Rosa Parks wouldn't give up her seat of the bus and helped to change the course of history.
Offer the "Rosa Parks option" As helping professionals, we don't know when our program participants will want to "become
Rosa Parks" but we owe them
the opportunity to consider the option and
the offer to stand with them if they choose to do so.
This
is the point in the "working" relationship where social WORK becomes
social justice. The opportunity for the client to become a change agent
that you offer is a handle that we can use to help bend the curve of history towards justice. reference.
Most of the time, making the offer to become a transformative figure
won't be accepted for all kinds of pragmatic cost/benefit reasons...but
by articulating the option to become transformative, you are offering
the client to consider the possibility of becoming an actor...not just a
victim. Friere's analysis is:
...the system of dominant social relations creates a
culture of silence that instills a negative, silenced and suppressed
self-image into the oppressed. The learner must develop a critical
consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is
created to oppress.[11]
Also, a culture of silence can cause the "dominated individuals [to]
lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is
forced on them by a dominant culture."[12]
Social domination of race and class are interlaced into the
conventional educational system, through which the “culture of silence”
eliminates the "paths of thought that lead to a language of critique”[13] (my emphasis)
When we fail to offer the transformative option, are we complicit in the Culture of Silence?
