7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships
There aren’t a lot of things I know for certain in this life, but there is one thing I have known for a long, long time: What lives at the heart of abuse is fear – and the power to turn that fear into violence and control.
When we live in fear, when all we have known for all our lives is fear, we are capable of transforming even the best causes and ideas into weapons of abuse – even the cause of social justice.
Let me tell you a story to show you what I mean: A few years ago I took a deep breath, looked one of my closest friends in the eye, and told him that I thought he should stop beating up his boyfriend.
He blinked at me in surprise. He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what I was saying. Then he said, “But it isn’t abuse if I hit him. I’m more oppressed than he is.”
It was my turn to shake my head in disbelief as I struggled to get a grip on what was happening, what was true, what I believed, what my responsibility in the situation was.
It was true that my friend was, on a systemic level, “more oppressed.” He was racialized, and his boyfriend was white. He was raised in a working class family, and his boyfriend was upper middle class.
Like me, my friend had grown up knowing trauma after trauma as a result of systemic oppression, while his boyfriend had lived a life of relative privilege.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/social-justice-abuse-ipv/
Hurt people hurt people. The 7 things listed in the article can sound a bit familiar to those of us who have dated fellow "woke" people who share our passion for social justice and fighting oppression. Someone who has been abused can become an abuser without even realizing what they are doing.
I've been with a woman who had been raped by several people early in her life and decided she didn't need anyone's consent to take what she wanted because she earned it. And I got to hear a lot about how patriarchal oppression trumps racism. Of course, as a minority male I might feel the opposite is true but they are both bad in their own ways and should not be compared. And finally that leaving her was no different than the African custom of female genital mutilation, because it's a way to control a woman's sexuality and she was a chronic cheater with blatant sexual addiction. Breaking up with her would be abusing her somehow and that I would have very terrible karma ruin my life for all eternity.
