[CW: (Internalized) Oppression]
I already feel like I’m hated for one of my identities. If you combine them all, then it feels like the amount of respect I get condenses even further.
Not only is there so much hate when I am acknowledged, but there are people who don’t acknowledge me whatsoever. I’m a black, non-binary, pansexual, and neurodivergent person. I sound like the blueprint for a chud’s joke about “wokism” and “political correctness”.
When people learn of who I am, they’re baffled that I, a black person could get into the supposed “woke white liberal gender shit”, as chuds tend to call it, because apparently EMPOC genderqueer people are non-existent or something. And yes, I have seen plenty of people call queer identity and egalitarian causes as a whole “white things.”
I have had people say they’re baffled that I’m black and vegan. People have told me that they’re baffled that I’m black and a feminist. People have told me that they’re baffled that I’m black and anti-capitalist even.
The notion that these things are at odds with my blackness is something I don’t feel uneducated enough to understand. Why would my being black make me shy away from these things? My being black, along with all of my intersections, makes the case for my alignment with these even stronger, yet I remain invisible.
The fact that I’m invisible while simultaneously despised is a crushing feeling that makes it hard to truly take pride in who I am, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but beyond Hexbear, I wouldn’t trust most people who identify with leftism. This is the only place where I feel like I can exist as whatever the fuck I am and have it not be taken as either a joke or just something to shove to the side. It’s a place where I don’t feel like I have to sense that I’m going to get targeted by hate speech simply for mentioning my gender identity, and as sad as it is to say, that is an incredibly rare find on the internet especially.
There is no true liberation desired by most self-identified “leftists” I’ve encountered, and the intersections I have seem to serve as a test that can prove how true that is every single fucking time. Misunderstanding is the primary ingredient for my depression and internalized oppression, and as long as that misunderstanding persists from people who only pretend to care, I will continue to feel like I’m some sort of “broken” in my existence, even though, if I just think logically instead of emotionally for a moment, I know that’s not true.
I’d love to see a world where we’re all liberated from the shackles of oppression, but for the time being, I just want the slightest relief from my “political” existence.
It annoys me when American liberals and conservatives bring up the persecution and/or discrimination of minorities in communist countries and how that’s evidence that gommunism BAD.
Apparently communism and communists cannot change and progress, yet if I bring up the the democrats’ creation of the KKK and lynch mobs or the republicans’ eventual pivot towards supporting those same things, it’s whataboutism. They act like the inclusion of minorities in the capitalist machine didn’t only happen less than a century ago.
It’s based on stereotypes imposed upon the group as well as from within. It’s also whether the dominant group also has control of perception. Sometimes people fall for their own propaganda. For example, I believe that statistically, POC are more likely to be vegan in the US, but the media only shows white, annoying, weak hipsters in skinny jeans or preaching to their parents as vegans. Not only does it create biased hostility towards vegans, it also creates the image that it’s a “white thing.” Similarly, the USSR has been reduced to “Russia” in the west, so they’ll falsely attribute every failure and achievement to just Russians which makes other nationalities upset for rewriting their contributions, and it causes the somewhat knowledgeable yet propagandized westoid to assume that everyone is like them and try to “correct” you when you say the Soviets did something by saying “Umm… actually, the Russians didn’t do that. It was [Soviet nationality] that did it”.
Black interest in anime is now pretty normal, but back when I was younger it was associated with the weird, nerdy white and Asian kids lol. You can also see this in the fantasy genre; studios will try to throw in a token minority, get a bunch of backlash, and if it affects their profits they never do it again, so all you get is a bunch of white people in a realm of make believe and magic because white people deemed it unacceptable otherwise, so those who never see themselves represented or included will assume it’s not for them. Another example is I have a female coworker who said she always assumed video games were just annoying toys for boys until she played Tomb Raider and other critically acclaimed games with female leads. The dominant group gatekeeps which results in us being ignorant about it completely, or other people in our group self-enforcing the gatekeeping because it seems like “the natural order of things.”
I speak generally and don’t mean that you, specifically, need to go out and do this, but I think one of the ways we fix this with or without the help of the dominant group (or gaining a position of influence) is to keep being yourself even if other people say you don’t belong there or “we” don’t belong there. You may even get other people in your group to explore their true selves and interests and lean on you to guide them through an unwelcoming environment.
Citations Needed had a very good episode about this, as a matter of fact. The media’s portrayal of vegans is about as distorted as… well, its portrayal of communists.
Lmao no way, did they actually? Just learned this today, why am I even shocked