The 21st century has become the era of freedom, as people in many places have almost eradicated social disapproval of gender, values, bodies, or skin color. However, in 2020, the topic of racism has captured the U.S. with strikes, riots, and cruelty. Oladipo states that “racism puts a burden on the society that artificially crafted it” (9). The rise of movements like Black Lives Matter requires demands equal treatment but uses its otherness to provoke conflicts. The reason for the confrontation lies in people’s minds, and people of color still tend to have and use colonized attitudes. This paper aims to discuss why people of color need to decolonize their minds and the ways of doing it.
Education affects minds and builds society, so it is reasonable to dig into pedagogy to discover how the colonized mind was developed. Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides valuable lessons about teaching the representatives of minority groups and reveals how their mind works. The book divides people into those with oppressed consciousness and the ones with oppressor consciousness and teaches how to educate the oppressed. Its central point is that such people are afraid of freedom, which affects their behavior and, thus, their whole life. The book includes pedagogy strategies like objectivity of reality, critical view, reflection, and dialogue. These practices, applied to the oppressed, would force them to stop fearing freedom of choice. Freire states that “the oppressed must be their example in the struggle for their redemption” (54). Thus, all of the kinds of manipulations are oppressive, and racism might be conquered if the oppressed change their minds and prevent the oppression from happening.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed describes banking education – narrative behavior in the teacher-student relationship that increases the oppressed consciousness of some. To solve the problem of oppressiveness, education must work in the teacher-student relationship by reconciling the two and emphasizing that both sides are simultaneously students and teachers (Freire 46). Such an approach turns learning into a dialogue that has no room for domination between its participants. The opposite of banking education is problem-posing training when students feel more independent in self-expression and are taught to respect diversity. Representatives of minorities will have to admit that their skin does not define them in the equity environment. Thus, they will need to become brave enough to liberate themselves from stereotypes and false expectations of how they must be treated. Pedagogy of the Oppressed shows that it is human consciousness that causes oppressions, and, to stop them, the oppressed must decolonize their minds.
Freire’s concepts, strategies, and statements formed critical pedagogy based on viewing educational theory as built on ideology, cultural backgrounds, and political influence. Education is capable of helping to lead minds in the decolonizing direction. If it adapts the process to modern realities by analyzing the factors mentioned above, it can find weak points of society, and work on them. However, Drozdowicz claims that “tackling the problem also requires raising the need of internal dialogue and critical reflection on the hitherto applied solutions, existing socio-cultural, economic and political conditions in the teaching milieus” (16). Critical pedagogy reveals the importance of education as it forms one’s mind, and its practices must be well-developed for society to thrive.
Freire’s book and critical education statements claim that minorities provoke others to mistreat them by acting weak and fearful. Moreover, the colonized mind lets such people highlight their specialty to get attention and achieve something. In a world where the ideas of equity are being built to allow diversity to prosper, its representatives behave like they prefer being more special than the average. These collisions have to end, and only changes in people’s minds can force them to stop.
As for the people of color, the colonized mind has an enormous impact on their lives. All U.S. citizens have the same rights and opportunities to live a fulfilling life, yet people of color tend to deny it and blame racism for their failures. Moreover, the colonized mind of a person lets them seek dependence and work for the privileged class instead of aiming to become a part of it. People of color with a colonized mind teach their children that the world is unfair and racism is to blame. Roberts and Rizzo claim that “while parents of color often speak out against those lessons to prevent their children from internalizing them, White parents often remain silent, allowing White children to internalize them” (18). All of these factors, if taken away, will significantly change society and the way how people are treated in it.
People of color need to decolonize their minds for the sake of the equity that is widely supported to make them feel full of value. There were dark chapters of history, yet today, the situation is different, and new conditions must be considered. The colonized mind not only slows down progress but also it harms modern society. Education is the primary social institution that has to adapt to the new reality and value equity by improving teacher-student relationships and preventing any oppression from appearing in the classroom environment.
Works Cited
Drozdowicz, Jarema. “Teaching to Transgress: Subjective Educational Experience in the Model of Engaged Pedagogy of Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins).” Culture-Society-Education, vol. 15, no. 1, 2020, pp. 7-16.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books, 2017.
Oladipo, Caleb O. “Construction of Racism: The Challenges and Opportunities for Promoting Justice and Modeling Race-Transcending Societies.” Review & Expositor, vol.117, no. 1, 2020, pp. 9-16.
Roberts, Steven O., and Michael Rizzo. The Psychology of American Racism. OSF Preprints, 2020.