Because love is an act of encourage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause– the cause of liberation. And this commitment, this loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom otherwise; it is not love.
(Freire, 2000, pg. 89).
In light of the attention police brutality and in particular the vicious policing of African-Americans has recently received in the media and the public response, racism was percolating in the field this year at the summit and needed to be talked about.
This need revealed itself as early as the morning circle on the second day- a time when the whole camp gathers. During that first morning circle there were words spoken by the youth of heavy hearts, anger and depression after what happened to Michael Brown, Sean Garner, and the many other incidents of police brutality in the country this year. It quickly became clear to the Facilitation Team that the theme of racism needed attention.
The Facilitation team, true to their commitment to value attuning to the needs of the camp rather than pre-set agendas, decided to offer several talking circles on the subject of racism. Remarkably, practically the entire camp attended the talks. These talking circles, called “Break-out Sessions” are optional for the youth and volunteers. If the youth don’t want to attend, they can swim, do art, play music or engage in other activities, normally the break out sessions are attended by 15-40% of the youth, so to have about 80% of the camp show up for these circles showed us just how needed this dialogue is.
Listening and participating in these circles gave me the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the visceral experience of people of color in this country. Many of the youth and volunteers who are African-American or Latino expressed the deep pain and rage they feel everyday. Some shared stories of their own abuse at the hands of the police and legal system. It was heartbreaking to hear the Africans who have come to the U.S. as immigrants or refugees share their experiences of feeling less and less welcome and increasingly afraid for their safety as they have learned what they could expect from the police and legal system here in their new country.
A big part of this for me was also looking more intimately at the way I am holding my own ethnic identity. My father is a brown skinned man of Brazilian and Puerto Rican descent. My experience in life has been radically different from my father’s and other brown-skinned members of my family. This work has given me new sensitivity to the line I walk between being the Euro-American and Latino experiences.
The book Psychologies of Liberation by Mary Watkins and Helene Schulman gave me insight into the phenomenon of bystanding oppression and its psychic effects. Paolo Feire’s classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed helped me to better understand the liberatory work being done by the facilitators at the GYPS and Mary Belenky et al supported me in seeing the political and revolutionary elements of community and offering a loving and nurturing space to grow. Ruth Behar helped me to be present in my fieldwork as both a witness and a part of the process, and at the same time. With the help of these authors as well as many other readings, I was able to dive into my fieldwork with deeper epistemological perspective. The result has been a rich inquiry and into racism and othering- how I experience it, how I understand it, and how it affects me.
Mary Watkins and Helene Schulman name and examine the idea of “Bystanding” in Toward Psychologies of Liberation (2010). They also name the “psychic wounds” of bystanding and presence how those psychic wounds are affecting our society through fragmentation, dissociation, and symptoms such as panic attacks, anxiety, depression, drug-addiction and more (pg 64-70).
At the GYPS, their is a powerful invitation to feel our feelings, and to reveal them if we feel called. There is a lot of tears and a lot of loving embraces shared. One of the lessons in this is the true power of vulnerability.
As we take off the masks and allow ourselves to experience each other deeply, we are touched, and it is transformative.
Creating a Global Village To Explore Issues of Race and Displacement 