Segregation Helps Hold Up Oppression (and vise versa)
When I talk to people who advocate folks who don’t hold the same identity as they do. Folks who do work to decrease the oppression of marginalized groups for which they are not part of. White folks who advocate for Black folks, Latino folks, POC folks. Straight folks who advocate for queer folks. Men who advocate for women. Over and over again when asked, “Why? Why do you do it,” themes of identification and empathy surface.
“I have friends that I see deeply hurt by these systems and I don’t want that to continue to happen.”
“I see my co-workers struggling to be taken seriously when I know how smart, intelligent, and worthy they are.”
“I see folks in my community who are constantly being made to feel lesser because of [insert identity] and I want to stand up for them.”
The first piece is identification, I see this person and connect with them in some way. The second is empathy, I feel their pain, I witness their pain, and I too suffer with them.
Now I had thought critically before of how oppression creates segregation. How there were and are systems that we put in place to isolate black folks from white folks, poor folks from rich folks, and so on.
However, I hadn’t thought critically about how segregation also in turn holds up oppression.
We live in homogenous neighborhoods, go to school in homogenous schools, have largely homogenous friend groups, go to work in largely homogenous spaces. And this isolation makes it a lot harder to identify with folks across difference and a lot lot harder to access those points of empathy that are so critical.
It is harder to discriminate against someone you see as your neighbor. It is harder to back policies or support laws that vilify people that you know. It is harder to say “those people” when they are “your people.”
