The Quandary of Structures & Fatalism

I have written this article so many times with so many beginnings, arguments, examples, doubts, and unfinished ends. I have written it a hundred times when I wake up in the middle of the night after a daunting dream about a student who felt alienated and disempowered in class. I have written it a thousand times on walks, in many conversations with myself after a long day of teaching.

Despite sporadic attempts, the ghastly weight of my incapability does not numb my mind; it does not leave me. It clings unto me. It takes over me, it becomes me, and for good reasons. I am not planning to let it go. Teaching gives my life meaning. But how can we learn about structural injustices without feeling lost, inadequate, defeated, and ironically lose meaning and purpose? How can I teach students that there is nothing special about 2021 when they say with angst and rage, “I cannot believe this is happening in 2021?” What is the point of telling students that what we wear is produced in sweatshops, and what we eat is picked by immigrant children and prisoners? Why would I ruin their world, if it is not ruined yet, and bitter their happy college years, even though that is a naïve assumption, by telling them that their Halloween candies are connected to sugar’s history, tears and grief, never-ending whips, and the colonization of Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Cuba? What is the benefit of telling them that we exist on Native lands, on the bones and blood of Indigenous people, that land acknowledgment is a liberal technique of exoneration, and that Thanksgiving was merely the colonizers’ lie to conceal the history of genocide? Why bother telling them that the white man’s burden has transformed to wars in Southwest Asia and mechanisms of debt executed by the World Bank and IMF?

To put it starkly, I wonder if the path toward the future is already drawn and predetermined, if the past bleeds into the veins of the future, what is the point of learning about our inevitable demise? Can we know about these atrocities and not get crushed under an unyielding force of fatalism? What happens to hope, dream, and prophecy? To share my reflections on these inquiries, I write this article once more, hoping that I finish it at last. This time, however, I would like to focus on where the concern about sociological awareness comes from. Why must knowing result in fatalism, and unknowing culminate in a state of joy? Can sociological understanding be emancipatory? Maybe the recent attempt to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a good case for examining these concerns and hopefully imagining a way out.

Why do those in power want to make teaching CRT illegal? Some argue that such an awareness exposes students to forces against which they are vulnerable and defenseless, an assessment that ironically reveals the structural and systemic nature of oppression and incapability of single individuals to do something, or anything, about it. They argue that such knowledge induces hopelessness and divides communities in an otherwise united country. These arguments, often entertained by those whose communities are not directly impacted by injustices, imply that ignorance and negligence are preferred over awareness. It assumes that not knowing about oppression makes it more palatable. This stance, hence, advocates for a prescriptive education, rather than an education that helps us “enter the historical process as responsible [conscious] subjects” (Freire 2005, 36).

As the word implies, a prescriptive education assumes two sides with unequal power: one who knows and prescribes what is suitable for a diagnosis and one who does not know, listens passively, and takes in. It presumes that one party knows the problem and how to heal it, and one who does not know and must rely on the former for the diagnosis and remedy.

Prescriptive education is based on a relationship in which the prescriber, with a façade of benevolence and care, preserves its power over those who are expected to conform. Prescriptive education, abusive, obscure, disguised, and domineering, invalidates or ignores the experiences and insights of students. It presents the world as static and unalterable. It instills fear of change and promotes a desire for the status quo. It encourages compromise and conservative reform to keep the source of injustices intact; it portrays change as a threat to what we have and what we have achieved. It induces fear of transformation (“You could have it worse”) and manufactures a sad, solitary, and isolating semblance of content (“See how far we have come”). A prescriptive education recommends passivity, encourages adaptation, and induces satisfaction and submission to a world that is unchangeable and compartmentalized, hence, predictably on its unyielding predetermined path. It naturalizes our location in the world where some know and tell others as an act of benevolence and grace, and some follow docilely, passively, thankfully. Isn’t then fatalism the inherent result of unknowing? Isn't then unknowing the tool of so-called masters to keep the conditions justified, naturalized, and intact so they remain in power?

To reverse this process of detachment which preserves and guarantees what Joe Feagin (2006) calls the unfair enrichment of some and unfair impoverishment of others, where we are abstracted from the world, where the world exists “out there” independent of us, we need to merge with the world and emerge from it anew. We need to know that the reality is unfinished and undetermined and that the reality does not exist statically detached from and eternally outside of us. That is why Freire (2005) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed argues that the movement, the point of departure, ‘must always be with men and women in the “here and now” (85), as a collective, rather than abstracted statistical individuals in the world and without others. Similar to the unfinished world, in which and with which we exist, we are “beings in the process of becoming- as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality” (Freire 2005, 84). Such a mindset does not remove us from a world that is depicted as unalterable. It rather places us at the center of the world as we act on reality rather than passively being acted upon. Isn’t then empowerment the inherent result of knowing?

Such a reflexive reconfiguration which places humans in the world, with the world, and with and among others, offsets forces of fatalism through inspiration. It negates isolation and atomism of individualism and weaves networks of solidarity and hope. Under such circumstances, the violence of oppressors and their projected fatalism becomes the weapons of those who inquire, learn, and act. If we are in the world and with the world, supported and accompanied by many existing and emerging fellowships, the world and its conditions will not function against us. They will join our march for reflection, engagement, rebellion, and action. In this new arrangement, the world and its weight does not, unfortunately, fall on us. It will, fortunately, crumble on the oppressors. In a world of solidarity and fellowship, our experience, existence, and knowledge will not alienate us. They will not make our world collapse. They bring us together and draw alternative paths to multiple futures and possible worlds to build and protect. In this new arrangement, as we engage with learning in our classrooms, as teachers and students, and student-teachers and teacher-students, as partners in inquiry, as comrades and fellows, we authenticate our experiences, we become the authority, and our new statement will be based on our own diagnosis of and solutions for our struggles, rather than prescriptions of the oppressors.