How many times do you think Tom said “Sorry” to the little girl after the cut?
OFFICIALLY MY FAVORITE THING EVER
Month: April 2014
i want your imperfect empathy.
identity politics has a pattern of actively discouraging solidarity, and it scares me. these well-intentioned phrases — “if you’re straight you can never understand what queer people go through;” “no, see, this post is about that oppression and you’re derailing;” don’t compare your experiences, or similar patterns of prejudice, or common strands of dehumanization, across oppressions. don’t.
i understand the intention. it makes sense to caution against over-enthusiastic identification — the able-bodied person who totally knows what you’re going through because they were on crutches once, for example. or the white gay person who claims that homophobia is the last acceptable prejudice, and ‘gay is the new black’. and it’s true that clumsy comparisons often ignore the existence of people who fit into both of the two categories they compare.
however.
identity politics is meant to be one facet of the struggle for justice, or equality, or any of those lofty goals. and in order to work toward those goals, it is necessary to prioritize empathy. you want to identify with people radically different from yourself. you want, and need, to recognize that everyone is human. that everyone is a person. you want to at least try to understand types of pain and cruelty that you yourself have never felt.
“you can never understand what these people went through” is a statement of cynicism. even if it’s true, it absolves people of the burden of trying. it leads to people tiptoeing around each other, scared to befriend those outside of their exact demographics, withholding their opinions from discussions where they might be useful. it leads, for example, to a white person encountering blatant racism and thinking well, i’m white, so my opinion doesn’t really count here. and i know, i do, that the opposite is a problem. the number of nondisabled people who talk over me and my disabled friends is infuriating.
but honestly, this “don’t compare / you can never understand” stuff often encourages parroting the lines you’ve heard from only a few activists in groups you don’t belong to, rather than listening. rather than seeing the diversity of opinions and ideas within any demographic. (because, look, we’re talking enormous swathes of people here.)
i’m saying it now: i want your imperfect empathy. i want you to delve into your own hoard of experiences and scrounge around for something that looks like mine. i want you to interrupt my post with ‘wow, so i’m not disabled, but i know exactly what you mean.’ i want you to talk to me at risk of being wrong, rather than meekly agreeing because i dropped a certain label into the conversation.
because i can feel it, even among my friends — the barriers that go up when we try to ‘check our privileges’. the intense doubt and loss of interpersonal footing that occurs when you try to backtrack, juggle disclaimers, ‘oh but they’re trans so i have no business relating to them’. ‘oh but they’re mentally ill so how would i know.’ it leads to silence. the mistreatment of human beings is all of our business. and the intuitive ways that friends relate to each other are far more valuable than drawing up mental charts of how your experiences are similar and different. you are allowed to feel shock and disgust and joy for things that have nothing to do with you. it’s the only way we can get anywhere.
i will honestly take messy, clumsy solidarity over the lines that are drawn when we try to do this properly. of course, people will fuck up, but at least they’ll be trying. it’s dangerous to distrust the natural impulse to relate to others, to say ‘hey, something kind of like that happened to me once’. often, that is all we have. it’s only in a rarefied and hermetic environment that empathy starts to seem blasé. in the world at large, this is what we need. we need to understand each other. we need to believe it’s possible.
Fresh perspective for me.
This is now officially my headcanon explanation for every unrealistic depiction of how boobs work.
Why shouldn’t a trait, heterosexuality, possessed by 90-92% of the population be considered default?
why shouldn’t being asian, a trait that 60% of the world’s population possess, be considered the default for humanity?
because human beings are diverse and there are a million ways to be normal and non-heterosexuals have been oppressed for centuries by the idea of heterosexuality as the default you little shit
Anyone who thinks that a group being the “default” is based solely on that group being a majority is lying to themselves. Intersex people and red-haired people exist in about the same proportions in the US (and consequently, gay, bi and ace people outnumber red-haired people by quite a bit), yet being intersex is seen as a deviation from the default whereas red hair is seen as a natural, albeit rare, variation in human hair colors. The idea of a “default” race, sexuality, gender identity, etc. is 100% socially constructed.
[…]
in addition to the shitty logic of ‘most x are y therefore all x are y,’ i would also like to point out that heterosexuality is socially constructed and rigidly enforced. it seems to take an enormous amount of work to make people straight in the kind of numbers that we see. even people who absorb that training uncritically are usually at least aware of it. so lets please stop pretending that heterosexuality is the ‘default’ for anyone.
Yuuuuup.
How to Explain Away ‘That Scene’.
german proverbs translated word for word.
Going to work every single one of these into my daily wordthings.
Oh yesssssss
Omphaloskeptomai 