as small as a world and as large as alone

3:03pm June 17, 2014

madeofpatterns:

vaprwave:

madeofpatterns:

hating people who appear to have it better in some way does *not* serve the cause of justice

but it’s okay to hate your oppressors. why would you come at oppressed ppl hating their oppressors, instead of the oppressors giving us a reason to hate them. hmmm.

I no longer think it is ok to hate entire groups of people for any reason. And I’ve reached that conclusion *in the course of my anti-oppression work*.

I’ve gotten better at doing anti-oppression work the more I’ve turned away from hate, particularly the more I turn away from group-based hate.

And, in any case, I wasn’t talking about hating oppressors. I was talking about hating people based on *perception* that they have it better than you.

And there was a context to this post. The context was that I was watching people viciously attack a friend based on perception that she has privilege that she *doesn’t even have*. And said friend has survived multiple attempts on her life, and has life-threatening medical conditions as a result of oppression. And people decided to put her in the category of hateable due to perception that she is super privileged, and rip her apart based on it. And then vented all of their hate for everyone in a particular privileged group on her, in ways that she did not remotely deserve.

This has to stop. This just leads to us silencing and destroying one another. 

Even when someone is both privileged and making a bigoted mistake, that doesn’t make it helpful or pro-justice to just viciously attack them with everything that might conceivably hurt them enough to shut them up. That’s not justice. That’s sadism, and it’s not helpful.

By all means hold people accountable for harm their doing even if it hurts their feelings. They don’t have the right to use their feelings as a weapon against us. But not sadism, and not hurting people as an end in itself based on perceived privilege.

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