Quote for the Day: December 10th, 2021

The thing about anger is that it needs a home.

Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

Sadly, the home of so much white cishet male anger is the bodies of the marginalized. When the powerful feel threatened, when the powerful are angry, they act as aggressors toward people and groups who have less power than they do so they can reaffirm their status as masters of the universe, if only in their own eyes.

That’s why Donald Trump was the answer to Barack Obama. That’s why Jim Crow was the answer to emancipation. That’s why for every inch gained in equality by a marginalized group, the privileged group forced to give up a modicum of their social superiority attempts to reclaim back a mile. Their anger, their vitriol, makes Black, brown, and queer bodies the sites of violence of an unspeakable magnitude. But this should not stop us from fighting for justice. If anything, it should galvanize us to press harder, to stand in the gap of our siblings’ oppressions.

I once read somewhere on Twitter that the place at which your privilege intersects with another person’s oppression is the part of the system you have the power to destroy. The work of dismantling white supremacy and toxic patriarchy is work that belongs to all of us, but especially to those of us who hold the most privilege. We are all of us complicit in systems which oppress, malign, and disenfranchise our fellow citizens, and it is high time we surrendered our comfort for accountability and our silence for truth and justice.

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