as small as a world and as large as alone, madeofpatterns: ...

7:18pm December 3, 2013

fuckmegentlywapumpkinspicelatte:

when people are like

“omg we cant say anything nowadays without offending someone!!”

all i hear is:

“im too lazy to change a few words when i’m talking and full enough of myself to think my minor effort trumps the terrible life experiences of oppressed people”

Or sometimes

“I can’t say anything about my experiences of oppression without everyone dogpiling me for using the wrong words, even when there are no other words available that describe the thing I’m experiencing”.

Yeah. Although even though what madeofpatterns said is more my experience, I don’t generally say “we can’t say anything nowadays without offending someone” either. I just grumble about very narrow ways of seeing one’s own experiences as The Only Way To Look At Oppression, including language among other things. Like people treat it like there’s a certain group of oppressed people who get to come up with what is the right way to talk about oppression, and even other oppressed people are shit on for thinking differently.

What gets to me is when people explain to me how serious oppression is, or explain to me details of oppression that they think I don’t know, just because I have a different view on how to act on that knowledge. And I’m far from the only oppressed person who gets treated this way.

I still don’t know what gains you admission to the People Who Get To Say What Oppressed People Think cabal. Because I’ve been admitted at times and shunned at others and I’m not sure what makes the difference. Not that I want to go around saying what everyone has to think. In fact, part of my entire take on this is that no one group should get to say what everyone has to think, that oppressed people can disagree about how to deal with our oppression and this should be a strength not a weakness and certainly not a sign that we’re doing something horribly evil. Diversity of opinions will get you further than uniformity.

Notes: