“if you hate your oppressor, you turn into the oppressor”
you know what? that’s actually true.
and I don’t mean hating white people means you’ll eventually go on to oppress white people, for example. quite the opposite in fact.
what I’m saying is: If you hate your oppressor, you risk oppressing those whom you THINK are the oppressor.
Let’s take antisemitism for a minute. A lot of PoC are antisemitic, but they don’t think it’s a problem because Jews are white people, right? It’s not a good thing, sure, but it’s nowhere near racism, right?
Except Judaism is heavily racialized in America as well as…well, damn near everywhere. Antisemitism by it’s nature holds up White Supremacy, because the White privileged class declared long ago that Jewish people are not ‘real’ white people.
And this isn’t limited to antisemitism. Throughout numerous social justice communities, there’s almost always a group that has conditional privilege of some kind that’s still marginalized. But that marginalization is often ignored in order to conflate them with the Privileged class in order to assert that they are the same as the oppressors when they really aren’t. And the biggest problem with this conflation is that it often leads to members of an oppressed group hating the marginalized, conditionally privileged group more than the ACTUAL Privileged group.
And the reason that they hate them more is because they are allowed to have any internal bias towards said group remain unchecked. Because it’s seen as hating the oppressors. We don’t have to think critically about hating trans women, because trans women are men. We don’t have to think critically about hating mixed people, because mixed people are White. We don’t have to analyze latent biphobia or aphobia in our statements, because those are all just Straight people.
And if we encounter a Privileged ‘ally’ who hates that group as much as we do? We give them an in to our discussions, because clearly they get it.
I’m not saying that hating your oppressors is bad, don’t be confused. I understand it perfectly. If the oppressors weren’t oppressive, the oppressed wouldn’t hate them. However, if we don’t think critically about our hatred of the oppressors, we may further oppress other groups which are also oppressed and/or marginalized in ways we either CAN’T see or REFUSE to see.
And ultimately, I think one of the best ways to fix this is to change how we think of oppression. So often we think that there’s a clear split between being Oppressed and being the Oppressor. In many spaces, people have changed that to Oppressed and Privileged, but we still run the risk of alienating those whom we personally can’t see as oppressed. If we can recognize that even those whom may have conditional privilege, or don’t suffer the same oppression as all other groups along an axis might still be marginalized, then we can build a new model: Oppressed/Marginalized/Privileged. And now, check it out, we have a way of recognizing the struggles of another group along an axis that doesn’t automatically turn them into an oppressor. We now have to think critically when we point out any privileges that group may have. We now realize that our hate may be impacting their oppression on another axis, or facilitating the process which will turn them into members of the oppressed class.
TL;DR – You can hate your oppressor. But think critically about who you assign the title of oppressor to. Because too damn many of you are facilitating the marginalization of another group while hating the oppressor.
NOTE: this isn’t me trying to assign one of the oppressed groups here into a role of conditional privilege or marginalization. I used as many examples as I could think of to show a trend. Ultimately, it’s up to those on that axis of oppression to consider who’s privileged and who’s only conditionally privileged but otherwise marginalized. And while I personally can speak on a few of those, I can’t speak on all of them and was NOT attempting to.
I stumbled upon this old post randomly and I want to add a correction in light of something I’ve been thinking about:
The only people that can decide who is oppressed or marginalized is the oppressor. The oppressed cannot do that, because they fundamentally lack the social agency to decide who is oppressed/marginalized and who is privileged.
At the same time, the oppressor will often not openly state that they are oppressing a people.
What that means is, we have to think critically about the oppressor’s actions and ideologies. Even if it’s a group that has conditional privilege over ourselves, the SECOND the oppressor acts against them then we have to admit that they are also oppressed. Because conditional privilege is not the same as absolute privilege.
This may be one of your most beautifully worded posts.
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