H8 is illogical

mattbellamysfolds:

“if i’m a person of color, i’m allowed to hate white people!!!!’

“if i’m gay, i’m allowed to hate straight people!!!!”

“if i’m a woman, i’m allowed to hate men!!!”

“if i’m trans*, i’m allowed to hate cis people!!!”

ok

The problem with this post is that is poses PoC anger, queer anger, women’s anger and trans* anger as being equal and reactive to white anger, straight anger, men’s anger and cis anger. They are not.

In a stratified society like most everyone on Tumblr lives in, there are uneven power relationships between groups which mean that you cannot just ‘flip’ negative behaviour and say it’s ‘just as bad’. This is because only one group in that relationship has the power to enact their hate on a society-wide level.

Like for example in New Zealand, where I live, most people are white, and a lot of them are racist towards Māori people. We get stereotyped as lazy and violent. A lot of white people don’t like us, and because they’re the dominant group in society, a consequence of that is discrimination in jobs, welfare, education, and all of those discriminations build up together and lead to a host of social ills.

All of them come from that dominant group in society hating Māori. When I’m with Māori friends and am frustrated by something, and I say ‘Aaaugh fuck, I just seriously cannot fucking deal with white people this week’ and my friends say ‘Ugh yeah seriously’ there are literally no consequences for white people. We don’t have the social capital to take that dislike and use it to fuck up white communities. When white people get together with their friends and say ‘Aaaugh fuck, I just cannot fucking deal with Māoris this week’ and their friends say ‘Ugh yeah seriously’ there are fucking drastic consequences for Māori communities because that racial discourse perpetuates negative stereotypes of us and creates an atmosphere where it’s okay for white people to treat us poorly for our ethnicity.

It’s the same (well really it’s very similar) for queer people. If a bunch of queer people are saying ‘Ugh man I am seriously sick of having to deal with straight people’ nothing happens to straight people. When a bunch of straight people are saying ‘Ugh man I am seriously sick of having to deal with the gays’ then people start dying.

Marginalised people fundamentally lack the power, as a group, to hurt privileged communities. When we say we hate them, we’re venting. When they say they hate us, they’re cementing their position at the top.