Well-intentioned professionals feel identity-threatened by renouncing cultural invasion

Evidence

Well-intentioned professionals (those who use “invasion” not as deliberate ideology but as the expression of their own upbringing) eventually discover that certain of their educational failures must be ascribed, not to the intrinsic inferiority of the “simple men of the people,” but to the violence of their own act of invasion. Those who make this discovery face a difficult alternative: they feel the need to renounce invasion, but patterns of domination are so entrenched within them that this renunciation would become a threat to their own identities. To renounce invasion would mean ending their dual status as dominated and dominators. It would mean abandoning all the myths which nourish invasion, and starting to incarnate dialogical action. For this very reason, it would mean to cease being over or inside (as foreigners) in order to be with (as comrades). And so the fear of freedom takes hold of these men. — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 497

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the liberating educator is trapped in a dual identity whose renunciation threatens their very self — the structural difficulty behind the reader’s question of whether Freire’s method breeds a new vanguard.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the fear of freedom’ as a structural force operating on the well-intentioned facilitator — an essay on why good-hearted educators resist becoming comrades.
• XREF: connects to: Being culturally cutting edge draws people into actively embracing a post-racial identity — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1269