Dear brownie-points allies,
From your vantage point of privilege, your soaring words of hope and progress for the oppressed make me frustrated. I know digging a bit deeper I will find the clear limits to your savioirist generosity toward us. At the top of the mountain you gaze down upon the earth stretching and sprawling across the vision below you like your own blank canvas to mold, while we are grounded in the actual struggle you dismiss as too radical.
Come down to the earth you think you can shape in your image. You can never experience our lives, but you can empathize and listen. Believe me, I have been in both positions. We are all oppressor and oppressed, privileged and downtrodden here in the intersectional consciousness. It's so easy for me to dismiss those with a worse hand in the birth lottery as lazy and unmotivated when we are all merely products of the place we were born, all trying to get by with the mental toll of crushing oppression we can sometimes struggle to even identify--and we're all doing the best we can to stay healthy and alive and afloat. Please come down to join us.
Your latest women and gender studies lingo means nothing without real commitment to justice. Because while you're getting speaking engagements and publication deals and acclaim from those on high for your capitalization of our struggle, and for oppressively defining it for us and shielding your ear from our voices, we are struggling to be heard above you, to tell our truth, and fighting for space in a world you own, on which we are regarded as tenants at best or squatters on private property which is what has become of our collective inheritance, the world.
Come down from your mountain and touch us, break bread with us, and not as poverty tourism either. Is the wretchedness too dirty for you, that you must in isolation of true life romanticize or exoticize us, or in flowery prose ennoble a deeply degrading experience? Be like the good writer Bradbury wrote of, who "touch[es] life often."
Change is not the sublime of a stormy Romantic era painting but the grainy photographs of Jacob Riis. Not in the blazing flags of Les Amis but in the barefoot, sickly, dirty young Cosette or her mother, the lowest of the low, dying of sexually transmitted infections and living on the streets. Eugene Debs declared at his trial for violating the Sedition Act, "Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free." That is the essence of true allyship.
