Imagine this: you are driving a car down the highway after a long day at work. You're tired and eager to go home. All of a sudden, the car behinds you slams into your back bumper and you run into the divider, totaling the car. You have no option but to call a tow truck, which will cost you money you don't have. When you finally reach home, you call your friend, hoping to vent to them about your terrible day. After reciting all of the terrible luck you had encountered on your route home, your "friend" responds, "Oh you think that's bad? Guess what I had to do today!" and then proceeds to tell you about some ordinary task, like trying to get a stain out of a new shirt.

This sounds ridiculous, right? Good, because it should.

This is how people sound when they talk over or invalidate the experiences of marginalized people.

If you're on the internet and follow a lot of feminist blogs (everydayfeminism.com is my favorite online magazine about feminism), you might have heard the phrase "mansplaining" before. If not, let me give you a quick rundown: "mansplaining" is when a man explains something to a woman in a condescending or patronizing way.

While it's quite possible that men are able to do this, anyone in power communicating with anyone who is oppressed is capable of (unintentionally or intentionally) invalidating and/or patronizing marginalized people. A more broad and inclusive term to describe this behavior is "powersplaining", which by the very word itself, includes anyone in a position of social power.

Powersplaining is something I see far too often. Whether it's the classic "well, I don't experience/ see this, so it mustn't be true" or disgruntled ex-boyfriends gaslighting their previous partners, it is unhelpful and oppressive by nature. The hidden message of these statements being that marginalized people are not as valuable as those with privilege, which is a message to which oppressed people are not strangers- it's everywhere. It's in the media where a white perpetrator will be described as a "misunderstood and troubled kid" and black perpetrators will be called "thugs". It's in the law when places of employment are legally allowed to fire LGBTQIA+ employees. It's the lack of accessible infrastructure for people with disabilities.

Furthermore, powersplaining leads to the silencing of marginalized voices. Again, we do not need any more of this. We hardly hear or see people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, people in the lower classes, and/or people with disabilities on television, in film, or in literature. There has been enough white, able-bodied, neurotypical, middle class, cisgender men in the media. We don't need their added "input" on what it means to be oppressed because of (insert identity they don't have here).

So please, If you do not experience said oppression someone is referring to, do not presume to know better. Listen. Empathize. Be open to learning something new.