Agent and Target Skills Models

Agent And Target Skills Models

The Agent and Target skills models for individual development are tools to help people assess their own consciousness and behavior, and that of others, in order to make strategic interventions. These models are examples of holarchal skill sets. The earliest and most basic skills are never discarded; they are transcended and included in the later and more complex skill sets.

These models can help us to stay in relationship with people who have different consciousness, social memberships, and experiences – and also to recognize the potential for growth in ourselves and others. Using these models, we can recognize that even behavior and attitudes we don’t like can be signs that growth is happening. 

They can also help us identify where to go next, bearing in mind that no skill set can be slapped. Recognizing certain skills in action, we can consider what will fulfill the needs of that skill set. By fulfilling or satisfying the needs of that skill set, we open the way to move toward more complex and complete ways of being in the world.

These models can be useful, whether we’re trying to grow ourselves or support others in their growth. At the same time, we remind ourselves often that we cannot be certain that we know what skills another person is using or what they need to help them expand their repertoire. We can only witness, listen, and make offers, bearing in mind that we never have access to the whole picture.

This book is not the first to explore developmental models for experiences around significant differences. Readers may find it useful to explore the work of Milton Bennett (1986), Janet Helms (1995), and Joseph Ponterotto (1993), when thinking about Agent group membership. Developmental models relating to Target group members’ experiences are found in Sue & Sue (1999) and others.

As we’ve discussed, we all wear identifications or social memberships. The memberships that we don’t think about are usually our own socially dominant or Agent areas, because in areas where we are assigned Agent Rank, we don’t have to be conscious. Not-thinking-about-it is an Agent group membership benefit, an example of how having membership in Agent groups saves us energy.

Another benefit of Agent group membership is called unconscious supremacy. When we carry Agent Rank, our conditioning teaches us that our own perceptions and ideas are correct, more valid, or more true than those held by people with Target Rank. Developing an anti-oppressive consciousness, the skills we call Awareness and Allyship, allows us to step out of our role conditioning and behave consciously in areas where we carry Agent group membership, questioning supremacist notions like the idea that our perceptions are more accurate than those of others. 

It takes considerable effort to be aware of our conditioning and learn to value the perceptions of Target group members. In actuality, regarding a specific area of oppression, the perceptions of those carrying Target Rank are likely to be more valid. For example, social class Targets know more than middle- or owning-class Agents about the reality of class oppression, even though an owning-class person might believe that their own view of class dynamics is broader, more educated, and more universal than that of a person living with poverty. 

In the media, the direct knowledge of people who experience oppression is often labeled in a minimizing way, as “special pleading” or “victim consciousness.” These terms serve to remind everyone that we should not listen seriously to the testimony of people who face oppression every day. They help keep all of us in our trance of unconsciousness about Rank.

How To Approach The Skill Sets If Your Memberships Are All-Agent Or All-Target

We recommend using the Age category as a device for trying on the skill sets, with the caveat that it won’t really work. If a person with an all-Agent profile attempts to learn and understand about Target skills through the lens of their memory of their adolescence, they will get some of the essence or energy of the skill sets – but it won’t be very complete. If a child, adolescent or elder uses their imagination or memory to think about the unfair advantages that adults have, this will also be only an approximation.

Agent Skills Development

For members of Agent groups to work effectively against oppression, the tasks are to become aware of the Rank system, to develop sensitivity for the experience of Targets, to acknowledge internalized dominance and privilege, and to become effective Allies. These tasks require that we develop access to specific and advanced skills. The Agent skills sequence describes a holarchical progression. It unfolds naturally, no skill can be skipped, and the more anti- oppressive skill sets are not supported by society.

Development does not occur in a straight line, but as a spiral.

We make use of a range of skills every day and usually identify with the skills at the top of our range. In a Rank area where we have many opportunities to be with Target members and practice our skills, we could develop strong anti-oppression skills, while in another area where we have little experience, we may rely on the most basic skills. Even where we have access to highly developed skills, we will sometimes use the simpler skill sets. As we grow, we might try out new skills briefly and then drop to earlier ones. It takes a long time to shift our center of gravity to a higher skill set, and even then we will continue to make use of lower skill sets regularly.

