This is an in depth account of what I believe in politically.
Compassion is justice. Compassion is the justice we
can extend to each other when Judicial systems fail us, when Governments pass
legislation that dehumanizes us, when Society normalizes narratives that render
us invisible, impossible, insignificant. Compassion is the justice we extend to
ourselves when we love ourselves enough to keep going, to keep living, to stop
going, to stop living as the ultimate act of self-preservation. Compassion, in
my opinion, is a very much underrated justice; the value of which is diminished
by systems of oppression set up to make us oblivious to our collective and individual
capacity to attain and retain freedom and enact revolution.
What is Compassion?
I didn't consult an Oxford for my definition of
compassion. Because I believe that people give words meanings, because words are
created for the purpose of communication. My definition of compassion as a
practice and value system can be broken down as follows:
1. Compassion is empathy.
2. Compassion is valuing everyone.
3. Compassion is a default of acceptance.
I've often found that along with explanations of
what something "is" a good way of gaining a deeper understanding of
something is figuring out what it isn't. This is what I believe the
"opposites" of Compassion are:
1. Oppression
2. Normativity
3. Hierarchy
Compassion is
empathy:
Compassion looks like engaging with people from an
empathic standpoint. It looks like opting for empathy rather than sympathy; regarding
someone as an equal whose experiences you are willing to try and relate to
rather than a lesser person who needs your pity within the context of social
justice. Too often people with privilege even amongst marginalized narratives
are unwilling to extend solidarity towards people they can't feel sorry for.
That is to say when someone whose experience of oppression differs from your
own; the manner in which they present their case 9 times out of 10 affects your
willingness to listen to their standpoint.
When people feel you are not being pitiable enough
or not giving them enough reason to feel sorry for your experience of
oppression they are less likely to want to stand beside you and fight with you
against the oppression you experience. I believe in resisting the culture of sympathy
and pity within social justice as it feeds into the culture of saviour-complexes
and so-called "allyship". I am not here for allies. Allies operate
from a basis of ego and saviorship; they seek rescue-projects whose narratives
they can dominate and control in exchange for cookies and admiration for a show
of pseudo-solidarity.
There is more to be said for people who stand
beside others whose oppression differs from their own. More to be said for
people who try and imagine themselves in your position and upon realizing that
your experience of oppression is valid and something they wouldn't want to experience
themselves; allow you a place in the meeting room and panel stage of social justice.
From a basis of empathy. I believe it is better to stand together and not feel
threatened by one another's strength than it is to only be willing to be there
for people we feel sorry for. Oppressed people -particularly those in the lowest
ranks of the margins- have every reason and right to be angry. We have every
reason and justification to be "aggressive" in our delivery of
resistance; as the violence we face is only intensified by not having enough
space or a wide enough platform to air our grievances. Empathy allows for each
of us to respect each other’s anger; to not trivialize each other's experiences
or use them for the bad-faith practice of tokenizing people in the name of
"allyship."
Compassion is
Valuing Everyone:
I have a deep hatred for the culture of popularity.
For several reasons.
1. I've never really met the standard for positive
popularity in any of the many social spaces I've occupied in my ± 2 decades
here on earth.
2. Not being "popular" has meant not
always having the support networks I need to fend off violence meted out
against me on personal as well as institutional levels.
3. The structures of popularity uphold privileged
narratives and reinforce the systems which grant people privilege and deny it
to others; thus making people who already experience oppression all the more
vulnerable in a society that refuses to protect them and targets deliberate and
direct harm at them.
Inasmuch as this stance against the culture of
popularity might seem like a bitterness or reactionary opinion; I've unpacked
it enough to know that there is a real danger in feeding the culture of popularity.
The danger of further alienating people, furthering the erasure and silencing
of people who need none of these things further perpetuated against them.
Compassion to me, in this instance looks like
dismantling the structures that make popularity "a thing". That is to
say learning to value absolutely everyone we engage with and their input. If we
are going to be all the way honest about it; the reason certain people are "popular"
within our ranks as anti-oppression resistors, is that they embody privileged
narratives. Popularity comes about as a result of privilege and also then,
becomes a "privilege" in and of itself. Take for instance the example
of "famous" people online who experience harassment or abuse from
hateful "trolls" or bigots. Because of their popularity; they are far
likelier to have a network of people willing to rally around them and offer support
to them and send out the message to the hateful bigots that "we won't let
this behaviour happen, towards this person, on our watch." While, I think
the ways in which we protect and rally around our own are phenomenal and
revolutionary, I can't help but wonder about how effective they are when they
only centre on people with mass followings and "celebrity" status. How
many, more obscure, people experience abuse/harassment in online or in-person
spaces and have no network to rally around them or show them support? How often
do we pay attention to people with low follower counts (on twitter for example)
when they complain about experiences of abuse in those spaces? How do we even
decide that some people are more worth following than others? What are the
factors that contribute to a person's popularity? Just like the arbitrary
systems of oppression and privilege, the ways in which we contribute to the culture
of popularity is, in my opinion counter-revolutionary, dangerous and without
cause.
