About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
I don’t think you’ve understood what I’m trying to say.
If a woman’s experience with most of the men in their life is that men are violent rapists, then you had damn well better not tell those women that their rage is childish and shouldn’t be encouraged. Should that rage be allowed to guide policy? Yes. Should that rage be allowed to direct policy? No.
Guiding and directing policy are no different for someone who doesn’t hold office. I will reiterate again that using your trauma as an excuse to hold bigoted views is childish and that it shouldn’t be encouraged.
If in my experience most of the black people in my life were violent rapists, you wouldn’t be like, “Wow, yes, you should blame all black people for the actions of the small group that you have interacted with”. You would tell me that I was being a dumbshit for idk, blaming an entire group of people for the actions of a few.
I’m not about to play coddle Olympics towards someone who is directing their trauma and frustrations in an unhealthy way. I’m going to sympathize but also direct them towards a healthier approach.
And all (well, most) of that is well and good! But:
All politics is trauma mitigation. And you don’t get to tell people that they should just not have their trauma, that they can not bring their trauma to the discussion table, because that isn’t actually mitigating the trauma, just suppressing it. Since trauma is experienced intersectionally the unpacking of that trauma necessarily occurs contra another intersection.
If the contest is over who gets to unpack their trauma, you aren’t going to succeed at bringing everyone to the table by forcing one ideology (in this case, ‘feminism-for-everyone’) into a position that is untenably ‘omnivorous’ (because it contradicts with ‘feminism-for-women’).
And there is this spectre in your thinking: there is no pure thought, there is no position free from bias, there is no exculpation you can perform to absolve yourself from contamination with the bigotry attendant upon trauma. You can’t ask someone who has been robbed at gunpoint by a Black person to be less afraid of Black neighborhoods, regardless of the hurtful bigotry of their acquired bias.
As I heard it, you don’t get to have a place free of racism. You can only mitigate its destructive effects.
Because of this, the online tendency to gather ideology into a perfect model rational reasonable list of beliefs is doomed.
I think this is plain wrong but I’m having difficulty articulating precisely why.