There is a paradox inherent to social activism, where the urge to create a world in which class, race, gender, disability, etc. are not painful ways of justifying prejudice requires distinguishing what makes different groups and experiences distinct from one another.
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You must make a big deal out of gender in order to convince people that it should not be such a big deal. You must point out how disabilities lead to different ways of interacting with the world in order to create the means for disabled people to live an ordinary life, and so on.
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There’s a common objection to such causes: these activists are attention whores who are fussing over nothing, and if they just shut up they would see that identity is not a big deal.
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I see this echoed in people’s well-meaning spiritual pleas to give up on identity and ego, which are sometimes redirected towards those engaging in “identity politics.” It seems that doing this would end much suffering.
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Trust me, I wish that my identity was not a issue and I wish I didn’t have to give a shit about it. It isn’t the most essential thing about me. When I let go of the ways I describe myself or others describe me, there is less suffering. And I keep working to relinquish such labels
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But telling other people to let go and that they are solely responsible for their own pain is a convenient excuse to not understand why society tries to convince them that their existence is a problem.
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End of conversation
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