Lines In Sand – AudioZine

1:07:16 – Lines In Sand: three essays on identity, oppression, and social war – intro by Peter Gelderloos – MP3 – Read – Print – Archive – Torrent – YouTube “…I think we all need to fiercely reject the Ally as a primary identity of struggle. You cannot give solidarity if you are not struggling … Continue reading Lines In Sand – AudioZine

1:07:16 – Lines In Sand: three essays on identity, oppression, and social war – intro by Peter Gelderloos – MP3 – Read – Print – Archive – Torrent – YouTube

“…I think we all need to fiercely reject the Ally as a primary identity of

struggle. You cannot give solidarity if you are not struggling first

and foremost for your own reasons. To be only or primarily an ally is to

be a parasite on others’ struggles, with no hope greater than to be a

benign parasite; it is to refuse to acknowledge our interests and place

in the world out of a dogmatic insistence on identifying ourselves with

the system we are supposed to be fighting. Being aware of relative

oppression and privilege is vital, but emphasizing those differences

over the fact that all of us have common enemies and all of us have

reasons to destroy the entire system is deliberately missing

opportunities to make ourselves stronger in this fight.”

Lines in Sand is a collection by various unnamed authors with an intro by Peter Gelderloos that looks

critically at identity politics and anti-oppression politics. All of

them are very thought provoking and well worth reading. These aren’t

knee-jerk criticisms, but rather are thoughtful explorations of the

problematic aspects of identity and anti-oppression politics and

practice.

“…tokenization and paternalism are on any list of “fucked up” behaviors in

an anti-oppression practice, thus the practice protects itself from

open complicity with the very problems it creates. Human agency is a

fundamental component of freedom, perhaps the most important one;

therefore if someone is denied agency in their own struggle because the

most legit thing they can do is be an ally to someone else’s struggle,

it is inevitable that they will exercise their agency in the course of

supporting a struggle they view as someone else’s. To do so, they will

either look for any oppressed person who supports a form of struggle

they feel inclined towards, and use them as a legitimating façade, or

they will try to participate fully and affect the course of a broader

campaign or coalition in which they are pretending to be mere allies. In

other words, by presenting privilege as a good thing, anti-oppression

politics creates privileged people who have nothing to fight for and

inevitably tokenize or paternalize those whose struggles are deemed

(more) legitimate.”