QOTD

[tim]

I am so sick of this rhetoric about how such-and-such marginalized person would "rather" get angry, offended, etc. about injustices instead of [insert whatever response would make the privileged person more comfortable here]. As if the person who was the victim of a microaggression (or macroaggression) made some kind of conscious decision to be hurt by it and consciously chose to express that feeling just to be a dick to some innocent well-meaning-but-ignorant privileged person.

This is some victim-blaming bullshit.

So, here's a little education: Feeling angry sucks. Feeling hurt, offended, belittled, sad, damaged, victimized, marginalized, threatened, pissed off and put down are all BAD things to feel. They are no fun. Nobody *chooses* to feel them - any more than people choose to feel non-consensual physical pain.

People often feel and act angry as a last resort, because the alternatives haven't been working. Because maybe having to patiently answer and educate about the same hurtful question over and over and over and over and over again only to get ignored or attacked half the time actually feels even WORSE than having to feel pissed the fuck off at people you don't even know.

[Trigger warning: I refer in the abstract to physical violence against marginalized people by privileged people below.]

It is not the job of marginalized people to teach us, as privileged people, to stop hurting them. It's especially not their job to wait until somebody hits them in the face, and then calmly say, "Please don't hit me in the face. I don't like it when you do that, because I have lots of nerve receptors in my nose and eyes. Oh, you've never heard of a nerve receptor? Here, let me load up Wikipedia on my phone for you and we can look at some illustrations together." And then do it again the next time. And the time after that. And the time after that. Because, well, THIS guy didn't know that punching people in the face isn't okay - *he* deserves a chance to learn.

-- Rebecca Crane, commenting on a Microaggressions post

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