tatterdemalionamberite:

tatterdemalionamberite:

the idea that “privileged people should speak out on behalf of oppressed people” and the idea that “it’s not the oppressed person’s job to educate” are both good ideas in their contexts.

if you take them out of context and try to scale them up outside of a single conversation into precepts of larger-scale discourse, they IMMEDIATELY become tools of white supremacy and get misused to justify privileged people talking over oppressed people.

I want to expand on this a little more, too – left it short and sweet because I’m too prone to walls of text, but I feel like this deserves a second pass:

Basically, establishing the idea that it is *only ever* the responsibility of people who are privileged in a specific discourse to speak out about oppression leads to the following situation. I have seen it primarily in racism discourse and now in antisemitism discourse, but it’s really all over the bloody place.

1) Someone not in an oppressed group circulates a thing that they made up, or nicked out of context from an off-the-cuff rant by some person in that oppressed group, without checking any kind of group consensus, because that thing is punchy and angery and gets attention. And it’s about ~protecting the weak~ so arguing looks bad.

2) Nobody bothers to run it past the group being spoken of (because that would be “expecting someone to educate you”) or check it against even the cheat sheet versions of decades of existing critical theory by that group (because that would be “work”).

3) Several thousand reblogs later, the echo chamber of privilege has generated a Fact! Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up to analysis. If there are like two or three approving reblogs from people in the group you’re talking about, and a few dozen disputing it? Well, clearly the dozens of folks are just internalizing prejudice, because of course the person who started it knows better than them, poor dears, and they can Prove It, now that they’ve got an endorsement from the handful of affected people who agree with them.

… And then folks start getting policed and yelled at by activists from out of their lane, for practicing their own cultural traditions or talking about their own life experiences or making their own stories and analyses.

The dominant narrative is a steamroller. People in a position of dominance, who decide to blithely attach shit to it without fact checking, have basically just discovered a new, exciting and socially approved way to steamroll minorities.

The system rewards punching down; it rewards talking over people that we’ve been trained to think are lesser. Unpicking this is *hard work*; flowing with the current is not.

Don’t be that person, is what I’m saying. Don’t confuse what’s satisfying with what’s right.