These skills are progressive and develop over time, but they are not “stages.” We can access higher skills only in a given moment, and will never be permanently “at” a given skill set. We will continue to use all the skills we have developed some of the time, including the most limited skills. As we develop the broader skills, we will become more conscious when we are using the limited skills, and better able to use even these skill sets appropriately. As a member of an Agent group, we go back to the beginning every time we encounter a new Target group.

While most of us hold both Agent and Target memberships, the Agent skills apply to areas where we have Agent membership, right now in our lives. To understand them, look at the ADDRESSING chart and identify just one area where you have unambiguous Agent membership. Focus on that particular social membership (for example, the experience of being an adult, a White person, a U.S.-born person, etc.), as you read the description of the skills. There can be a temptation to shift your focus around to different memberships as you are learning the skills. We recommend sticking to just one.

The more developed or later skill sets are wider. They give us more choices about our actions than the less developed skills. We cannot develop these later skill sets without going through the earlier ones. Judging the earlier skill sets in a negative way – whether we notice them in ourselves or in someone else – is not useful. By adding to our stress, such judgment makes it more difficult to move toward greater development. 

The most basic skill sets are a necessary part of our learning and our developing consciousness. Those of us who care about justice can easily become self-righteous in the presence of the earlier skill sets, ashamed when we find them in ourselves and judgmental when we notice them in others. We can do more to support learning and personal discovery when we take an accepting attitude to the skill sets, see them as a learning process, and support growth in the person using them.

• Agent Ranks
• Adults (18-64)
• Able-persons
• Cultural Christians, Agnostics, and Atheists
• White Euro-Americans
• Middle and Owning Class (access to higher education)
• Heterosexuals
• Non-Native
• US-born
• Biologically male

Agent Skills Development, Continued

Imagine a row of toolboxes, from smallest to largest. If you open the smallest tool box, you will find only one tool, a hammer.” With sincere respect to Pete Seeger and Lee Hays (1949), if you had a hammer, you’d likely hammer in the morning, and hammer in the evening, all over the land. A hammer is a good thing. But sometimes what you need is a screwdriver or very fine tweezers.

Opening the second box, we find it also has a hammer in it. But it has another tool as well, say a wire-cutter. With this toolbox we can do more — we can cut wire, as well as pound things. Each skill set provides us with more “tools,” more skills, and more possible courses of action. The final skill set is the ultimate toolbox; it has every possible tool in every possible size. This ultimate toolbox also provides assistance, handing us the tool we need at the moment we need it. So we go from the most rudimentary to the most sophisticated and precise tool kits. 

When we have access to the largest set of skills, we can choose among many courses of action, and we can foresee to some degree the result of those choices. Once our range is wide enough, using complex skills comes naturally when we feel calm and energetic, fully present and aware of the needs of the moment, a state sometimes called “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi,

1997).

When we are tired, stressed, or out-of-flow, we fall back on the simpler and less demanding skills – even when our range is wider than that. These simpler and more conditioned skills take less energy to use, and we are more practiced with them, so we tend to default to them. These fundamental skills don’t foster liberation or even knowledge of oppression. Instead, they are part of the mechanism for maintaining the status quo. They are easy to use and habitual.

As the range and complexity of our skills increases, so does the demand for energy to run the more effective skills. We need to take good care of ourselves, and be mindful of how we’re doing moment-to-moment in our own being. We need to know whether we are wide awake or fatigued, and to notice when we need to eat something nourishing. We need to be sensitive to the ways that anxiety, anger, danger, trauma, or any emotional stress can make us more reactive and less conscious. 

Taking care of our own needs is not a luxury; it’s essential. Our liberation work rests on the foundation of our own wellbeing. (For some ideas on handling stress and getting ourselves into the state of flow, see the Challenge and Support Model later in this book.)

