violaslayvis:

It seems like you just suck at talking to people & are taking your frustrations bc of your lack of likability out on theory. It’s not about giving people a “proposed reading list” and leaving them to fend for themselves. Understanding theoretical concepts is something you help them do and they help you do. To quote @cannibality, “Reading is hard. Reading is worthwhile. Learning from revolutionaries who came before us, from their successes and their failures, is vital. Nobody is saying to hand people a copy of Capital and expect them to derive from it the entire revolutionary tradition of the past century. Reading together, and making the effort to all become teachers who can explain what has happened before to those of us who can’t undertake a sustained engagement with this historical material is a really good strategy. Practice explaining things - start with just a simple concept what classes are, or what ideology is. Over time, every single one of us can become a teacher, and contribute as much as we possibly can to advancing the struggle.”

Similarly, to quote Donaldo Macedo from the introduction of the 30th anniversary of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “I am often amazed to hear academics complain about the complexity of a particular discourse because of its alleged lack of clarity. It is as if they have assumed that there is a mono-discourse that is characterized by its clarity and is also equally available to all. If one begins to probe the issue of clarity, we soon realize that it is class specific, thus favoring those of that class in the meaning-making process. 

The following two examples will bring the point home: Henry Giroux and I gave a speech at Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts to approximately three hundred unwed mothers who were part of a GED (graduate-equivalency diploma) program. The director of the program later informed us that most of the students were considered functionally illiterate. After Giroux’s speech, during the question-and-answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said, ‘Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn’t have a language to express what I have felt. Today I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you.’ 

And Paulo Freire told me the story of what happened to him at the time he was preparing the English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He gave an African American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read to see how she would receive it. A few days later when he asked the woman if she had read it, she enthusiastically responded, “Yes. Not only did I read it, but I gave it to my sixteen-year-old son to read. He read the whole chapter that night and in the morning said, ‘I want to meet the man who wrote this. He is talking about me.’

One question that I have for all those “highly literate” academics who find Giroux’s and Freire’s discourse so difficult to understand is, Why is it that a sixteen-year-old boy and a poor, “semiliterate” woman could so easily understand and connect with the complexity of both Freire and Giroux’s language and ideas, and the academics, who should be the most literate, find the language incomprehensible? I believe that the answer has little to do with language and everything to do with ideology. That is, people often identify with representations that they are either comfortable with or that help deepen their understanding of themselves. The call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one. The sixteen-year-old and the semiliterate poor woman could readily connect with Freire’s ideology, whereas the highly literate academics are “put off by some dimensions of the ‘same ideology.’  For me, the mundane call for a language of “simplicity and clarity” represents yet another mechanism to dismiss the complexity of theoretical issues, particularly if these theoretical constructs interrogate the prevailing dominant ideology.”