Thread by @erikaheidewald

the intersection of racism, misogyny, classism, xenophobia, and anti-SW bias is so fucking intense and horrific in the case of the hate crime murders in Atlanta. these are never just someone else’s problems. there are no unrelated issues of oppression.

i don’t think an issue should have to affect you personally to AFFECT YOU. PERSONALLY. and i don’t understand how it’s possible to ignore hatred just because it’s not directed at you. but that distinction doesn’t even fucking exist anyway. nobody is free until everybody’s free.

Fannie Lou Hamer said that in 1971 as someone who experienced the intersection racism, anti-Blackness, misogyny, ableism, and classism and fought against it her whole life. Fifty years later, we refuse to learn the lesson.

blavity.com/blavity-origin…

Hate that affects anyone affects all of us and hate directed at another group should feel as intolerable to you as hate directed at your own. It IS the hate that’s directed at you. That doesn’t make all our experiences equal or even similar but our investment should be the same.

I don’t fucking want safety that comes at someone else’s expense. And it’s not safety. Bargaining with someone else’s life will never make you safe because it creates the system that ensures you are never safe. It ensures your life is always in someone else’s hands.

The people who fed you the lie that there’s only so much freedom, security, opportunity, or happiness to go around fucking lied to you and you’ll never have any of those things as long as you believe it. It’s the lie of supremacy and no human is superior to another.

That murderer in Atlanta believed in white male supremacy but he couldn’t stop wanting Asian women. He could never take everything from them. He could never be superior to them because supremacy is not fucking real. That is why he killed them. To feel supremacy he can never have.

I am an AFAB person who barely scrapes by in capitalism on my sex appeal but my whiteness is the biggest factor separating my life path from theirs so that those women were murdered while I was at home asleep. That makes me fucking sick! That privilege is fucking sick!

My life is not worth more than someone else’s because of my skin color and I do NOT want any protection it affords because that always comes at the expense of someone else. You can’t want to hang onto your privilege. You have to want to destroy the system that gave it to you.

Life is not a zero-sum game. It is not a system of winners and losers. It is freedom for everybody or nobody. That’s it. Nobody’s rights are in tension with each other. Any time you think so, it’s bc you were fed a lie by people who seek supremacy and need you to give it to them

Wanting to hang onto your privilege means wanting to hang onto your oppression, too. It means agreeing to sacrifice someone else for one more day of a false sense of security. Look at what a false promise that is. That man killed for it because he had it and it wasn’t real.

The most privileged people on this planet are literally destroying it, creating a future of extinction, losing every shred of humanity they had in search of supremacy because however much they get is never enough. It only ends in death. This is where it always goes. It has to.

There’s a reason oppression always comes with cruelty. Why men beat their wives, why white people weren’t satisfied to enslave Black people but also subjected to them to unimaginable physical and emotional torture, why we kick people when they’re down. Because it’s never enough.

You can’t own a human being’s soul. You can’t be superior to them. Because you’re not. You’re not superior to anyone. So after you’ve taken everything else, you’ll kill them to try to feel it just for a second. That’s where the search for supremacy goes. You have to give it up.

White supremacy is the enemy of humanity. It’s a human invention but it is literally the death of all of us. It’s ours to destroy or it will destroy us. Any time you see an issue as someone else’s issue, you say they are not human and your life is worth more than theirs.

That puts you on the same path as that killer in Atlanta. That’s the only path there is for supremacy. So yes you have to want to defund the police, abolish prisons, and end capitalism, the patriarchy, & white supremacy once and for all. You should WANT to. You CAN want to.

You can and should genuinely want to decolonize this planet. You can and should want to listen to the people who know how to do it and have been trying to tell you. These aren’t unsolved mysteries without solutions. You don’t have to come up with the solutions. Just listen.

Stop seeing yourself on the opposite side. I don’t have to hate the color of my skin to hate what society decided it means. I don’t want to pretend I’m not part of it, I’m part of it until it ends. Not being superior to other people IS freedom. It is happiness and opportunity.

We don’t have to kill each other to change the world. We just have to stop agreeing to let other people do it. We have to stop looking away, silencing those who speak out, and bargaining with their lives. Stop being scared of change. Be scared of what happens if we don’t.