Amanda Morstad Quote

This work takes commitment, courage, patience, willingness, and spiritual power. It is important for me to remember to take care of myself, to be gentle on myself, to allow myself to make mistakes.

Caryn Gillen Quote

I look at my life and I see an escalator more than a roller coaster. I never have to hang upside down with the blood rushing to my head, I never have to climb really high only to roll back faster than I ever moved forward. I am standing on a moving set of steps. I can step up if I choose or I can step down, but in the process of shuffling my feet, I keep rising – never having to think about what powers this endless escalator, just riding, thinking about whatever I want to think about, and keeping feet and shopping bags away from the edge.

Caryn Gillen Ethnicity Agent Group Member

Leticia Nieto (For Juliette Graziano)

Change is a side-winding beast whose many arms splash and flail.

Look for the ones emergent the ones imminent the ones just starting out the ones flying in the lead the ones who thought they’d lain down for good the ones wounded the ones leaning in.

The Agent Skills Model

As we develop anti-oppressive consciousness in the areas where we carry Agent Rank, we build better skills for understanding and responding to oppression, and we become more conscious of our own internal states as well. This development unfolds as a holarchical sequence of skill sets, shown in the diagram of the Agent Skills Model on the following page. Each of these skill sets represents one or more tools for challenging oppression and enabling liberation from the Rank system. 

As we move toward anti-oppressive consciousness, we have more and better tools to work with. Working with the wider skills also enables us to respond more flexibly, from our authentic humanity or what we call Power. In the early-acquired skill sets we are behaving in a programmed and robotic way; in the later-acquired skills we have choices.

As you read the Agent skills model section, practice “sitting in Agency,” the discipline of bringing one’s Agent membership into consciousness. One way to do this is to think or say, “In this area where I carry Agent Rank, my life is easier than it would be if I weren’t a member of this socially dominant group.” Often this requires a willing suspension of our disbelief. We deliberately acknowledge that privilege exists, even when we don’t feel very privileged. We might say, “In ways I cannot even decipher, I experience unearned benefits as an adult, or a person without a disability, or member of Christendom or

European American or middle- or owning-class or heterosexual or non- Indigenous or U.S.-born or biologically male person.” We can also become more conscious of the benefits of Agent Rank by listening to and reading about the experience of Agent group members in contrast to the experience of Targets, or studying the history of supremacy and advantage in this particular Rank area. If we want to understand White privilege, we can listen to the experiences of People of Color as well as European American Allies, read their stories, and watch films that focus on their concerns. 

We might also read about racism and White privilege, and listen to or read testimony by conscious White people who talk about their experience of privilege. Learning to sit in Agent group membership is a characteristic of people who are developing Awareness and Allyship skills. It’s not a one-time thing, but a lifelong practice.

Indifference Skills

Some of the words we use to describe or to refer to skill sets may surprise you. We use the word Indifference here to evoke a posture or stance of people saying to themselves, “that doesn’t have anything to do with me.” When we, as members of an Agent group, use the skill set of Indifference (which is most of the time) we are simply not noticing, for good or ill, the presence or existence of Target group members or anything associated with them. The experience of Indifference is affectively mild. “I don’t notice what I don’t notice.” “I don’t have any feelings about what I don’t notice.” 

“I don’t have any feelings about not noticing that.” An adult who works primarily with adults and does not have any children can easily string together hours, days, months, without encountering or having to think about children and adolescents. When watching television, the smallest thumb pressure on the remote control can surf away from children’s programming towards something more “relevant” or “interesting,” which are code words for “geared toward adults.”

Indifference means not recognizing differences or oppression because of isolation or intentional separation from Targets. This can be an innocent or naïve view, as in a person who is European American who has never encountered an African American before. There is no consciousness of Agent supremacy, and at the same time we unconsciously dehumanize Targets. 

This might take the form of staring, asking rude questions, or just ignoring the Target person without any thought. When a Target group member is not present, Indifference skills mean that we don’t think about the existence of the Target group. We might read the paper without even noticing the stories about members of the Target group.

