After reading Chauncey's Gay New York excerpt, I started to wonder if major social change is possible when people are still divided over some of the same issues they were battling over in the early twentieth century. Class conflicts with race, race with sexuality, sexuality with gender... Seriously, if people cannot come together and fight for HUMAN issues as opposed to their own private interests, we will never see a downfall of heterosexism and heteronormativity. Maybe it does take a gradual change, but it is frustrating to reading about W. E. B. Du Bois, someone I was taught to respect in high school for his promotion of education, dismissing an employee based on their sexuality to prevent smearing his name and the name of his cause. This is the same situation we see in social organizations today; instead of addressing different perspectives about the shape change will take and coming to a consensus on how best to avoid excluding anyone, we eliminate the variance and proceed.
What exactly are we all fighting for? Do we want our perspective to be the right one? Or do we want freedom for everyone to live in whatever ways they choose? I'm going with the latter.
Everything is problematic because freedom for everyone to live how they choose would mean having to be tolerant of sexists and racists and so on. I would like to live in a world where people let animals have the basic right to live their natural lives, but instead I have to settle for getting people to at least treat them better while enslaving and murdering then eating them.
ReplyDeleteAs for that being my perspective on that situation, many people say it's the vegan agenda or whatever. But in reality we don't do it because we think that it's right by us, we do it for them, the ones who can't fight back.
What are we fighting for? Social Justice. How can we get it the soonest and most effectively? Kill all the humans! Right?
It's annoying trying to think about it sometimes. You might have one person who is fighting against racism but they are the biggest homophobe on the planet. Like when old Betty tried to kick out the lesbians.