In 1968, Paulo Freire, the Brazilian writer, published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he articulated a logic of oppressor and oppressed that continues to structure our intellectual and moral discourse half a century later. One of his central claims was that the oppressed peoples of the world, the underclass, were essentially incapable themselves of violence, or indeed oppression itself. He neutered the dispossessed of moral agency. “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” he wrote. “It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent.”
