3:41pm June 30, 2014

I really, really dislike…

youneedacat:

…the way that people discourage any solidarity between oppressed groups for fear that someone somewhere might make the mistake of thinking that our oppression is too similar. I understand where the fear comes from, because I’ve seen the same train wrecks passing for advocacy that everyone else has. But I seriously believe that losing the potential for solidarity between oppressed groups is a far more serious problem.

And I think that this discouragement is a symptom of a larger problem. Where basically, people are going so much on their feelings, that they don’t think through a situation. They don’t think through which situation is worse. They just think through that one situation feels bad (and I know it’s more than that it feels bad, but the bad feeling is what people go on to make these decisions), so then it becomes a situation that must be avoided at all costs. Even if the costs are so high that they could destroy a lot of important possibilities for solidarity, cooperation, mutual understanding, and helping each other in general.

oh, THIS, so so so so much… I can’t count the number of times I’ve composed rants on this subject in my head and never actually said/written them for fear of it causing some horrific flamewar and getting me vilified to the point of losing real, important-to-me friends…

Well… I’ve said it. If I lose friends or start flamewars, so be it. Been there, done that. But I don’t think any real friends would leave me over a difference of opinion on a matter like this.

It’s way more complicated than my original post could make it, but I didn’t have the time and energy to explain every possible facet of the situation.

I just think that people have become so afraid of accidentally taking ideas from other oppressed groups, or accidentally presuming a similarity that isn’t there…

…that people aren’t being able to compare experiences throughout different oppressions and find the similarities and build on them and help each other. People just aren’t being allowed to do that exploration, and that weakens everyone.

Especially because I know as someone facing multiple types of oppression, how many things are so very similar, and how many of the “huge differences” people talk about… they’re just as often cosmetic differences, surface-level stuff, or minor details, as they are actual major differences that need to be made into Serious Business about how different they are.

And people in different oppressed communities need to be working together, especially in situations where the communities are very small compared to the overall population. We need each other. And this enforced tiptoeing thing, it just pushes us apart.

And the enforced tiptoeing only really happens in certain communities. As usual, ordinary people that I talk to, ordinary oppressed people who aren’t part of these online SJ communities and stuff, are usually more than happy to find commonalities between our experiences. Because nobody’s ever told them that it’s Bad Bad Bad Wrong Wrong Wrong to do that. And I honestly think the contempt that’s so often shown around here for the natural impulses of ordinary oppressed people is really elitist and icky and wrong.

Separation between oppressed peoples is a far, far worse thing than anything that happens when someone accidentally makes a connection between two oppressions that maybe isn’t as real as it looks. But the way people act, you’d think the opposite was true.

Notes: