There’s this oppressive notion spouted that says diversifying and expanding protections, social programs, and laws (like Medicare for All, universal education, and protecting forcibly marginalized peoples’ rights and access) would result in “reverse ism” situations. As mentioned in my first blog post, this is a falsehood because equitable distribution of resources and protections under the law would still have everyone accessing the same healthcare, education, food, water, shelter, protections, etc. It would just mean less privileges for some and effectively end “positive vs negative eugenics”.
In my opinion re: these phenomena, positive eugenics is the privileging of certain groups to have resources over other groups for the betterment of the privileged while negative eugenics is under-resourcing certain groups to the detriment of forcibly marginalized groups.
For instance, as detailed in Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington, Black people were not only under-resourced in healthcare access, but they were also actively tested on and lused by the medical system (like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, lobotomies on “hyperactive” Black children, and the use of Henrietta Lacks’ cancer cells to advance cancer research without compensating her or her family for their continued use (“HeLa cells”)). This had a disabling effect on Black people and communities at-large. To rectify the situation for Black people who are still under-resourced and mistreated by systems in the US, they need radical accessibility to equitable healthcare, education, and compensation (meaning reparations as well as financial investment in their communities’ betterment).
People who upheld the institutional violence and the privileged people who benefitted from Black people’s mistreatment, former enslavement (or current, if they are in the prison system), and lack of protections under the law also need education on empathy, DEIAIA, and accurate history.
It is important to name that just because you are privileged in one or more ways doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t experience marginalization; it just means you have mitigating circumstances to your oppression, and that you have biases that you need to address. We all have things we need to learn and unlearn about the world. For instance, a White cisgender, heterosexual man living on the street or in and out of shelters doesn’t have financial nor housing privilege, but his Whiteness, gender, and sexuality mitigate his experience of this socioeconomic oppression and affect how systems and societies perceive him. His Whiteness, cisgender manhood, and heterosexuality are not seen as the reason that he is houseless and poor. In fact, conservatives and our current administration often point to DEIA initiatives as the reasons for that man’s misfortune.
We all are oppressed by White supremacist cisheteropatriarchy, including those privileged under this system. White supremacy and racism negatively affect White people’s empathy and humanity and isolates them from the world around them by making everyone else the “enemy” and therefore disposable, worthy of coercion, and or otherwise subhuman.
Intersectionality is a framework to understand diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in a way that necessitates interdependence (depending on each other in different ways at different times that fluctuate over and between relationships, time, and situation), community building, empathy, and resistance to the privileges we have.
Now, where does accountability come into play?
I touched on it earlier in regard to reparations, but accountability is not only tangible, material resources and repayment to marginalized peoples but active acknowledgments, apologies, and transformative actions taken to reimagine systems for collective betterment and to equitably distribute resources in communities.
This can look like:
- Reparations for Black people in the US for historical abuse, enslavement, and systemic racism across the board
- Black history being taught as a core part of K-12 and higher education
- Culturally competent medical care and Medicare for all
- Accurate and culturally specific research into what the Black people in the US need to transform their relationships to the systems that oppressed them.
For intersex people, it can be:
- Ending the oppressive practice of mutilating babies’ genitalia to make them look binary and normative instead of embracing difference in sex characteristic
- Teaching the history of this practice and the precolonial embracement of sex differences
- Financial restitution for the harm these surgeries caused the intersex population.
For trans and gender expansive people (as well as intersex people), it can be:
- Teaching of LGBTQIA people and their history
- Age-appropriate gender, consent, sex, and sexuality education being taught in K-12 and higher education
- Identity-based protections under the law on all levels of government
- Financial Restitution for historical harm from systemic cisheteropatriarchy.
Almost nothing can be proven empirically, empiricism being the prevailing thought process claiming people, events, things, and concepts can be understood through objective truths. This is most prevalent when interrogating major concepts, especially in the “hard sciences”, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
For all of us, accountability and intersectionality alongside DEIA looks like transforming the systems we live under in the name of collective humanity; resisting fascism and the isms that hurt us all; and learning our accurate histories and radical empathy while unlearning harmful behaviors, ideas, and ways of connecting.
