That is the energy we need. Enough with our prejudice. Enough hiding behind privilege. Enough with fearing the person next door who has never fucking harmed you rather than getting angry with the oppressors who would hurt you both.
If we can actually get our shit together & get serious about real solidarity, the fascists & white supremacists are fucked. They are counting on white people to fucking think of themselves first & act on fear, prejudice, & indifference.
If enough white folks will just fucking look around & accept that everyone else is as valuable as they are, that everyone matters with no exceptions, the fash are going to *really struggle* with what they are trying to do.
Same with cis-het people with queer people. Same with all those dividing lines that define people as "not like me".
They need us not to care about each other. They need us indifferent to each other. They need us not to be able to see the humanity in others.
Frankly, this is why fashy folks lose their shit at the inclusion of POC & queer people in entertainment media.
The media we interact with helps shape how we see each other & what we believe about the world.
Yes, representation is great for the group represented, but it is healing to all of us. It can help us learn to see each other without fear or hatred or disgust.
So yeah, they are fucking upset about inclusion in media. It's a fucking problem for them if we can just see & love each other.
The increase in recent years of widely available good representation of different people & experiences has been transformative for me.
I can't name specific examples because it's not really individual things. It's the overall experience of exposure.
Sure, I try to mentally unpack my racism & other prejudices, & that's important work, & OF COURSE I try to apply that progress in real life, but the whole process is significantly helped by additional exposure making difference feel normal.
Here's the difference between this & "can't we all just get along?"
The empathy gap largely goes in one direction. David Graeber does a great job in The Utopia of Rules explaining this, but the short version is: in relationships of unequal power, the less powerful/oppressed people learn to empathize with & understand the powerful people. They are forced to understand them to survive. This does NOT go the other way.
It's not "white people & Black people need to learn to understand each other" because Black people have already spent a fuckton of energy understanding white people. And it's not all fucking anger, as deserved as it is: if you spend your time understanding someone, even someone shitty, you will often develop at least some level of empathy for them.
So white people need to learn to understand & empathize with POC. Cis-het folks need to learn to understand & empathize with queer people, etc.
If you are on the powerful side of an unequal power dynamic, the folks on the other side have already dedicated a lot of energy to understanding you. They had to. You did not have to learn to understand them because in that dynamic, you get to bend the world to your expectations. You aren't forced to understand people you have power over, so you don't.
We gotta reverse it. Look around & figure out your empathy gaps. Whose experiences have you ignored because you didn't have to pay attention?
