One of my problems with the way that people talk about oppressed groups today is that instead of trying to free them from oppression, they seem to want to make them more comfortable, create outrage about their oppressors, encourage sympathy for the oppressed, or do other various things that are about the problem, but aren’t solving the problem.
The analogy that I think of is Black slavery in America. There may have been people who attempted to make living conditions better for slaves. There may have been people who advocated that all the slave owners should be killed. But what ended slavery was actually ending slavery. Yes, there were terrible repercussions and continued oppression for a long time after that for Black people, but literal slavery was ended by ending it. Even before that, my understanding is that the most effective method for helping slaves was the Underground Railroad, which ended slavery for individuals.
It was not necessary to kill all the slave owners to free all the slaves. (In fact, doing so would have probably perpetuated Black slavery in America forever, because of what happens culturally when you engage in a violent revolution of that sort.) It was not necessary to sympathize with the slaves or make them more comfortable before freeing them. It was simply necessary to be effective.
Look, sometimes you need to win hearts and minds in order to get a culture to agree to make a change. That makes sense. But that’s not what I see people doing about groups they feel are oppressed today. (Caveat: I’m generalizing—some people are doing effective things, I’m mostly talking about a set of people who are aggressively spreading viral ideas about oppression.) I see people creating a sort of upset or sympathy that’s designed to protect or forward certain ulterior motives rather than truly freeing people from oppression. This is especially noticeable when the upset is directed at attacking the oppressors, rather than freeing the oppressed.
Yes, there are tremendous complexities involved with freeing people from long-standing oppression. They may have had no education, no resources, no understanding of how to function in a free environment. Some of them may be insane, now. Some of them won’t even want the freedom. (This is incomprehensible to people living outside of the oppression, but is very real to people who actively try to free others.) The culture around them may not accept them and will find new ways to put them back into oppression.
The point isn’t “we should ignore those complexities and just declare everybody free.” The point is about the intention we have when we work to free oppressed groups. Even though it’s difficult, even though we fail many times, we have to persist with the intention to actually free people.
One of the places I see this problem the most is with addiction, where there is so much rhetoric that “we just have to accept people’s addictions.” Addiction is slavery. We don’t have to accept that. We don’t have to make a safe space for people to be addicts. We don’t have to support the industry that serves their addiction, and explain away why it’s okay that people work in that industry. Yes, there are complex factors involved in all of it, like I mentioned above. But the message, “It’s okay to be an addict,” (however that message is disguised) is always being pushed by somebody who benefits from the addicts being enslaved, not by somebody who wants to free them. It gets a lot of agreement from people who have failed to help others, because they have their own failures and they say, “Well, I can’t solve the addiction, I guess I should at least try to do something.” That’s a noble goal. People are worth helping. But supporting their addiction, supporting their oppression—that isn’t helping them.
Look, I am here to tell you that addiction can be solved. Addiction to anything. People successfully pull themselves out of addictions all over the world. It’s not hopeless—something can be done about it. It’s hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to make a judgment call about whether it’s worth it to spend that effort to help somebody. But every person with an addiction can be helped.
This is true for every type of oppression in the world today. You don’t have to accept it, sympathize with it, fight it, etc. You just have to fix it.
Max Kanat-Alexander 