Compassion looks like listening to everyone, no
matter how softly-spoken or obscure and valuing their input. Compassion looks like
never trivializing someone's significance in anti-oppression resistance based
on how many people like or follow or endorse them.
Compassion looks like the justice of amplifying
voices that don't have clout; that don't have a "name" or reputation
which precedes them. Compassion looks like viewing everyone as having the
potential to be an inspiration and removing the lens of favouring privileged
narratives for models of what to look up to and who to seek representation
from.
Compassion is
the Default of Acceptance:
The politics of anti-oppression resistance tends to
look a lot like sending mainstream society the following message:
"Accept people regardless of their
differences."
Acceptance breeds equal treatment, respect, being
valued. One of my favourite mantra's regarding acceptance is that "understanding is not a prerequisite for
acceptance." Too often in the mainstream, privileged society we
inhabit, the argument against acceptance of marginalized narratives is that
people 'don't understand [insert oppressed identification marker here]
people" and thus can't possibly be expected to accept them. I call bullshit.
Acceptance can definitely occur sans the presence of understanding. None of us
can ever have a first-hand understanding of what it means to live another's experience;
but we can -if we are willing- accept the validity of each other's narratives.
Understanding is helpful in the furthering of advocacy and authentic practice
of solidarity (that is to say, it helps to have some insight on the experiences
of marginalized groups when arguing for their freedom and equality) however it
cannot be the step that stands in the way of acceptance as a default.
If we have any hope of any authentic and wide-swept
revolution; we have to be willing to shed the complex of wanting to be experts
on everything and everyone else; and learn to put acceptance as our first and
best virtue, forward. Compassion looks like approaching people -and being open
to being approached by people- with a readiness to accept them as valid.
Compassion looks like continuing to extend this acceptance to people even when
you can't fully relate to the experience they describe. Compassion looks like
accepting narratives that will possibly challenge a previous stance on
something or even your own understanding of your experience of oppression.
Compassion looks like accepting that you cannot and probably will not ever get
to a place where you know everything there is to know about every narrative
there is on earth. And accepting that even in the narratives you DO know a lot
about, but do not embody yourself; the people within those narratives are experts
on their own lives.
When we are able to start practicing a culture of
respectful empathy, a dismantling of "popularity" in the name of
valuing more people (and ultimately everyone around us) as well as acceptance;
we afford a justice towards one another that mainstream society continually
denies us. We afford a justice towards one another that defies the rules about
how we are meant to relate to one another. Rules that dictate that within
marginalized spaces there is to reign a culture of divisiveness and disunity.
Rules put in place to ensure that we are without the protection and respect of
one another; which allows for systems of oppression to continue to wreck unchecked
havoc on our lives.
Compassion is Justice when it Dismantles systems of
Oppression,
Normativity and Hierarchy.
I think it goes without saying that people who are
involved in social justice or anti-oppression resistance are doing so with the
end goal of seeing an end to oppression. I do, however feel as though the extent
to which people would like to see oppression obliterated tends to differ from
person to person, group to group and narrative to narrative. That is to say
many people who are against oppression are rarely against oppression as a whole;
just oppression which is pertinent to their experiences. And this kind of
prioritization of our own experiences and discarding of all or many others, in
my opinion is in direct contrast to any authentic desire to end oppression. You
have to be against oppression as a whole; against the very idea and premise of
oppression or whatever efforts you put out to resist it are rendered null and
void.
At its nastiest oppression results in swift and
wide-spread death. Oppression is a big bad machine which devours and mars and
taints and destroys anything it targets. It doesn't operate on its own however.
Oppression is human-made and human-enforced mechanism, which can only end once
all humans -those oppressed and perpetuating oppression- are forced to be
cognizant of their contribution to this machine and stopped. One of the most
poignant quotes I've ever heard regarding the way oppression works is Martin
Luther King Jr's "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere." And this is the point. The tiniest drop of oppression
anywhere threatens to rapidly turn into an overwhelming tide of alienation,
erasure and death. And right now, so many of us are in the midst of resisting
Oppression Oceans. We cannot hope to eliminate oppression and obliterate any
future threat of it unless we learn to hate oppression as a whole, fiercely.
Just as practicing compassion requires being able
to identify what compassion is and what it looks like; hating oppression means
being able to identify it and understand what it looks like in its fullest scope.
Oppression looks like everything we have been
taught within our social justice movements to resist. It looks like racism, and
sexism and ableism and classism and cissexism and trans-antagonism and
homo-bi-queer-antagonism and ageism and elitism. It looks like the erasure of
whole cultures and the genocide of whole peoples based on identification
markers deemed less worthy of justice and compassion by mainstream privileged
society. It looks like the cross-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism,
segregation, apartheid, the "war" on drugs, the "war" on
crime, street harassment, rape culture, human trafficking, modern slavery, mass
incarceration of specific groups of
people, disparity in remuneration for work, inaccessibility to resources like education,
sanitation, housing, food, health care.
Oppression
also looks like Normativity:
Normativity is the blanket of pseudo-commonality
and pseudo-sameness which mainstream privileged society uses to protect its
sinister mission of erasure, alienation and eugenics. Normativity is the granting
of the status of "validity" and "normalness" to certain behaviours
and identities. Normativity is the insidious culture of normalizing certain
narratives and imposing -through prescriptiveness- those narratives on all of
humanity. Normativity is treating all of humanity as a monolith which has to achieve
a level of sameness in order to have any hope of continued survival.
Normativity is positing certain narratives as the gateway of the continued
existence of the species and thus rendering other narratives a threat to the
survival of humanity. Normativity is so insidious and sinister because it holds
the credibility which comes with privileged dominance of narratives in society
and is thus so deeply embedded in the psyches and hearts of humanity that no
one questions it.
Normativity is holding certain groups of humanity
to be the standard that all other groups of humanity have to meet in order to
be validly human. Normativity is requiring the assimilation of the latter to
the ways and customs of the former. Normativity is requiring this assimilation
from people in order to ensure a conditional survival for them. I say
conditional survival, because with normativity in place; people who do not, by
default meet the standards of normativity, still stand the risk of being
eliminated for their defiance. A defiance, mind you, which stems solely from
their existence. To be perfectly clear; Normativity is the decision made by absolutely
privileged voices, about who deserves to live and who does not. Humanity has
engaged in practices and customs to give meaning and value to our experiences
and lives since the beginning of time.
Normativity privileges certain practices of
granting meaning and value to certain experiences over others.
Normativity is privilege. Normativity is
oppression. Oppression is murder. Normativity is murder.
Normativity
looks like:
1. Whiteness
2. White languages
3. White religions
4. White standards of appeal/attractiveness
5. White standards of appearance
6. White infrastructure (linked to privileged
attained through geographic location)
7. White education systems
8. White Judicial systems
9. White Government
10. White media
11. White standards of ability
12. White Healthcare
13. Eurocentricism
14. White standards of Civilization/Respectability
15. White science
16. White mysticism
17. White literature
18. White art
19. White expression
20. White definitions of gender
21. White sexuality
22. White Patriarchy
22. Assimilation to all of the above
The most dominant narrative of Normativity is
whiteness. Whiteness carries the utmost privilege regardless of what space it
is in. Even white people who do not benefit from all of the elements of white privilege/normativity
still enjoy the privilege of being white over their non-white counterparts
within those spaces that are rendered non-normative and thus oppressed. While,
whiteness sets and maintains the tone for normativity, because of the vastness
of humanity, normativity plays out even within marginalized people of other ethnicities,
even without the explicit presence of whiteness. Normativity in non-white narratives
looks a great deal like assimilating to whiteness and white ideals, but also
upholding other universally privileged narratives such as Maleness,
Heterosexuality, Cis gender identity, Able-ness (physical as well as
neurological), Material wealth, Physical Appearance, Access to resources,
Freedom (as the opposite of incarceration). We dismantle Normativity, in part
by ridding ourselves of the structures of Hierarchy we have in place, which
enforce it.
Hierarchy:
Hierarchy looks like a prioritization of which
humans are most worthy of protection and respect and justice and the justice of
compassion based on normativity. Hierarchy looks like engaging in baseless "oppression
Olympics" to distract ourselves from the real work of practicing as much
inclusivity as possible in order for normativity to no longer thrive as it
currently does. Hierarchy looks like allowing normativity to dictate the
standards we live by and to infiltrate the ways we organize and build
community. Hierarchy looks like reinforcing the culture of privilege through
upholding the culture of popularity within marginalized spaces and not interrogating
the many ways in which our experiences of oppression intersect.
Hierarchy looks like creating ranks and levels of
seating which place more or less value on people depending on the seat they
occupy. Once again reinforcing privilege and upholding normativity and thus
doing nothing to really dismantle oppression.
