as small as a world and as large as alone

7:53am June 18, 2014

mikalhvi:

madeofpatterns:

vaprwave:

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.

I apologize for what happened to your friend. 

But the fact does remain that it’s okay to hate privileged people (and in the case of your friend, if she didn’t have the privilege in question, this doesn’t apply to her). 

That being said, hating people that have privilege has never caused any harm on a systematic scale. Hating people with privilege gives the oppressed energy, motivation, and a source to vent out justified feelings of anger.

Also, a person having privilege doesn’t mean that they automatically have it better than others, but it means that person does not experience oppression on that axis, and has better chances of success/survival on that one axis. 

From your post and response, I’m kind of coming to the conclusion that you believe hate doesn’t end hate, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, etc, and it’s good that you’re comfortable with the way you react to your oppression, but please don’t tell other people how to react to theirs.

The culture of seeing it as a virtue to hate people based on perceived privilege *has* caused massive harm. 

Particularly since that kind of hatred often ends up getting directed at people who are actually the least powerful person in a given situation. 

It’s used as a silencing tactic for people who are talking about their own experiences of oppression, by people who experience a different kind of oppression and don’t want to face dealing with the kind they don’t face.

I’m speaking in defense of oppressed people who are unjustly attacked. Please don’t act like I’m speaking in defense of oppressors who think their own thin skins are more precious than other people’s lives.

Experiencing one axis of oppression does not relieve anyone of the obligation to be decent to others whose oppression is different.

Just because the harm isn’t a systematic problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t do harm. Where in the world has people’s empathy and humanity gone?

There’s an ideology at work here that turns off people’s empathy and humanity unless it’s certain people being hurt in something ways.  Which is, exactly, part of the problem we’re talking about.  

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