Indifference In Our Lives

Indifference skills are kind of like remembering what you thought before you could think. Do you remember when you were unconscious? So, I guess it’s kind of blissful. It reminds me of going to school as a kid and not knowing anything -just showing up. It’s just a state of mind of being oblivious to things about people who are members of

Target groups.

Ed Weisensee

Indifference Skills, Continued

Think back to a time when you didn’t know about the Target group, the “other.” Perhaps an encounter made you realize this difference does exist. Indifference is the first way we learn to experience our Agent membership. So, for example, in hearing a reference to a group outside our Agent group, we might say aloud or to ourselves, “Oh, we don’t have anybody like that around here.” This skill can be cold, but often it feels neutral. There’s no malice here: it’s an unconscious process.

Using Indifference, we don’t perceive what doesn’t apply to us. For example, as an able-bodied person, I walk through a doorway and I don’t notice if it is too narrow for a wheelchair. Why would I notice? Using Indifference skills denies the implications of

Rank, Agent group membership, and Target group membership. It starts in unconsciousness, and it keeps us in that state of not noticing anything outside of our Agent worldview.

So, what’s Indifference for? What is its function? Why is it the most pervasive of all Agent skills? It saves the members of the Agent group energy. The skill set allows us to go quickly back to our own agenda, without getting distracted by uncomfortable ideas like injustice, or concerns that seem irrelevant to us personally.

We all do this a lot, and it allows us to operate with ease. The ability not to notice is essential to our lives – when we’re making dinner, when we’re solving a computer problem, when we’re planning the weekend, in many, many moments of our day, we’re probably using our Indifference skills. We’re not noticing the oppression that benefits us and marginalized members of Target groups.

Indifference In Our Lives

Each time I refuse to look at a homeless person I practice Indifference. Often it is born from my fear of being asked for something I do not have, but I recognize that by making someone invisible I diminish humanity.

Nanci LaMusga, Social Class Culture Agent Group Member

Indifference Skills, Continued 2

In the body, the Indifference skill set looks just like it sounds: a shrug. For one moment, take on a body posture that says “it doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Most of us experience life as having too many things to track. When using the Indifference skill set, anything not associated with our Agent group simply does not register. This selective perception, reinforced by social conditioning, strengthens our ability to not notice and not know even when circumstances might seem prime for noticing and knowing. 

We can have a healthy respect for the strength of our Indifference musculature. At a moment in our history when so much information is readily available and where so many environments allow for exposure to members of Target groups, it takes strong Indifference muscles to stay focused on an Agent-only agenda. Simple exposure does not result in the development of the next skill set. What might?

Imagine: I am watching television. I am used to being able to click away from

Teletubbies (Davenport, 1997) and Sesame Street (Cooney, 1969) toward Frontline (Huffman & Monemvassitis, 1983) or Law & Order (Wolf, 1990). Suddenly, my remote gives me no relief. I frantically click and click and all I find are Barney & Friends (Leach 8r Deshazer, 1992), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Freedman, et al., 1987), and Sponge Bob Square Pants (Hillenburg, 1999). Now when the small movement of my thumb yields no results, I am forced to activate a bigger effort.

Imagine going from the shrug stance to one of pushing something away from you with both hands. Or, picture the adult picking up the television and throwing it out the window. We are evoking a larger expenditure of energy here, which we will call Distancing skills.

Distancing Skills

The next skill set, which is more complex, is called Distancing. Bring to mind again a toolbox which includes the hammer of Indifference, and also a wire-cutter. The Distancing skill set is significantly more complex than the Indifference skill set. Instead of not noticing, we notice and react by pushing away. We are pushing away contact. We are pushing away knowledge and consciousness. We are especially pushing away the implications about ourselves that contact and consciousness would raise.

There are many ways that we, as members of Agent groups, can defend against contact with members of Target groups. We organize it in three ways. The pseudo-neutral Distancing position we call Distancing out. The basic posture of Distancing out is achieved by extending your arms out in front of you, palms out, as if pushing something away. 