Empiricism prevails despite its limitations because of White supremacy, colonialism, and cisheteronormativity. I say this because, for centuries, scientists “knew” Black people’s heads were smaller than White people’s heads that indicated an IQ difference and an innate Black “animalism” (all falsehoods that prevail, despite being regularly debunked).
For centuries, disabled and chronically ill people have been imprisoned, institutionalized, or killed for being higher-needs than non-disabled counterparts, all supported by society and the medical community at-large. For centuries (if not millennia), women across gender expression and identity have been policed by the notion that any emotion they show is rooted in “hysteria”, or an innate craziness brought on by female genitalia that had various “cures” that were never long-term addressing of the issues women in these societies faced. The counter to these “facts” is evident in the fact that White medical professionals studied Black doulas, medics, and birth workers (who were often women) perform major medical procedures with comparatively low mortality rates then stole the methods and tools they used to build the medical industries as we know it today. Black women are some of the most formally educated groups in the US, and “hysteria” was debunked in 1980 (which is far too late be debunked, but I digress), and – in my opinion – “hysteria” was just a manifestation of women’s frustration, anxiety, and anger in sexist ancient and more modern societies.
Absolutely everyone has needs, including education, healthcare, food, water, and community. We are an interdependent species who rely on each other to survive/thrive, and we have been lied to by capitalism and its propaganda that we need to deny that instinct and need.
So, why explain all that?
We are dealing, in the US, with a population that has been spoon-fed harmful, vitriolic, nonsensical lies, under the guise of “logic and objectivity”, leading us to experience the normalization of interpersonal and structural racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and xenophobia (among many other isms). Empiricism, to me, is a falsehood outside of pure math and leads us to misunderstanding each other. Empirical thought, or “the view that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge.” We are all fallible and are not born with any education, perspective, or philosophy. -Isms are taught, and they stay around because we, as general societies and communities, rely on experience and opinion rooted in harm or positivity most of the time. If we never hear, see, or feel perspectives that are positive and thoughtful about our experiences nor any experiences that nuanced about others, we succumb to the falsehoods and hurt each other.
I personally ascribe to a sort-of “collective standpoint skepticism”, which posits that everyone has a different experience of the world, its issues, its peoples, and its concepts based on the intricacies of one’s lived experiences, identities, and environments so there are collective truths, not absolute ones. Moral relativity is real, but more so in the sense of murdering a Nazi leader is not as alarming nor detrimental to collective liberation as the genocide of a people, like Palestinians.
All our identities and life experiences inform how we navigate dynamics with our and other communities, people, relationships, and institutions. Everyone has a positionality, including people of dominating privileged identities (like White, cisgender, non-disabled, educated, light-skinned, “citizen by birth”, etc.). Knowing someone’s positionality can inform how you interact with them and vice versa. It can also inform how to move forward as friends, partners, community members, strangers, and members of society in different systemic and interpersonal interactions. We all contain multitudes, and not all of them are pretty.
We must learn from mistakes of the past, and sweeping the past under the rug in the name of maintaining society as it stands now is killing us. For instance, we all stand to benefit from naming the erasure of gender expansiveness and exploration in postmodern societies as well as ancient ones (gender expansiveness predates White supremacist cisheteropatriarchy). People who have been gender marginalized, including trans and cis women, trans men, nonbinary folks, genderqueer folks, and agender people, experience violence in multiple ways, but we have been here forever and will not go away, even under the rise of fascism and late-stage capitalism.
We must name our positionalities; pursue research, community, and structural change knowing how we interact with the world has affected out opinions and worldviews; and unearth the histories that have been watered down, erased, or actively altered in the name of racist cisheteropatriarchal violence.
Artemis Montague - Reflections on A Life Renewed 