanded to use that confusion and clear it up with love. It’s well discerned on your part that those who bring clarity and speak clearly get the most attention. One way would be to cultivate no-response to prevent the new words from overtaking your inner dialogue. Another way would be to be bold, be unafraid, to create language. Make words purple and orange and underlined and I’s dotted with stars, make them mean more than one thing! If the people you are speaking with know you love them, then they begin to hear past the words, and you are helping others by being yourself!

I appreciate you sharing.