“I don’t have a problem with the Target group as long as they’re not in my neighborhood or dating my child.” “I don’t care what people believe or what their practices are behind closed doors, I just don’t want them to flaunt it.” We say this is pseudo-neutral because there is clearly a negative evaluation of the Target group. However, when using Distancing out, we Agent group members experience ourselves as anything but hostile.

You may begin to notice that skills have particular postures or stances. They involve particular states of mind. They are experienced very differently by those inside the state than by those witnessing the state. In other words, when using Distancing out, I feel neutral but someone observing me may perceive me as hostile or aggressive. 

One characteristic of this skill set is that, if confronted with the feedback that I am coming across as hostile, I will defend against that and have difficulty even hearing feedback. “What are you talking about? I don’t have a problem with immigrants. I just don’t want them in my country taking our jobs.” Notice the difference between this skill and the previous skill, Indifference. When using Distancing we are actually more engaged with the Target group.

An even more effortful form of Distancing we call Distancing down. This takes a lot of energy. Systems of organized hatred (like the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the anti-immigrant “Minutemen,” and so forth) provide a support system to enable people to stay in this uncomfortable and effortful posture for an extended period of time. 

It takes a lot of commitment and training to use Distancing down because this skill quickly becomes uncomfortable when we try to hold it. The social training we receive includes support for Distancing skills. This might be explicit and direct, as when we are told that we shouldn’t talk to certain people, or it might be subtle.

The characteristic posture for this skill is to extend your arms, palms out and down, as if pushing something down or stuffing the lid on something. The facial expression is of disdain and disgust. The language for this is, “I make a negative evaluation to keep distance between myself and the Target group members.” Characteristic expressions: “They are a problem, They are ugly. They are a drain on society. They need to be more like us. 

They need to be helped. They need to be killed.” It might sound like: “You people always…” Or it might sound like, “send them back to where they came from.” Agent group members using Distancing-down skills will use negative and polarizing words to describe Targets: ethnic slurs, accusations of criminality or terrorism, sexual put-downs.

Stories Of Distancing Up

When I fall for the illusion that somehow the nomadic life of the homeless provides freedom from responsibility, I forget how cold it is to sleep outside, in the woods, on nights like tonight with a cold below freezing.

Nanci LaMusga, Social Class Culture Agent Group Member

Madora Coberly Quote

Once I agreed to understand how unearned advantage and conferred dominance work, things began to move pretty fast. I began to experience anti oppression as less of an attack (that would cause me to lose something) and more of a truth that I had been taught not to believe, but had a distinct responsibility to God and “my neighbors” to believe. Such is the nature of truth in this world. I still have moments of stunning defense and self-righteous indignation, but these are just feelings that try to obscure what I now know. They are self-protective where there is no attack and therefore are useless.

Madora Coberly, Religious Culture Agent Group Member Distancing Skills, Continued

When using Distancing down skills, we are tapping into Agent supremacy and, in contrast, visibly and actively devaluing the Target group. There are at least two ways to do this. One is the standard bigot position. “We are better. They are the problem. They are dangerous, contaminated – they should be restricted or eradicated.” We can find examples for characters using Distancing-down skills in the media, for example, All in the Family’s Archie Bunker (Lear, 1971) and news coverage of hate crime perpetrators. Such examples are usually presented as unacceptable; today, we have a collective agreement that open hate and bigotry are undesirable.

Another way to use Distancing down skills is to characterize the Target group as deficient, incapable, helpless, in need of healing, teaching, conversion, or improvement. These forms of Distancing, such as “us/them” attitudes toward people seeking mental health support, or missionary outreach by Christian denominations, usually go unnoticed and unchallenged. Those of us involved in education and social service will likely recognize that a large portion of our workday is consumed using these pseudo-benign forms of Distance.