Below is a basic (non-exhaustive) list of various
oppressed identification markers which are experienced by vast numbers of the
human population:
- Black
people
- People of colour
who are not black or have/claim some black lineage
- Women
- Black women
- Black men
- Men and women
of colour who are not black or have/claim some black lineage
- Cash-poor
people who live in 1st world countries
- Cash-poor
people who live in 2nd and 3rd world countries
- Disabled people (blind, deaf, lame, mute,
depressed, neuro-diverse, anxious, traumatized people, amputees, folks of varying
heights, folks living with chronic illness, folks living with chronic pain,
folks living with cognitive impairments, folks living with varying degrees of
or variations of the above)
- Fat
people
- "Ugly"
people (I don't believe in "ugly". I think it is a maligned invention/construct
used to uphold the privilege of conforming to societal standards of acceptable
aesthetic. However, constructs are harmful and thus must be named and
recognized in order to be dismantled)
- Illiterate
people
- Unemployed
people
- Homeless
people
- Indigenous
people still living within tribal contexts
- Colonized
peoples
- People
within the diaspora
- Trans-people
(this is inclusive of the several hundred + genders not recognized in dominant
narratives about gender identity and within the medical sphere. Examples of
genders under this umbrella but recognized in mainstream narratives of gender
are trans-women/men, intersex people -although their identification marker is more
often than not merely used as a token- and white supremacist notions of
"non-binary" gender identities).
- Queer
people (people whose sexual orientation breaks away from heteronormativity e.g.
gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual)
- Non-English
speaking people (especially in geographical locations which privilege a
"good" command of the English language)
- Enslaved
people
- People
living under apartheid
- People who
are incarcerated
- People
sold into sex/drug-trafficking syndicates
- People who
are survivors of abuse (emotional, sexual, violent -"physical"-as we
live in a society which often refuses to recognize the trauma sustained by
people who have survived abuse, a society that protects perpetrators of abuse
and continually blames victims for their own abuse).
- People who
are survivors of rape
- People who
are survivors of violence
- People who
are survivors of emotional abuse
- People who
experience sexual/street harassment
- Children
- Children
who are orphans raised in various child care systems
- Children
who are orphans and live in child-headed households
- Children
who are under the care of abusive guardians or parents
- Veterans
of war
- Women/Femme
people who are fighting or employed within the context of armies
- Factory
workers
- Miners
- Service
workers
- Sweatshop
workers
- Folks
employed in positions of servitude
- Maintenance/Sanitation
workers
- Several hundred + people who embody genders not
recognized in mainstream narratives around gender identity and in healthcare
- People who
are oppressed within the context of religious sects/cults/communities
- People whose identities and lives are
criminalized by the judicial systems they live under
- People who don't have access to resources like
water, sanitation, food and (adequate) shelter or healthcare
- People living with or recovering from addictions
- People who are raising children as single parents
- Teenage parents (of all genders) who have given
birth to and opted to keep their children
- People living in states/geographic locations
which do not permit healthful/affordable access to safe abortions
- People living within the contexts of civil wars
or attacks on their homelands by leaders of superpowers like the U.S
- Children who are denied access to education and
thus denied access to autonomy and agency over their lives
- Indigenous peoples
Dismantling hierarchy would look like, being
cognizant of the above forms of oppression experienced by vast members of the
human populace. And understanding that some people may experience several of
the above mentioned forms of oppression at once. And further understanding that
the more instances of oppression a person lives with, the more urgent the need
for their liberation is. Dismantling hierarchy looks like organizing ourselves
in ways that allow for us to always pack in extra chairs in case any new people
would like a platform within our meeting rooms to air their particular experiences
of oppression. Dismantling hierarchy looks like recognizing that the fewer
instances of oppression you experience the more privilege you have which means avoiding
at all costs feeding into the culture of popularity (which is and reinforces
privilege) and allowing people to take up space alongside you. Dismantling hierarchy
means recognizing that privilege does not exist without an equal and opposite
experience of oppression, thus silencing people who point out your privilege
exacerbates their already dire experience of oppression/s.
Through compassion, the justice of compassion, I
believe we enable ourselves to take a step closer to a revolutionary world. A
world where the culture with which we treat one another does not emulate the systems
we claim to abhor. A world where no one is disposable and no one gets left
behind or told to "wait their turn". A world where our priorities in
fending off violence represent the needs of those who are the most vulnerable
among us. A world where we all enact the possibility of protecting ourselves as
well as one another; because we are cognizant of the fact that none of this is
a competition; but rather a daring movement, an audacious process towards
something bigger and better than what the world has meted out to us thus far.
Compassion is the justice we can all afford to
extend to one another.
Because it is for
free. And empowers all of us.
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