I recently came face-to-face with the proselytizing nature of the anti-oppression my community and I practice. By this I mean to identify the practice among many (including myself) that there are really only three kinds of people: those who already get it, those who are learning, and those who are worthless or even dangerous others. These questions are what followed:
1. What if everyone had intrinsic value and worthiness?
2. What if we practiced radical inclusion and saw rejecting someone as impossible?
3. What if we moved towards those we think were “fucked up” and just stopped talking about people as “fucked up?”
4. What is the difference between orienting towards the goal of justice and equity vs. orienting towards the framework of anti-oppression (when interacting with people?)
5. What would it mean to stop thinking of anti-oppression as a framework everyone needs to understand and utilize?
6. How can we maintain safety and struggle for equity and justice while being in community with people who don’t use our anti-oppressive language or hold all (or any) of our understandings of the world?
7. How safe do we need to be and what actually increases our safety?
8. What is the real value of anti-oppression versus other systems of understanding power, oppression, and violence?
9. What is our commitment to the words and specific meanings built into anti-oppression? Who does it serve?
10. What oppressive systems are imbedded or function within anti-oppression?
I mean these as honest questions and am not sure I would necessarily promote any of the implied conclusions. For example, if I practiced radical inclusion, would I need to invite the cook who said to me the other week, “don’t make me commit a hate crime,” into my community? If so, could I ensure the safety of my friends and loved ones, many of who have much less resources through which to process such hateful speech? Should this even be a goal?
Although I find fault with much of the proselytizing, exclusionary practices in anti-oppression, I also think it is an incredibly important system for understanding real life, in the body experiences. It is important to have language to name a group refusing to ask participants to identify pronouns as trans-phobic. Yet, does that mean they should be rejected or that there is no value to be found in such a space? Does it mean we must approach such people with only two options: change or be rejected?
I am a writer. I have a deep need to understand my world and the systems at work within it. To do that I must have language and yet, I desire a nimbleness of language and cognitive frameworks in order to see and work with the intrinsic value of all people. I wish to be able to see everyone’s need to be loved and to belong, to be safe and to be seen, to be understood and to be whole whole. To what extent does anti-oppression as a framework make these wishes come true and to what degree is it walls I build between mean and others?