It has to be you

May 4, 2010 at 10:52 pm (Uncategorized)

It has to be you.

Lately I’ve seen people asking “Some marginalized people tell me they think one thing about an issue affecting them, and some similarly marginalized people think the other thing. How do I figure out who to defer to?”

It has to be you.

I sometimes get a little embarassed for these people who, although they identify as progressive or radical, seem to have just begun grappling with the problem that a given marginalized population is made up of individual people.

We all know that some people in a marginalized population, usually those who are privileged in other aspects, are not political at all, would rather not talk about what’s going on, don’t feel like much of anything is a problem. Exactly what is it that you use to determine you won’t integrate their views into your own, even though they belong to a marginalized population you don’t?

This goes way beyond language, which you can usually tailor to whoever you’re speaking to, into every type of idea and struggle a progressive/radical person might go through.

Yes, you don’t know what it’s like to be a person you aren’t. Yes, your sources for self-education about a given axis of oppression should consist of the voices of people oppressed along that axis. You have to work to process the points at which these people challenge your privilege and you have to keep current on dialogue and movement coming from them/us.

But as you’re doing all this (I can’t say “after” because that is work that is never done) at some point, it has to come down to you. Upon educating yourself, you are going to have an opinion (it is not reasonable to ask you not to) and that opinion has to come fundamentally from yourself.

Now it’s all kinds of likely that there are very few places it will be appropriate to express your opinion on a marginalized group you are not a part of. Possibly your personal blog, private conversation with a friend, a time you’re specifically asked for your opinion maybe. Your opinion just does not have a lot of relevance.

But you are probably going to have an opinion. (I sometimes come to the conclusion that I just am not able to educate myself on something enough to have a coherent opinion, but more often I find myself specifically agreeing or disagreeing with parts of one or another view.)

As long as you remember:

That some things are not matters of opinion–individual experiences, for example, are matters of reality,

That you are never really educated enough and your opinions are therefore likely changeable as you grow and continue to learn,

That although you cannot stop thinking for yourself, there are places where the expression of your thoughts are unwelcome,

Then it is appropriate for you to have an opinion. A conviction that comes from within oneself is indispensable to being a good ally; an unwillingness to approach difficult matters of thought makes a dangerous one. Often an outright abusive conflict may happen between members of an oppressed population, and if you are personally connected to anyone involved it is then essential that you have the faculty to support the victims and not be swayed by the bullies or abusers.

Listening to marginalized people but making the ultimate decision about what you think (& often keeping your own counsel) means that sometimes you will be wrong, maybe devastatingly wrong. Well, that’s part of the human experience, and you can’t get out of it by deferring to whichever side in an argument seems most numerous or popular or academic or political or marginalized or any other metric. Learn from it and remember it when next you have to decide what you think is right.