I am a straight, white, cis, male, or in other words a bug of a person. Please tell me how I oppress my sister, my mother, my best friend, my teacher, my aunt, etc, personally.. Please tell me. I dare you
Do you want me to start with the implied threat in your statement, the way you appear to have created an anonymous blog for the sole purpose of insulting and criticizing blogs that argue for equality, the way you asked a total stranger to provide you with specific personal examples because you want to shut me down rather than engage in an actual dialogue, or the fact that you already consider yourself to be a blight on humanity without my assistance based on your username?
Or the fact that he used all the women he knows as leverage in this conversation as if knowing 50% of the population is so difficult and as if he chose to have a mother, sister, aunt, and teacher. As if by having those people in your life we automatically know for certain that you don’t treat them like crap.
Or how he immediately made this post about himself when he isn’t a poc or a woman so this wasn’t addressed to him, but I guess he just clicked the first post he saw on your blog because any blog with feminism in the name is one he wants to harass regardless of the kind of feminism it is.
Like… dude, we don’t know you, we can’t really tell you how you oppress them besides by willfully ignoring the fact that they are systemically oppressed by forces other than you, by the government and media and a lot of men that you aren’t, but we can certainly tell you that there are plenty of people that have daughters and sisters and mothers, men in fact, that rape them, abuse them, murder them, that’s an indisputable fact regardless of your beliefs on feminism. So no, you don’t get to treat this like just because you have a woman in your life you’re immune to the accusations of sexism. Unless you’ve lived in a strict commune in Antarctica, you’ve men some women. All sexists have met women. How else did they oppress them?
First, it’s people/person of color, not “colored.” That’s an outdated and offensive term, which you probably at least suspected since you put it in quotes, but went ahead and used it anyway. So if you’re hoping to have people distrust you for your actions instead of your identity, you’re off to a solid start. If you’re genuinely unsure what a group of people prefers to be called, google it, or ask one of them politely.
If you get upset by oppression and want to be a part of changing it, here is my suggestion. Every time you see someone complaining about cis straight white people and it bugs you, go do something to prove it wrong. Donate what you can to the ACLU, or Planned Parenthood, or any of the other myriad of organizations working against oppressive power structures. Call your government representatives and tell them a cause you want them to consider important. If you’re in the US, volunteer to help get people registered to vote, or make calls/door-to-door visits to talk to people about voting in the mid-terms, or supporting candidates that are advocating for change. Read an informative article and share it on social media, or with conservative family members. Read a book by someone in the LGBTQIA+ community. Watch a show with diverse representation and a showrunner of color. See if there’s anything you can do at your place of work to make it more accessible. Something.
If every time you felt that all straight white people were getting a bad rap they didn’t *all* deserve you did something productive to prove it wrong, not only would you be bettering yourself and society, but you’d be helping to change the perception. When instead you rant reply to someone’s post - which initially was *JUST* a post about considering it reasonable to hold everyone accountable for working to educate themselves about the plights of others and helping to lessen them - about how unfair it all is that strangers aren’t giving you credit for work they don’t know you’re doing, not only do you not come across as an ally, but you waste everyone’s time.
I am white, and I am a feminist. I don’t get upset or defensive when I see people complaining about White Feminists, because I know there is a specific type of person that they’re complaining about, and I know that I put active work every day into not being that person. I don’t need someone to pat me on the back or acknowledge it. I love reading complaints about White Feminists, because sometimes they teach me about things I don’t know and show me behaviors I don’t want to adopt, ways to keep myself from becoming the kind of person being complained about. No stranger is complaining about me personally. But if they *are*? I want to listen, and learn to do better.
Trust isn’t something you just get from people the second you meet them. Trust is something you earn over time, repeatedly, through consistent actions. Honestly? Some people might never trust you, and it may or may not have anything to do with you. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Fighting oppression isn’t something you should do because you want to be given a gold star for your ability to be a decent human being. It’s something you should do because it needs to be done.
