Listen

Alert Bay, 2013

“When learning to see yourself as an oppressor, the experience is by definition hidden from you, because part of the process of becoming a member of an oppressor group is to be cut off from the ability to identify with the experience of the oppressed. It is this lack of empathy, this denial that anyone is hurt (at least, anyone viewed as fully human) that makes oppression possible. When the oppression is not part of your own experience, you can only understand it through hearing others’ experience, along with a process of analysis and drawing parallels.” (from Becoming an Ally, Anne Bishop, 2002).