Another form of this skill set we call Distancing up. When using this skill, as members of Agent groups, we hold what we think of as positive evaluation of the Target group. We might speak with admiration, even envy, about the Target group. We may feel very connected to the Target group or identify with it and yet, at the heart of this skill is consumerism, and a wish to help ourselves to the group or something about the group. While our internal experience of the Distancing up position is quite positive, someone else may perceive the oppressive quality of Distancing functioning in our stance.

For example, the word exotic means foreign or from outside. When spoken by Agent members, it is often meant as a compliment, yet the underlying message reminds the Target group member that he or she is an outsider. It is said that emulation is the highest form of flattery. Even so, we are often uncomfortable when we see European American youth adopt Black English usage, or when non-Native people appropriate sweat lodges and other Indigenous practices.

Distancing up carries an unstated and unintentional message; “You exist for my use.” It is dehumanizing to members of marginalized groups to be packaged for consumption. We can come to see that dogs from Taco Bell® ads, or the tokenized characters of the Will & Grace TV show (Kohan and Mutchnick, 1998), are not necessarily celebrations of diversity. Instead, they can unintentionally convey a distant message.

Distancing up recognizes a difference between Agent and Target group members, adding a positive but stereotyped evaluation of the Target group. Members of Agent groups using Distancing up skills express overt messages of appreciation for the Target group while communicating Agent supremacy covertly or subtly. Distancing up skills support practices of paternalism, appropriation of the Target groups cultural and material property, and cultural genocide. The physical posture is to extend your arms, palms out, as if you’re framing someone, and look up at them with awe and amazement, as if worshiping the Target group. You may notice in the images and metaphors about Distancing that we are trying to evoke the effect of pushing away while simultaneously taking something back for ourselves.

When we use this skill we idealize the Target, and often there’s an appropriation going on, such as making use of some part of the group’s cultural identity. The skill allows us to keep our distance from the group and the reality of their lives, while at the same time taking cultural resources of that group, or physical things that belong to them. The underlying message is “I have a very positive evaluation of the group and I want to get close to them.” We think and feel this while maintaining and protecting the space between us and any challenging information about their life conditions or our unfair advantages.

The Implicit Association Test And Rank

The Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed at Harvard University, measures participant’s speed in sorting different categories of words and pictures and identifies which associations come most rapidly (IAT Corp, 2010). For example, the Gender-Science IAT measures the ability of the test-taker to rapidly sort male and female words (e.g. “father” and “mother,” and science and humanities words (e.g. “experiment” and “literature”). The test-taker is asked to sort male AND humanities, versus female AND science, and then the categories are reversed. (The parts of the test are presented in random order to avoid distorting the data.) This test reveals that the majority of those tested are able to associate male words with science words, and female words with humanities words, more rapidly than when the categories are reversed. Similar tests are available for weight, age, race, skin tone, religion, sexual orientation, and other categories.

Not surprisingly, the test reveals that most people who take the test hold implicit associations between socially over-valued groups (e.g. Agents) and positive words, and also between socially under-valued groups (e.g., Targets) and negative words. These lightning-fast associations, which happen before conscious thought can take place, reveal the subtle influence of the Rank system on the human brain and reflexes. Most of us automatically and, most importantly, unconsciously associate Agents with positive words and Targets with negative words, an indication that Rank is operating within us. This is true even for people who see themselves as conscious of Rank dynamics and active in anti-oppression work.

Experimenting with the test, we find that slowing down all of our responses helps reduce or eliminate the tendency to overvalue Agent groups. This shows how implicit associations can be overruled by conscious thought and cognition, which we associate with the latter skill sets in both the Agent and Target skill sets model and our reframe of Power. We need not let our knee-jerk responses determine how we respond to people in our lives. Slowing down, noticing the automatic response, and consciously choosing how to speak and behave gives us a chance to move towards anti-oppressive behavior in our lives. However, for every instance where we are successful at slowing down enough to be choiceful, there are many where Rank operates in us and around us unconsciously without our having the option to choose anti-oppression.

For a more detailed explanation of this project, or to take the tests for yourself, see the

IAT web site at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.