#whataboutism

Here’s something I hear a lot, in many different contexts, and I hate it every time.

Someone who belongs to an oppressed minority group is speaking out against an act of oppression against their people. This person is justifiably angry and hurt about the things that have been said and done to their people. And in the process of expressing their anger and pain, this person says, “You know that terrible thing that you said about my people? You wouldn’t say that kind of terrible thing to THIS OTHER minority group! So don’t say it about us!”

I’m being deliberately vague here because I do not want this blog post to actually say any terrible bigoted things about anyone. But I encourage you to fill in the blanks for yourself, quietly in your head. You may have said or thought something like this yourself – “You wouldn’t say X terrible thing about Y group! So leave my group alone!”

I understand that the intent of a comment like this is to point out the absurdity of bigotry by comparing it to another kind of oppression. But here’s the problem: whenever someone says, “You wouldn’t say X terrible thing about Y group!” the answer is always, “Actually, people DO say that terrible thing about Y group.”

There is no minority group who is objectively better off than other minority groups. Unfortunately, there is no oppression that is “a thing of the past” and therefore totally okay to be invoked now. The bigots who say terrible thing about your people ARE, in fact, saying terrible things about other people. And when you say, “You wouldn’t say X terrible thing about Y group,” what you are saying is, “I don’t believe that Y group is oppressed. I neither understand nor care about what Y group is going through.”

Oppression comes in many forms. Every oppressed group experiences oppression in a different way. This only gets more complicated when you recognize that everyone is a combination of identities – you can be privileged in some ways and oppressed in others, and as a result, that experience of privilege or oppression is different. It is different, and it still exists.

This is not an easy thing to understand. The human brain craves for things to make sense, for things to happen for a logical reason. But bigotry doesn’t happen for a logical reason. Bigotry is objectively terrible, and humans are not very good at understanding things that are objectively terrible. You are naturally most likely to be able to see and understand the oppression that you and your group face. It is much more difficult for you, and for anyone, to comprehend the oppression that other groups face.

You will never completely understand what another group is going through, and they will never completely understand what your group is going through. It is useful to recognize this inability to understand – but we should be careful to NOT mistake that lack of understanding for reality.

Claiming that someone else does not experience oppression is not useful. It’s just using your own pain as an excuse to throw someone else under the bus. The goal should be ending all kinds of oppression, and we cannot achieve that by pretending that only one group is truly oppressed.

When you speak out against the oppression you face, by all means do so loudly and angrily. But it is entirely possible to do so without making light of another group’s suffering.