Dismantling oppression is not a gentle act

The truth of what we're doing

It’s okay to feel like life is falling apart.

But, let’s increase our capacity to be honest with ourselves: Dismantling is messy work. Whether demolishing a house, dissolving a marriage, or disassembling a washing machine, dismantling takes elbow grease and leaves behind mess, disorder, and debris.

Remember, we committed to dismantling systems of oppression.

What we refer to as oppression is a complex system of systems. Systems provide stability. They’re reliable, secure, solid, predictable, and therefore hard to take apart. Dismantling oppression isn’t like taking a Lego creation apart piece by piece. It’s more like demolishing a city that is also connected to your own internal organs. Remember, we’ve internalized the oppression so it lives inside us too.

This was always going to be messy work.

It could be said that it is the job of the old to resist the emergence of the new. After all, even if we hate ourselves, our bodies will fight to stay alive. Everything alive fights to keep it that way.

Embracing The Darkness

When light embraces darkness
darkness is enveloped
until only light remains

Thus darkness is defeated 
through love and proximity,
through the willingness to extend a tender embrace 
to that which would destroy us

Light wins through its willingness to include 
that which appeared to be an enemy
and through inclusion, overcomes

Light will engage 
with each thing it encounters 
with equal gusto

Light shines on 
the grotesque
and loathsome 
as well as the pristine
and romantic 

The pain you feel, my child,
is the light 
loving the darkness
inside of you
until it transforms

But darkness is not swallowed
without a fight

and transformation is
a messy business
anyway

not neat
or tidy
or numb

So scream and cry, and thrash, my dear 
do not go down without a fight

because your darkness loves itself, 
and it is loving 
that you will not let yourself be destroyed 
just because you are miserable

Oppressive systems and the people who support them are miserable.

But they must fight for themselves (at the level of awareness they have) because deep down they love themselves. Is this convenient? Absolutely not. In a system where everyone is traumatized and acting out, being interdependent sucks. On the flip side, the more we help each other heal the trauma of oppression, the freer we will become. None of us are free until we all are, because we’re interdependent.

Indigenous people know this.

Numerous indigenous communities around the world choose to share their medicine with colonized people. Even though those colonized people continue to hold the abusive power of colonialism over them. The the wisdom of interdependence tells us to wish our abusers well. When they are well, they will stop being abusive. This does not mean we accept abuse, it simply means we see the bigger picture: we are all being abused by systems of oppression. We all need to be freed.

If this is the truth, can we share our healing with those around us? Can we prioritize our healing, knowing that if we have more healing inside us we have more to share? Can we embody this indigenous wisdom?

Self-love is the key

It is clear to me that in order to dehumanize someone else you must first dehumanize yourself. Self-dehumanization creates an environment in which we do not experience self-love and therefore cannot gift others with the fullest expressions of love. This is a self-reinforcing downward spiral. The less we love ourselves the less we can love others, and the less we can love others (and are cruel) the less we love ourselves.

I’m not asking you to love the people who support your oppression.

I’m inviting you to notice they are trapped, too. They are foaming at the mouth, crazed to get out, but trying a strategy that won’t work: aligning themselves with the cage and building more cages.

What if we fought their actions, but not their innate dignity? What if we fought their border walls but not their self-love? What if we fought their tyranny but fought for their freedom too? None of us are free until we all are. The more we make fun of them, and the more we try to hurt them back, the farther we get from the goal of collective liberation.

We are always and forever interdependent.

We sink or swim together.

Better to throw life rafts at the a-holes than stones.

If they drown, we do too.

We are always and forever interdependent.