Not okay - at all

I mentioned briefly, in a previous post, that my instructor in my Nonviolence class seemed to have some pretty set ideas about nonviolence, at least within the context of the class. Prof NV is a friend of mine, in addition to being my instructor, and that made what happened in class even more surreal. From our friendship, I had made some assumptions about my Prof's beliefs on nonviolence, how to integrate it as lifestyle & philosophy, and its use and place in our society. However he may feel about these things personally, it sure didn't come out in class.

What happened is that I volunteered to facilitate discussion around one of the books grad students were asked to read. This wasn't the reading I had signed up for but I volunteered because I had read the book fairly closely and had some ideas I wanted to present to the class. The book is Gene Sharp's "The Power of Nonviolent Action", part one "Power and Struggle" and is considered by many to be the foremost handbook on nonviolent action (both practice and theory) in the world. We had to write a reflection on this so I used the ideas I put forth in my reflection to help generate discussion.

Although I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Sharp's work and thought he was extremely clear and precise, I did have some critiques of the book. Here are a couple of things I wanted to discuss:

• His ideas about power are centered around "power over" and not "power with." My personal feeling is that, in order to continue moving forward, we have to move away from the current "power over" paradigm and move towards other models.


• The entire book was written from a distinctly white, male, privilege perspective. All the pronouns were male, the language is extremely militaristic (i.e. warlike even though it's about nonviolence), and it's very much about the movement and control of power. Although I'm not a feminist scholar or critic by any means, I felt this was a huge point and that we should take this into consideration when reading the book and talking about his philosophies. Nonviolence from a feminist perspective could look extremely different. I also think his lack of feminist viewpoint ties in closely to his ideas about the control of power.
  NOTE: After speaking with hcul, I realize that I've made some implicit assumptions about the connection between some of my points that others may not see. My apologies if this is confusing.


• I didn't feel we were critically looking at the idea of nonviolence but that people were accepting it just because the idea of action that doesn't include violence is intriguing. While I wholeheartedly support nonviolence in almost any context, I do NOT agree that we should just swallow any ideaology without examining what it truly means to us, in our lives. When we do that, we become just as dogmatic as those we claim to oppose. Nonviolence is such an appealing idea that most of us probably aren't willing to seriously look at what it means and recognize the possibility that it can also be used to harm.

When I raised each of these points, I felt a great deal of pushback and defensiveness from Prof NV. My classmates seemed somewhat willing to engage in at least some discussion but much of what he had to say either trivialized or dismissed my points entirely - especially my rudimentary feminist critique. He did allow the conversations to continue for a bit but when he weighed in (with all the weight of classroom authority and personal credibility), I felt shut down.

He definitely went on the defense about Sharp's book with regard to the lack of feminist perspective claiming that we had to make concessions for the language of the time and so on. He basically reduced the feminist argument to pronoun usage and I don't consider that acceptable or appropriate. He also completely negated any future attempts to address structural violence by making a fairly strident claim that (paraphrased) "nonviolence in this class is going to address the issue of direct violence only."

I realize this post is a bit rambly and disjointed but I'm writing it in an attempt to clarify and process what happened. I feel that any discussion about the broader scope of nonviolence as a philosophy that can inform nonviolent action was completely shut off, as was nonviolence potentially being used to harm others (structural violence), and whether or not women's voices are being heard in the education of large, new generations of nonviolent activists.

I know at least one other person in class felt the same way I do about the feminist stuff but it's possible that I'm the only one who's really concerned about the other questions. What I found especially distressing is that Prof NV had told me, when I mentioned I was going to be in class, that he was glad and hoped that I'd help raise the level of discussion. Well, I'm going to keep trying but I'm not sure what's going to happen. At this point, what I'm really concerned about is being graded fairly.

By the way, here is a feminist discussion of natural and manmade violence and another on the connection between militarism and violence against women.