Oppression Wears Many Hats

In this blog post we are going to outline concepts related to oppression as discussed by Morton Deutsch in his article: A Framework for Thinking About Oppression and Its Change. Oppression is defined as injustice that is systemic, widespread and repeated. The following five forms of oppression are identified:

1. Distributive injustice

2. Procedural injustice

3. Retributive injustice

4. Moral exclusion

5. Cultural imperialism

Distributive injustice results when there is an unjust distribution of the benefits, costs, and harms a society has to offer. Benefits include income, education, healthcare, police protection, housing, water, and the like. The costs related to the delivery of these benefits may be more for some segments of the population. Examples of harms include crime, accidents, rapes, and imprisonment. The benefits and harms may distributed differently based on wealth, race, gender, and age.

Procedural injustice is about whether or not the distribution process is seen as being fair. Not only must outcomes be fair, but the way in which those outcomes are decided must be fair. All persons must be treated with dignity and respect and there must be input in the decision-making process from a variety of sources.

With retributive injustice, people are treated differently when rules and laws are broken. So, for example, the wealthy or the politicians may receive a mere slap on the wrist for an offense that would result in stiff penalties or even arrest for regular or poor citizens.

Moral exclusion speaks to the reality that not all persons are regarded as being worthy of equal treatment or favors and when individuals fall outside of our moral community we are able to treat them unfairly and as even being expendable.

With cultural imperialism, there is a dominant group that stereotypes others in society.

It is easy enough for us to be oppressed and also to be agents of oppression. When we accept stereotypes about people without question and allow our beliefs about others to impact the way we treat them or the things we believe about them, we can unwittingly help to perpetuate systemic oppression.

The best way to reduce the likelihood of being an oppressor is to get to know people who are different from ourselves and to learn to embrace them in spite of these differences, always remembering that we are all created in the image of God with dignity, value, and supreme worth.

Leadership and Power in the Local Community

At the core, leadership is basically about influence, and leaders play an important role in establishing a just and healthy climate in their communities.  So, it makes sense that communities that want to move ahead in a positive direction must be careful to elect leaders with integrity. There is, however, a difference between leaders who are appointed and have what is called “legitimate” power and leaders that emerge because they have other sources of power. The truth is, duly elected leaders are not always the most influential in local communities. In fact, with few resources available to them, these leaders oftentimes cannot even enforce or reward good behavior.

On the other hand, charismatic but toxic leaders can emerge that have access to resources, oftentimes gained illegally, and play a more significant role in nurturing a climate that is unhealthy and even downright criminal and dangerous. Let’s consider the six sources of power: coercive, reward, referent, legitimate, informational and expert. With coercive power, leaders use threats and bullying to force followers to do precisely what the leader wants them to do. Though this kind of power engenders fear and is not effective in today’s work environment, it is largely effective in local communities where life and death may be at stake. Reward power provides something of value to followers for engaging in certain types of behaviors. In local communities where toxic community leaders have access to rewards based on illegal activities or because of their relationships with politicians, reward power is important. This type of power should be deemed even more important because of poverty or the basic lack of material goods needed for everyday survival. The need for resources and a sense of belonging drives poor inner city residents to tolerate the harmful behavior of the politicians and emergent community-based leaders.

With referent power, the leader is able to build loyalty and attract followers who respect and admire the leader and who wants to gain approval. When toxic leaders are flashy, appear powerful, and seem to have unlimited access to scarce resources, they can easily exert referent power as they become the “ideal” or the role model especially for vulnerable youth.

With coercive, reward, and referent power at their disposal, toxic community-based leaders are able to wield an unprecedented level of overall power. In this environment, legitimate leaders who have been given formal leadership titles may have little influence on followers in the community.

Let’s now consider the final two forms of power. Informational power exists when there is access to information that others do not have. Expert power is when a leader has in-depth information, knowledge, or expertise in the area in which they are called to work. Expert power is often considered the most effective type of power. Even though it is much more likely that toxic emergent community leaders may have access to more sources of power that the legitimate community-based leaders, the impact of legitimate community-based leaders can be significantly increased. This needs to change and can change if individuals and organizations with more access to resources and that can provide capacity building support can come alongside local leaders to provide greater access to informational and expert power sources. In additional, because of the needs that exist in marginalized communities, greater access to resources also increases the reward power available to legitimate leaders.

At the national level, it is never enough for leaders to just espouse the right ideology.  Neither is it enough to just take the right public action in terms of writing new legislation and imposing stricter penalties to deter the criminal behavior of gangs. 

“The persistent facilitation of gang activity by politicians continues to hinder targeted violence reduction efforts, despite the government’s vociferous public condemnation of crime and violence and official support of both punitive and social approaches to violence reduction”

— Glaister Leslie (2010). Confronting the Don: The Political Economy of Gang Violence in Jamaica.

Jamaica remains a small island in the Caribbean known for its beauty, its coffee, its reggae music, and myriads of friendly, delightful people.  With authentic transformational leadership, it is conceivable that the island could one day be also known for the courage and resilience of a new breed of political and community-based leaders who will provide their people with unprecedented opportunities for spiritual, physical, and emotional growth and healing.



Can There Be Justice for All in Education?

Despite decades of investment in education in Jamaica, there is still a severe lack of access to a quality education for students in Jamaica’s marginalized inner-city communities. This reality is not limited to the Jamaican context. Poor students living in poor communities anywhere in the world just seem to always have limited access to the quality teaching and learning environment that could help to improve their longterm outcomes. However, if the truth be told, some of these students are able to overcome the challenges related to a less than adequate educational environment when there is strong parental support.

But, educational deficiencies from one generation just seem to spill over into the next, and the next, and the next, and after a few decades , even loving parents become frustrated as they find that they are unable to provide the educational support needed by their children even in the early years. Imagine the loss to a child when a parent is illiterate and is therefore not able to read to his child. We can try to blame the parent, but what if the parent(s) of that parent were also illiterate?

When there is a high percentage of poorly educated citizens in a community or a society, there are outcomes that can be potentially devastating. For example, poorly educated youth who cannot find gainful employment may turn to crime. Maybe it is time for an affirmative action-type approach to early childhood education in marginalized inner-city communities. Among other things, this approach would seriously consider parental capacity to support their children’s educational outcomes and implement measures to provide extra assistance for those students whose parents have serious educational challenges.

The problem, however, is that we live in a world with limited resources, and giving more to the poor oftentimes means taking away from the abundance of the well-to-do. And, the people making the decisions are the well-to-do, those with the means. For there to be greater equity and justice in our educational systems, individuals will be called upon to give up some of the privileges and benefits to which they have become accustomed and to which they feel entitled. This is a knotty problem.

In the interim, those of us who have empty nests and who are not competing for limited educational resources could do well to give back to some of the most vulnerable among us. After all, it does take a village, albeit a virtual village, to raise a child.

Corporate Social Responsibility: A Day of Service and A Tale of Three Jamaican Companies

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to the practice of engaging in initiatives that benefit the society in the process of doing business.  Businesses that are socially responsible want to make a profit for shareholders and to be successful, but they also want to leave a positive footprint as they journey across a broken social landscape. 

We got a taste of this behavior as Jamaican diasporans as we headed back home in June 2019 to the 8th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference convened by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade. The conference ended with a Diaspora Day of Service where more than 40 projects were carried out by across the island by Jamaican diasporans who wended their way back home for the event. Along with other members of the diaspora, Jalawelo engaged in one of these community projects in Dela Vega City, Spanish Town. Led by Donna Gabbadon (Jalawelo), an energized and fun-loving diaspora team worked across four time zones prior to the conference to plan the details for the execution of the Dela Vega City Day of Service project. The team included Akelia Lawrence-Maitland (Advisory Board Member, Jamaica Diaspora Organization - Northeast); Alvarine Bennett (Dela Vega City Benevolent Society); Rodney Panton (Dela Vega City Youth Foundation); and Diana Harrison (Jalawelo).

Though the Diaspora Day of Service was designed as a one-day event, we extended our project initiative and spent two days in Dela Vega City. Three amazing corporate sponsors contributed to the success of our efforts in this community. Hardware and Lumber came alongside us to ensure that we were able to work with the community to beautify the park.

A team of passionate young men from Dela Vega eagerly prepared the space prior to the Day of Service, and on the actual day we planted two lignum vitae trees and grass seeds with the assistance of the children from a local basic school. Diaspora members eagerly jumped in to lend a hand to move the project forward. We had all the tools and supplies that were needed to complete the project because of the very generous support provided by Hardware and Lumber. Since then, benches have been added to the park, the gate has been repaired, and plans have been put in place for the ongoing maintenance of the space.

Beyond the development of the park, diaspora members and residents did a community walkthrough and enjoyed a special lunch and an engaging stakeholder meeting. Best Dressed Chicken provided super generous quantities of chicken for a sumptuous fare and Wisynco provided all the beverages we needed for everyone involved on both service days. These sponsors had us covered and we take none of this for granted.

We are particularly grateful for this support because our service project is just the beginning of a longer-term initiative to collaborate with other organizations, both local and diaspora, to have a sustainable impact on Dela Vega City. Our sponsors are now a part of what is just the beginning of a truly amazing journey in Dela Vega City.

We held a stakeholder meeting on the second service day. It was very well attended by residents, elected officials, pastors, educators, and other key community and corporate stakeholders. The residents readily shared about their dreams for their community, and this information was noted and is now being incorporated into plans for future development in Dela Vega.

