This is a paragraph from a blog on Medium by @iamderay about defeating the bully that is White Supremacy. I recommend it. He talks about white supremacy as an enabled bully which impacts us all and how to end the bullying by drawing attention to it and speaking up.
Not getting one up or ‘switching places’ with the bully but ending the bullying altogether and right now visualising a time without it so we can all pursue that collective vision. This paragraph specifically ☝️☝️got me thinking... There isn’t a single oppression (racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, sizeism etc) which has yet been made extinct. Those experiences, those oppressions, those bullies- if you’ve encountered it once then you are probably always gonna live with the threat of encountering it again. That’s if you don’t encounter it every day... That fearful threat makes me really angry. It makes me really determined. Call it out when you see it, look for it, work to dismantle the various systems in place, work to fix your biases and your loved ones biases. This generation may not be the ones who benefit but there will be a kid, one day, who grows up and never encounters that bully. Let’s focus on that. If you can’t understand privilege or what your level of privilege is then just remember that bully you experienced when you were growing up and the lasting damage they did to you. For every one bully you experience as a white, cis, able bodied, thin male someone else has experienced 10 or 20 or 100 bullies. You think you carry a lot of pain from your 1 bully...? We all have a lot of work to do.
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