#And we’re talking as though light up sneakers with wheels could ever possibly cool enough to justify the hunger that’s coming

[rotationalsymmetry]

I’ll take “your liberation is tied to my liberation, solidarity not charity, an injury to one is an injury to all” any day. Over being non-constructively hyper conscious about my privilege. 

Sure, it’s worth being aware when all the faces on the magazines in the check-out line are white. But the thing worth being aware of isn’t the idea that it somehow net benefits me to not have that many people of color as celebrities and politicians and so on. How does that benefit me? It harms people of color, and it indirectly harms me because it means I live in an unjust society where racial inequality gets in the way of building a world with more class equality, more public funding for social services, more sustainability, etc. 

I don’t benefit personally from Jeff Bezos existing as a billionaire and being white. I’m not convinced that Jeff Bezos benefits from being a billionaire. The harm done is disproportionately to people of color. And part of confronting the harm is untangling social norms that give white people more power, more voice, etc than people of color. But I don’t think a world of injustice overall benefits anyone, it just harms some people less than others. 

Having a very racist, punitive police and prison system does not harm me as a white person as much as it harms people of color. But I do not believe it benefits me either. It just harms me less. But it still harms me. I can oppose police and prisons and an economic system that allows billionaires to horde wealth while poor people die because they can’t afford necessities, without assuming that this opposition will cause me to make sacrifices that are not overall worth it to me.

One of the biggest privileges I had in my life was being able to go to college without taking out loans. And the world I want has that privilege for everybody. (or maybe a world where people don’t need college to get a decent job, whatever.) If what I would lose to get that world are a few nice extras that didn’t benefit me that much — I don’t know, maybe when I need glasses I get fewer color options, maybe I didn’t get skiing trips as a kid, I really don’t care people don’t need that shit — that’s worth it, that’s so much worth it that’s so much better I shouldn’t have nice extras when other people don’t have what they need to survive anyways if I got fewer nice extras in exchange for never being afraid that I might not have things I need, that’s beyond worth it. Not in some abstract “what if you didn’t know what life you’d get before you were born” sense, but in any life.

Patriarchy harms men (white, affluent, able bodied, cishet men) too. A world where you can die from being poor while others have excess harms rich people too. Racism harms white people (not as much as people of color, but it’s still overall harm.) Colonialism and the destruction of the biosphere provides fucking irrelevant material benefits to the colonizers at the expense of more important things (like idk living on a planet that isn’t dying) — it would still be bad if colonizers actually benefited, it is not necessary to demonstrate that a system of oppression is bad for everyone to oppose it, but I don’t think anyone does benefit. I think some things just make the world worse for everyone.

No amount of temporarily cheaper gas or cheaper material goods can justify the harms of living in an imperialist nation: the lies, the increase surveillance, the way that military equipment gets handed over to cops so that suppression of other people abroad is directly connected to suppression of dissent at home. The way that war profiteers turn around and fund politicians, destroying the democratic process. Not even counting the harm to vets. (And not even counting how much environmental harm the military does, we're literally destroying that which we need to survive.) It’s not worth it. For anyone. It’s just a really, really bad system.

#And then people come online and play ‘guess who can self efface the hardest about all this privilege’ game #Who fucking cares that’s not real #This continent used to have idk dozens or hundreds of functioning cultures fully integrated with the ecosystems they lived in #And now we’ve got this bullshit #And it’s not sustainable and things are going to get a lot worse #And we’re talking as though light up sneakers with wheels could ever possibly cool enough to justify the hunger that’s coming