Reality is only at odds with your fears

rolequeer:

cool-yubari:

Activists in general are very threatened by the idea of being wrong, or being half-wrong. This is a serious problem because it means that they often don’t engage directly with things that exist and matter, because those things seem to threaten or conflict with the neat, clear-cut-ness of their theories. You see it with feminists and false rape accusations. You see it with animal rights activists and their downplaying of GMO issues and the health problems people can develop from eating meat substitutes. You see it all over the place, with things that don’t actually invalidate good ideologies, because activists are afraid that if they don’t make their message simple and catchy enough, they will be ignored. And because they aren’t attacking the root causes of problems: they’re trying to keep as much of an oppressive structure intact as possible and just convince people to make a small change. The world doesn’t need small changes. It needs large ones. And to address that, you have to face head on the things that might mean your current way of looking at it is wrong. Because those wrinkles are important.

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I really love this piece and I particularly love this bit:

Women who lie about having been raped to attract emotional support actually need emotional support. Identifying them as liars and shaming them will not improve their behavior. And trying to separate the (many) women who have actually been raped from the few who see *making a personal tragedy up* as a viable way of becoming someone other people will treat more gently and kindly harms everyone. It’s not my responsibility to withhold empathy from everyone who might not deserve it. It is my responsibility to share what I have and care-take when I can, in a world that’s full of needy, hurting people. And as part of that, I consider it important to protect and defend the members of my minorities that supposedly “threaten our credibility” and “make us look bad.” Because they don’t.

Which sort of touches upon something else I’ve been trying to put into words but can’t quite touch: in the process of building a movement that is catchy and easy to understand and without mistakes, people are also treating that movement like property that their community owns, that needs to be protected from those who might ‘damage’ it. 

Especially the word ‘appropriation’ – a word invented to describe a very specific process of the claiming of the cultures of POC by white people while sexualizing and commodifying and stripping them of their meaning – gets thrown around whenever someone seems to be ‘in the wrong place’. A woman who ‘makes up a personal tragedy’ isn’t just presented as a threat to the credibility of a movement, she’s also presented as a thief, who ‘appropriated the struggles of victims of sexual violence’. 

And while there might be some truth to that, it shuts down the conversation on why she did that, what kind of help she needs, and if the movement that she is interacting with couldn’t make room for her. When the truth is, we can help each other more than we know and viewing out stories as property brings in a capitalist ‘defend what you have, share nothing’ attitude. ‘That’s appropriation’ says ‘this is mine’, and by extension ‘we can’t share. not one crumb, not one drop’. I don’t like how instinctive that’s become and I don’t like treating movements for change like property.