1. Don’t be a non-passing Person of Color
2. Don’t be Black
3. Don’t be a Black Queer Womyn of Color
4. Don’t have any disabilities
5. Especially, don’t have any mental illness related disabilities
6. BEHAVE. be thankful people even have the time to say “oh, how horrible for you. do you know about zine/website/useless little collective XYZ?”
7. BEHAVE. even if what you want is to have someone sit and listen and center you and your pain, and to consistently engage you, you can’t expect Very Important Student and Community Activists to take much if any of their precious time attending to your Non-Activist-Resume-Boosting problems.
8. BEHAVE. hey, if you hide your brokenness well enough, perhaps the ‘Community’ will allow you to continue doing ‘The Work’ ( you know, the important social justice activities as determined mostly by able-bodied cis-gendered single non-parent students/privileged people) Just as long as you don’t require any real support beyond exiling and scapegoating other people.
9. Don’t have your abuser be a white person if you are a person of color.
10. Don’t have your abuser be a white person who is an Important Member of the Activist Community who is getting Work Done which is More Important Than Accountability.
11. Don’t have a complicated situation involving psychological abuse and no broken bones. The Community doesn’t have time to parse complexity, that gets in the way of The Work.
12. Be a conventionally attractive white cis-gendered woman with culturally appropriative hair and culturally appropriative personal aesthetics.

so, my abusive ex, who has never been accountable to me for his abuse? is working with portland solidarity network. he’s in one of their demand videos. i don’t know if he is one of the main organizers or not; there is a good chance that he is, given that when we were together we were working to try and get that group together/off the ground.

 the whole concept of solidarity is usually highly contextualized; if you want support for abuse that didn’t involve broken bones or rape then people seem to want to hide or bend over backwards to find reasons as to why they can’t do anything. i believe this is because of how our culture is an abuse culture and so abusive behavior is so widespread that people feel too guilty about the ways in which they have not been accountable to hold others accountable. as a survivor, there is just so much abusive shit that i refuse to accept that most people have normalized. i feel that one of the first steps of decolonization is really breaking away from abusive people, if that is economically feasible for you, because otherwise you will never be able to figure out where you begin and the abuse ends. it is dangerous and oppressive when people act as if emotional abuse is ‘less’ than physical abuse and is somehow tolerable or acceptable. i am about radical liberation, and that includes radical accountability and radical vulnerability. i don’t think that abusers should get a pass because ‘all of us make ‘mistakes’. that is a silencing and oppressive framework for looking at emotional abuse and it simply rentrenches abuse culture.  so much of our culture is about guilt & shame (‘they have problems! they couldn’t help it! they already feel bad what do you want from them!’ etc) when that has nothing to do with accountability.

another way people normalize/erase emotional abuse is saying things like ‘when relationships go wrong, all kinds of things happen. it’s complicated’, as if emotional abuse is just about miscommunication or something like that. this is just another form of justifying abuse culture. it is about people being unwilling to unpack the oppressive frameworks around relationships that have become embedded in their libidinal economies. there are often very clear power dynamics at play in relationships and if you add the combination of certain kinds of gender and racial privilege then it is really ridiculous to act as if there was this even playing field where everyone should be held ‘equally accountable for their behavior’. i really wish people would stop hiding from this shit. it destroys everything at its root.

i hate how when someone abuses you, and their being held accountable might disturb their life, everyone wants you to ‘not be that way sweetie’. especially, with emotional abuse, or with emotional and physical abuse that doesn’t equal a broken arm,just bruises internal and external. WHY are people so concerned about the quality of life of abusers? WHY is there no one telling abusers to stop their lives in order to give recompense for the damage they have caused? WHY is the burden of proof, and the demand for ‘letting things go’ placed on the person who has the least power in the situation? who has lost the most? accountability includes stopping your life in order to repair to the extent that you can the damage you have caused.

what’s really frightening about this nascent backlash against accountability which i am witnessing in online and offline radical spaces is the way in which being responsible for respecting other people’s experiences and triggers is being coded as “codependency”, an extremely problematic term and concept from psychology which has often been used to silence and further oppress marginalized & also non NT people for ages when they confront others about their actions.

to put it bluntly: some of us can’t deal with our shit while you deal with your shit because your shit causes my shit. in fact, some of your shit creates shit i will have to face in the future and that i face every day. when people engage in radical liberatory communities, there is an unacknowledged ethical responsibility to your fellow co-inhabitants of that space, which are usually filled with people who have been intensely abused, marginalized and dis-empowered by the constant violence that is the centering of oppressive hegemonic constructs of behavior and identity.if how you are constructed by yourself and our culture allows you more power and privilege than others in any way, you are responsible for unpacking all of that. this process involves making an active effort to de-center oneself and to respect the boundaries of those who are constructed by society as having less power and privilege, and being receptive and non-defensive when confronted with the ways in which you have oppressed someone else. it is a continual process, one that is inherently intimate and complex. it is not engendering this radical state of ‘co-dependency’ and it takes a vast cowardice to try and dismiss your fellow humans as pathological and weak just because they suffer when you replicate marginalizing and oppressive behaviors.

you can’t turn away and focus on ‘your thing’ like say, Animal Rights ( we are animals you fucking assholes. sorry. too many classist racist ableist essentialist AR people in my world.) or Worker Rights ( people who need legal tender to trade for resources and want to engage in the economy under the rigid, rigid and limited construction of what constitutes ‘labor’ are disabled, are queer, are marginalized and oppressed on multiplicative and intersecting axises.)Anti-Racism/Racial Identities and Oppression,Radical Feminism,LGBTTIQ rights,Radical Environmentalism, etc, etc. kyriarchy is directly responsible for all of the oppressive constrictions on our shared realities that make it necessary to become radicalized in the first place. kyriarchy exists, even if you turn your face away: it is behind your fucking eyes. it is Always a measure of your privilege if you don’t notice it in the world around you or in your own processing. hyper-focused, goal oriented activism is only part of what goes into pushing back  against our various oppressions.

yes, it is overwhelming. but that is the point; we are to share the burden of the endless struggle against kyriarchal oppression with one another,with compassion and always reaching toward empathy.

(if you like this reblog but do not steal w/o asking me.)