The Episcopal Church’s Office of African Descent Ministries’ “Healing from Internalized Oppression” curriculum teaches participants about institutional, interpersonal and internal oppression from a Christian perspective. Photo: African Descent Ministries
[Episcopal News Service] Five years after The Episcopal Church’s Office of African Descent Ministries began offering its popular “Healing from Internalized Oppression” curriculum for Black people, a second version that includes contexts for other groups of color will launch Oct. 25 and 26.
“People of color, the oppressed, have taken on narratives of the oppressors and themselves perpetrate those narratives on each other and in our communities,” the Rev. Ronald C. Byrd, the church’s missioner for African Descent Ministries, told Episcopal News Service. “The whole idea of the curriculum is to get us to look at ourselves, look at the Bible, look at our faith and go through a point where we can understand the narratives.”
The Diocese of Maryland will be the first Episcopal entity to use the new curriculum, with the session taking place at the diocesan center in Baltimore. The curriculum’s original version focusing strictly on people of African descent remains available for use.
Byrd travels to an average of six dioceses a year to present “Healing from Internalized Oppression” to groups of 30-40 people. The hands-on, discussion-based curriculum uses a series of modules to teach participants about institutional, interpersonal and internal oppression from a Christian perspective. The goal is to enable a healing process that empowers people for transformational ministry.
The curriculum’s development title derives from Genesis 3:11, when God asks Adam and Eve, “Who told you that you were naked?”
“The original sin is not eating the fruit from the forbidden tree,” the Rev. Ellis Clifton, rector of St. Mary the Virgin Episcopal Church in Virgin Gorda, Diocese of the Virgin Islands, told ENS. “The original sin is listening to a voice other than God, who said that ‘it was very good’ … and the oppression, bigotry – all those terms that we associate with racism, culturalism, etc. – Those happen when we see others as not being good, as God said we were good in creation, and then when we start seeing ourselves as less than.”
Clifton, one of the curriculum’s program coordinators, said internalized oppression harms communities and congregations of color because people who are mistreated by oppressive authority figures or others tend to unknowingly do the same to their peers and families, causing a ripple effect.
“It’s like when a man goes to work and the boss hollers at him, so he hollers at the secretary, and the secretary goes home and hollers at her husband, and her husband hollers at the kids, and the kids holler and kick the dog. That’s what internalized oppression is like,” Clifton said. “This curriculum is a chance for people of color to heal from their own brokenness.”
When the curriculum launched in 2019, participants quickly saw the value in addressing internalized oppression. Positive word of mouth spread and led to increasing demand for an expanded version of the curriculum that accommodates other groups of color, including Indigenous, Latino and Asian. The new version can be adapted to suit different racial and ethnic settings where needed.
The curriculum includes analyzing internalized oppression from colonization and decolonization contexts, focusing on three areas: decolonizing faith, decolonizing the self and decolonizing the Bible.
Lisa Sharon Harper, founder and president of the social justice-centered consulting agency Freedom Road, LLC, said decolonizing “our eyes” is also important.
“How do we as African Americans begin to do the work of decentering whiteness in the way that we see Jesus, in the way that we see and experience our own faith? This has been my own journey over decades,” Harper told ENS. “Jesus himself was a brown, colonized, Indigenous human being who was himself at that time subject to European colonization from Rome.”
Harper co-developed the second “Healing from Internalized Oppression” curriculum, which centers on helping to move people of African, Indigenous, Latino and Asian descent into the process of reclaiming their heritages and faith without looking at them through a European lens.
The program is split into two sessions over two days. The first session lasts three hours in the evening and the second, seven-hour session concludes the next day in the afternoon. In that short time, participants are encouraged to think critically and share their experiences and realizations of internalized oppression through open discussion. They also worship, listen to and sing uplifting music, analyze music lyrics, listen to panel discussions, write journaling exercises and express themselves through building art with clay.
Because some of the topics are “really heavy,” Byrd said. “There’s a lot of crying and a lot of emotion” by the second session after some “really deep processing.”
“Beyond just racism as we understand it, people don’t know that they have internalized oppression,” Byrd said. “One of the big takeaways from this curriculum is people can really start to recognize internalized oppression by the end of it. You see it every day in our lives.”
Harper said Freedom Road, LLC, works with a multiethnic clinical psychologist and offers coaching on how to be “resilient” when recognizing and processing internalized oppression.
“The process can be discombobulating,” Harper said.
Clifton said many people who’ve completed the program have mentioned that they’ve since spread awareness of the issue with their congregations.
For the future, Clifton said it would be ideal to develop a third version of the curriculum that addresses how to effectively bring wider awareness of internalized oppression and how to recover from it to communities outside of The Episcopal Church, including city governments. Clifton also said he can envision the curriculum being further adapted for members of the LGBTQ+ community, people who are economically or educationally marginalized, women and specific age groups.
“The intent of internalized oppression education is to produce or inspire a positive, permanent change in behavior,” Clifton said. “I’m prayerfully hopeful that the wider church will see the value in tackling internalized oppression.”
-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.