9:52pm May 16, 2013

“Some people might claim that my mother has no idea how systems of oppression work. Some might also claim that her focus on survival means she has internalized the system’s logic so that she oppresses herself. But get this: my mom has a different—but extremely deep—understanding of how systems of oppression work. She interacts with them daily, fighting to survive despite structural disadvantages. Working class laborers don’t need a physician to know that they’re straining their bodies or an economist to know that they’re being exploited. Most of the time they don’t even need organizers writing articles about “the struggle” to know that it’s there and it’s theirs. The lived experience of these oppressions is not only real, it’s indispensable. No movement is legitimate without it. We don’t do justice to mothers like mine when we alienate them by privileging analytical understandings of systems of oppression.”

—

Ngoc Loan Tran, “My Movement Mom”

That is…. Every damn thing I’ve been trying to say, for years, about academic understandings of oppression, in a nutshell. I get so frustrated with it I could smash my head on a wall. Not only don’t you need academic understanding, you don’t even need understanding of language, any language (and I’m talking about language disabilities here) to understand this stuff in your bones. I used to say, “You don’t need to know the word freedom to know when it’s being taken away from you.” And I just… I’m so glad someone is talking about this because everywhere on tumblr all I see is people discovering academic models of oppression and forgetting direct experience and approaches that don’t fit the academic mold.

I’m not good at abstractions and ideologies, and I’m less and less able to fake it, so this stuff has always felt like hands pushing me away. People thinking they’re better than me because they’ve discovered how to use all the perfect ideas fit them together make jargon about something…. Something I feel in every bone and every pore and everywhere, something I react to from my guts, something I don’t do academically, and often the academic stuff feels like poison to my brain, then my brain wants to throw up to get it out of my system so I can just act on what I know do what I need to do.