as small as a world and as large as alone

11:08am June 8, 2014

patternsmaybe:

chavisory:

bree-backstage:

youneedacat:

patternsmaybe:

plansfornigel replied to your post “It scares me when people say things like “I analyze things at the…”

why? it’s like saying, it’s not about you and if you are a nice white person, but about white supremacy as an institutional oppression. but whatever makes you feel special. who cares.

Because when you stop thinking that the experiences of individual people matter, things go really wrong really quickly.

WTF why do people always talk about this as in ‘feeling special’?

The problem with saying things like “I analyze things in terms of groups of people, individuals don’t matter” is because individual people are the only things that matter in the end.  Without individuals there would be no groups to analyze.  And even if you can get important information out of analyzing the patterns that groups of people make, you still have to acknowledge that the the bottom of everything there are people.  Specific, individual people who are not numbers you can count and analyze and calculate as if who they are doesn’t matter.  And if you lose sight of that, if you lose sight of people as people, you’ve lost sight of the foundation of ethical behavior itself.

“whatever makes you feel special” my ass, it’s not about feeling special, it’s about the fact that people aren’t group-patterns.  "who cares" my ass too, you cared enough to not only write a comment, but leave a little barbed insult at the end.

The person who said individuals don’t matter is the person arguing against the macro-analysis perspective. That’s words-in-mouth and it’s right there in front of you.

Just because within one conversation you are focusing on the bigger picture doesn’t mean that throughout like they don’t give a fuck about people. It just means that this particular conversation IS NOT ABOUT YOU.

This isn’t about one conversation that isn’t about me.  This is about activism and advocacy dynamics that persistently, over and over again, disregard the experiences of individuals and disregard their own (often unintended) consequences for individuals, including ones marginalized within their own communities.

If you haven’t encountered those, you’re fortunate.

This.

Except - I don’t think it’s possible not to encounter it. I think that people who think they haven’t encountered it, are largely intentionally ignoring it.

And I find it really curious that whenever anyone tries to say “individuals matter”, someone says “this isn’t about YOU.”

As if, whenever anyone talks about individuals mattering, it must be because we’re self-centered and want to be at the center of every conversation.  Rather than quite the opposite, that we think individuals matter and that certain styles of activism ignore individuals in favor of ideas about how groups of people work.  

Sono, it's not about me, and it's not about whether the conversation is about me in the first place, so stop making it sound like people who are concerned about individuals are just saying “me me me”.

It’s almost as if they think if they say “It’s not about you” often enough, they think people will just see what we’re saying as identical to “I want it to be about me”, even if that’s not what we’re saying at all.

I hate this kind of conversation.  Because there’s the actual conversation.  And then there’s the distortion fields people are trying to throw up around the conversation, to keep the conversation from taking place or being understood by any onlookers.

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