Peace, joy, and justice friends! Today starts a series that will show up intermittently. As I relaunch my writing under the Toward Solidarity name, it seems right to introduce a few thinkers who are foundational shapers of solidarity’s meaning for me.
We kick off today with the great Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. In some yet-to-be-determined order, I’ll consider what the Catholic Womanist theologian M. Shawn Copeland means by “mystic solidarity,” think with Katie Cannon about the inner and outer concentric circles of Howard Thurman’s love ethic, meditate on Gustavo Gutierrez’s “poverty of solidarity,” and wrestle with Willie Jennings’s question: “what happened to the original trajectory of intimacy?”
We’ll see where the wind takes us from there.
With love,
Nathan
In 2014, I was living on the southeast side of Fresno, California, brooding over the causes of poverty and the murders of Black people by police. My attempts to make sense of it all through Evangelical categories and preoccupations were failing.
That fall, through an internship program at my seminary, I was worked with a small community development corporation in Fresno’s Lowell neighborhood—a majority Latinx and Black community with some of the highest unemployment levels and deepest concentration of poverty in the country. The development corp was focused on housing conditions. We were organizing tenants in an apartment complex owned by a notorious local slumlord, taking pictures of mold-infested bathrooms, un-repaired appliances, missing windows, hives of cockroaches, and generally unimaginable conditions.
Every internship was supposed to have a field side and classroom side, but my seminary only offered a course designed for pastors-in-training. The questions there weren’t living up to the questions emerging from my experiences in Lowell or touching the specter of death coming to Black people before their time.
I approached Dr. Karen Crozier to see if she was willing to offer an alternative. Dr. Crozier is a Black theologian, a spiritual descendent of Howard Thurman, and a profound teacher whom I found both wise and terrifying.1 In seventeen years of formal education, she was the first Black woman educator I'd ever had and the first to see through me to the bone. She was a bush that burned in the wilderness but was not consumed. I wanted to wade into that fire and let the flames separate my wheat from chaff.
Maybe she suggested it or maybe I did. Either way, as she agreed to take me in for an independent study, she designed a curriculum rooted in the philosophy of the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. As we moved back and forth between his texts and the text of my life and active experiences in Fresno, she crafted a space where I was broken and put back together differently—broken in a way that revealed a deeper, older, hidden brokenness; different in a way that felt like healing but burned like hell.
When I think of solidarity today, because of Crozier, I think of Freire.
Let’s drop some context here to set it up. What was Paolo Freire up to?
The writer, teacher, and activist was one of the founders of what’s called critical or popular education—a practice that has influenced grassroots movements around the world. He proposed a radical reframing of how learning could and should take place that would abolish the hierarchy inherent in Teacher-Student relationships, replacing them with a process of mutual dialogue and critical reflection on the lived realities of an oppressed persons world. Think of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s urge to shift from “I-It” relationships to “I-Thou” relationships, brought to classrooms and turned outward into the world. Through a process of self-discovery, the oppressed pass through a threshold he called conscientization—the O.G. work of getting woke to the powers and histories that oppress you, and discovering your power, in collective action with others, to transform the conditions of your misery. In Freire’s own words,
“This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation.”2
Freire builds his theory of education on two cornerstones.
First, becoming human is the fundamental goal of life. Humanization is troubled in multiple ways by relationships of oppression. Out of the gate, both the oppressed and oppressor have their identities warped by the oppressive relational structure. Neither can be fully human in those disturbing garments. But the process of seeking to become more deeply human is undermined by the fact that the image of humanness we all are given to aspire to is the very image of the oppressor himself.
Second, the world is not some immovable given. It is something which can be transformed. This work of shaping and transforming the world is the essence of what it means to be humanized. Theologically, we might say something like: we creatures were created in the image of a Creator to be creators; by entering this creation-for-life-in-opposition-to-death vocation, our creatureliness becomes divinity incarnate.
In Education for Critical Consciousness3, Freire describes his alternative vision of becoming human, liberated from the box of either oppressor or oppressed.
“We began with the conviction that the role of [humans] was not only to be in the world, but to engage in relations with the world—that through acts of creation and re-creation, [a person] makes cultural reality and thereby adds to the natural world, which [they] did not make.”
Learning and doing can no longer be divided from one another. Living in that divide repressed true humanity. Action and reflection make up a single whole he calls praxis.
“I never advocate either a theoretic elitism or a practice ungrounded in theory, but the unity between theory and practice.”4
It’s this embodied, collective, holistic praxis that humanizes practitioners. The oppressed are no longer objects of education or tools for politics or labor commodities for extractive economies. They are Subjects. Agents of history. Creators.
It’s in this context—a context that centers the oppressed as the vanguard of a just and good future—that Freire turns to speak to members of the oppressor class who may be reading his book. Hello.
To me the passage below remains one of the most important statements on solidarity ever written. It is the challenge someone like me has to continually wrestle with should she wish to align herself as a comrade with the disinherited.
If you have the generosity to slowly read one paragraph in this essay, let it be this:
“Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture. If what characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master, as Hegel affirms, true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these ‘beings for another.’ The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor—when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plentitude of this act of love, in its existentially, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.”5
We want so badly to make this safe. To avoid the personal depth of challenge and transform that would be required. To somehow read it as an affirmation of the activities and postures and relationships of our current life. But Freire presses the point refusing to allow us off the hook:
“It happens, however, that…[the oppressors] almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want, and to know…they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation.”6
What then is solidarity for oppressors in the eyes of Paolo Freire?
Solidarity is a matter of proximity: We will be “at the side” of the oppressed.
Solidarity is embodied, physical, active and not abstract. This is an alongsideness that cannot be accomplished through avatars on twitter or the metaverse.
Solidarity requires a transformed perception and posture. It starts with a cessation—a stop in paternalism and objectification, however well intentioned—and begins anew in the apprehension of actual complex human beings in their structural-historical context and complex personal realities, related to through love.
Solidarity reveals love as a material and existential risk. The young ruler told to give all he has to the poor recognizes that his way of life and identity would be destroyed by the act. It is a concrete act through which the oppressor would radically “enter into the situation of those with whom [she] is solidary.” Such is the love that is solidarity.
Solidarity fights. It joins with and follows the lead of the oppressed to transform and abolish the conditions that oppress and all social forms that reduce humans to oppressors-oppressed relations. God bless Mother Theresa and may we learn from her as well, but acts of mercy that tend to wounds but do not confront the tools of violence and those who wield them are not acts of solidarity.
That, my friends, is the way of life. Down that road we all get free.
I have never read those lines of Freire’s, or looked deeply into the fire in Dr. Crozier’s eyes, and not found myself wanting. And that is ok. Because at the same time I have never looked closely to those dangerous places and not found myself welcomed in love. Salvation depends on allowing ourselves to be judged. We do not need to be afraid. Love beckons us inward, outward, and onward.
One reason I’m so dogged about the need to integrate inner work with our efforts at social change is that there is no way to allow the power of Freire’s message to press as deeply it must — and for the sake of justice, it must — without turning towards it in humility, gratitude, and wonder. Our standard defensiveness makes us too brittle to sustain the heat of his words, the pressure it places on the contours of our lives, how we have understood ourselves, and the moral purity we fearfully struggle to maintain for our people, family, ancestors. Only a person who has cultivated the fruits of the spirit in their body, soul, mind, and strength can return to these words again and again and allow themself to be transformed in thought and action.
As Freire puts it, “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth.”7 This conversion to "the plentitude of the acts of love" is nothing we can master or possess or hold in stable perpetuity. As I recently heard Jim Finley put it, "we all die beginners." What a gracious relief.
In a letter to her readers,
8 opens her new book, Living Resistance, with a message that may help make clear the transformative simplicity Freire’s challenge poses for us in 2023.“One of the most painful things I notice in my work is that people are scared to start the journey of transformation because they don’t know when they will be done. They think a week of reading the right books will get them there, only to find out that is not enough. They believe that following the right people on Instagram and Twitter will alleviate them of ignorance, but it doesn’t. So they give up…assuring themselves that change isn’t really possible or that the effort isn’t worth it in such a hopeless world. We forget that living is our actual adventure.
You are a human being. You are always arriving.”9
So be it.
Living the Seasons
Last month, my dad helped me build the post and pour the concrete base for the little lending library I’ve been slowly prepping in our basement for months. It’s giving me so much joy! Watching folks pause for a peak, seeing at least a dozen sets of new books dropped off over the past few weeks, then get picked up again, and taking in the waves of perennial bulbs in the bed behind it emerge (we’re now well post-snow drops, post-daffodils, into full tulip and bleeding hearts season, and still pre-irises) are my favorite thing right now. Not to wax too socialist-nerdy, but however cliche these little libraries have become, I still think there’s something incredible about how this practice has mainstreamed the sharing economy and punches a hold in the private property line. Plus, books! For FREE!
I’m going to keep us this “Live the Seasons” thread alive and would love to hear from you how this theme is unfolding—both as you’re experiencing the seasons of creation and in your own life. Hit me back with an email or in the comments.
Reads + Listens
Ezra Klein’s interview of Matthew Desmond—one of the best observers of oppression in America we’ve got—about his new book Poverty, by America is absolutely required.
Here are two quotes from Desmond that floored me:
“There is a kind of spiritual poverty among progressives. I quote the theologian Walter Brueggemann in my book, who says that liberals are fluent in the language of critique and bumbling in the language of repair or celebration. When I read that I thought, man he’s really onto something there. I think there is a kind of chili’s nihilism that many progressives or liberals more generally are much more comfortable with than saying, man this thing, this is working, this is something to celebrate, this is something we should be out in the streets for.”
“One challenge we have in America has to do with how stigmatized poverty is. There’s no flag for poor rights, there’s no identity politics around ending poverty, there’s no sticker there’s no button there’s no sign you can put in your lawn. And the stigmatization of poverty really forces movements to organize around families, around tenants, around workers, but not around ending poverty. That poses a real political vulnerability. We haven’t developed the language yet in this country around ending poverty—including the Democratic poverty, who is much more comfortable with the language of the middle class than the language of ending poverty..”
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“We all die beginners.” This conversation between
and James Finley, mentioned above, is a gift. Everything this living saint offers is. I've listened to it twice and will read Jim's new book as soon as I can find an excuse for buying another book.-
Reading's Substack has deeply moved me over the past several weeks. His lived experience with homelessness, coupled with extensive knowledge of the history and structural pathologies that cause it, are all expressed through vulnerable, sharp writing and the melodic genius of Black faith. I think back to many seasons of my own work with folks on the streets and wish someone like him had been at the head of the table.
So much of what he's put out recently is commendable, but I would particularly call your attention to this essay written to the memory of Jordan Neely -- a young Black man experiencing homelessness in NYC who was murdered earlier this month. Terence’s poetic apology brought me to tears.
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A final thought — most of you are reading this by email, which is amazing! However, if you would prefer not to have your inbox cluttered, and want to discover an online space that I’m finding much healthier than any other form of social media, I suggest considering using the Notes App. You can turn off emails and just get notifications in your app inbox (this is what I’m doing with the now too many newsletters I’ve subscribed too). There are so many remarkable writers and humans here. Or don’t. Go touch a tree instead. That would be great too.
Check out Dr. Crozer’s work here! Her latest book is on Fannie Lou Hamer’s revolutionary theology.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 48
Education for Critical Consciousness, 41
Freire is quoted saying this by Donald Macedo in the Introduction to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p 19
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 49-50
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 60
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 61
Living Resistance, 11-12
This was really juicy, Nathan. Could have been three installments. I loved getting your sense of your mentor as an unconsumed burning bush. I wonder if that's the kind of reverence students used to offer the teachers they apprenticed themselves to.
Thanks for the window into your formation; I look forward to reading the next chapters too.