Paulo Freire in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed writes that people who are oppressed must enter into a “communion” with the people, that is, that they must find a way to “‘discover” their oppressor and in turn their own consciousness” (61). Freire is trying to say that oppressed people have to separate their oppressors from their other self–their identity outside of their oppression characteristics, because if they cannot, then their situation (being oppressed) and mentality toward their situation and their oppressors will always remain pessimistic and fatal. Freire writes that there is an “existential duality” in the oppressed person’s mind, where they have internalized the image of their oppressor, and therefore the oppressed person has become their own oppressor.

I agree with Freire that oppressed people have an “existential duality” where they are not just being abused by their oppressors but are also enslaved by their own minds. When I was in middle school, I was teased and bullied by other kids in my class and school. I was never picked in gym class and when I was last and the teacher gave me a team to be on, people would make comments such as “ughh, noooooo, why is she on this team?”. Although that was painful to hear and being in gym class was agonizing, those words and the images of those kids stayed in my mind and haunted me even when I wasn’t in gym class or school. I would repeat those comments in my head every day and night. I would get so tense the day before I had to go to gym class (we had gym twice a week) and a lot of the time, it was hard to play well because I was made to believe and I did believe that I wasn’t tough, or strong, or couldn’t play well. I could never defend myself to others and every time we would start another sport and we had to pick teams, I wanted to throw up because I knew that I wasn’t going to get picked again.

However, I think Freire places too much pressure on the oppressed person to separate the oppressor from their identities outside of that situation and also for the oppressed person to teach their oppressor. It can take years, sometimes even a lifetime, for an oppressed person to recover from their trauma and to think about their oppressors and the reasons why they behaved the way they did.

Freire also puts emphasis on the oppressed to teach their oppressors. However, when a more privileged person is in a space with a less privileged person, the privileged person has to first be able to identify that they are privileged and then they have to want to learn.