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Demechanizing Whiteness: Lessons From Theatre Of The Oppressed, Elizabeth J. Simpson

Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal

The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) provides small group techniques to strategize and “rehearse” for collaborative liberation using popular education forms of systems analysis, bolstered by practices that counter implicit biases and habituated behaviors. This essay draws on interviews with jokers at CTO-Rio to advocate the need for continual engagement of demechanizing practices both within TO and in the lives of practitioners in order to demechanize the tenets of white supremacy that we are born into, despite our essential loving nature, with particular focus on counteracting a the habit of exploiting Black suffering for creative capital.