Jalawelo has been engaged in this community for more than four years, and this year we were supremely grateful to have the privilege of working alongside other diaspora members for two days for this very special Diaspora Day of Service project.

We plan to remain passionately engaged in Dela Vega, and we are excited about the ongoing reports that an amazing group of young men have continued to nurture and care for the park since we left so that it is becoming a special space for residents to relax and interact with each other.

There is excitement and buzz in this community. The leaders, residents, and a growing and passionate group of Dela Vegans in the diaspora are already engaged in the process of community transformation. We are excited to join them of that journey and we are grateful for our corporate sponsors who helped to make this a reality!

Dela Vega City, Spanish Town, is, indeed, a Community of Special Promise. :)

Do We Really Like People or Do We Just Leverage Relationships?

Everything in today’s world seems to be moving so quickly. We have so much to accomplish, we are oftentimes so overwhelmed with our responsibilities and driven by our personal goals. This makes it easy for us to meet people, engage in a manner that appears friendly and even caring, but our subconscious and even conscious minds move easily and quickly to a place where we begin to align each new encounter with our personal desires. We begin to think immediately about how we can leverage each relationship to fast-track the goals we are working so hard to achieve. We may call this networking, and to some extent it is, and it is good and important to connect with others and to actively look for ways to help and support each other. However, taken to an extreme, we can soon become self-centered and even uncaring deep inside though our public image of “niceness” remains intact.

One of the dimensions of leadership that is considered transformational is “Individualized consideration”. This speaks to the particular attention a leader pays to the well-being of each follower. It may just be that individualized consideration is a behavior we should work hard to adopt in every relationship or interaction with another individual. It may just be a brief encounter, but we must train ourselves to develop those interpersonal lens that will help us to see people as human, as individuals, as persons uniquely created in the image of God for His glory and not for us to leverage.

Genuine care and concern for each other will support the work of community development and, in fact, promote progress in any project we undertake.

As it relates to leadership, a genuine interest in the welfare of followers will help leaders gain the appropriate buy-in and commitment to accomplish the goals of their organizations.  However, though leaders can be made aware of the importance of being genuinely supportive of their followers, this kind of caring cannot be faked or institutionalized through mandates from higher authorities. That is why some leaders genuinely appear and truly are more “transformational” than others. In essence, more human.

Maybe it is time for us to strive to to adopt behaviors that embrace individualized consideration whether or not we see ourselves as leaders. Maybe it is time for us to become truly human and to recognize the humanity in others.

Solid Community-Based Leadership: A Must

Leadership occurs when a person, group, or organization influences and empowers enough people to bring about change.  

There was a time when people believed that only very special individuals were born to be real leaders. But, most of us do not hold that view today. We have moved away from the “great man” approach and we have come to recognize that leadership occurs with all types of people in all kinds of situations. Plus, no individual, “great” or otherwise, can be considered a leader without followers, so when we think about leadership we must also consider followers.

In recognition of the major importance of the relationship between leaders and followers, James MacGregor Burns developed the transformational leadership model from his research.  Generally, four leadership characteristics are discussed when talking about transformational leadership. These leaders are strong and positive positive role models (idealized influence); they motivate their followers to work hard and to commit to a vision for the organization or community (inspirational motivation); they encourage their followers to be creative and to think about new ways to solve old problems (intellectual stimulation); and they genuinely care about and support their followers (individualized consideration).

There are other researchers who have outlined leadership behaviors that are considered transformational. James Kouzes and Barry Posner, for example,  present five behaviors of exemplary leadership. They suggest that great leaders are good role models, they inspire others with a shared vision, they look for new approaches to accomplish their mission and are not afraid to take risks to bring about change. These leaders also do a good job encouraging their followers and empowering them to act.

At the end of the day, leadership is practiced through faithfulness, integrity, and service. Leaders must be faithful to their mission and must be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to accomplish that mission.

Leaders must act with integrity. This means they must keep their promises and their behavior must be based on high moral principles even in difficult situations. This allows them to lead by example as they consistently align their behaviors with their values and priorities. Still, no one acts perfectly all the time, so great leaders are quick to take responsibility for their actions and acknowledge their mistakes.

Finally, leaders must be intentional about serving and encouraging others. They must be sensitive and empathetic when dealing with their followers, and, in the case of community development, they must be committed to the long-term growth and stability of their communities. placing the good of others and the community over their own self-interest.

Always remember that what the leader is able to accomplish is not the only important factor. The character of the leader matters, and leadership is practiced through faithfulness, integrity, and service.

““The fantasy that somehow organizations can change without personal change, and especially without change on the part of people in leadership positions, underlies many change efforts doomed from the start.

— Peter Senge

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