4:01am May 30, 2014

Don’t involve me in your conversations if you expect me to be perfect from the get-go.

Perfect includes understanding every nuance of whatever modern activists in your particular activist niche see as the absolute truth, and then adhering to it whether my truth corresponds to it or not.

I know you’re trying to make the world safe for a wide variety of people, and that you think in order to do that, you have to have something close to perfection.

But you’re not making the world safe for me. Or for a lot of people I know.

Where one wrong move, and it’s “You must believe X, Y, Z, A, B, and C” that you’d never believed in the first place. And “You’re damaging all these people in all these ways if you don't instantly understand a complicated ideology, and then agree with every part of it.”

Such conversations are completely disheartening for any hope I have for a future in making changes for the better in the world.

It’s not just the identity policing I was griping about earlier. It’s ideology policing too. It’s expecting everyone to know, believe, and understand the same things, and to all react the same in the same situations. It’s not realistic except inside echo chambers. And yet I know you believe that the safety of all marginalized people depends on doing exactly that.

Disheartening doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Heart-breaking.

Put one foot wrong and you’re not only out of there, but presumed to be a privileged person in a number of areas that you might not be.

Heart-breaking.

Effectively throwing marginalized people out of their own movements because they can’t or won’t manage perfection.

When you have nobody left to throw out, will you make the rules tighter, start throwing out the ones who were once the insiders?

“You ARE the weakest link – goodbye!” is not a way to run a movement.

Notes: