0
0
This past week, I conducted a Facebook friend purge for the first time ever.
Up until now, I would allow all opinions to be expressed on my feed, whether I agreed with the opinion or found it revolting. This meant that I would get messages from my friends asking how I could possibly know the racist/misogynist/homophobe commenter. They’d bring it up in conversation: Who IS that guy?? How do you even know them?
Who was this misogynist defending Brock Turner? Who was this homophobe calling gays deviants and associating them with pedophiles? Who was this guy that keeps telling my Black friends that racism ended before the 1950s and they just needed to read this book and talk to some Black intellectuals and they’d understand that?
These people are former colleagues, former classmates, parents of friends, and my family.
This past week, I’d had enough. I’d had enough of wondering if people were hurting some of my friends’ feelings. I was tired of exposing my Black friends and family to racism in the name of me trying to fight it. I was tired of exposing LGBTQ+ friends and family to homophobia.
I don’t want to be a conduit for hurting people for who they are.
Anyway, if the racists that I’ve been fighting for years now are still adamant that racism isn’t real—especially after this year’s BLM movement—then they are not changing their opinions based on what I continue to say, no matter how many different ways I say it.
I pushed harder this year, calling out out racism, calling out racists. No one was spared. If you’re still in the “racism doesn’t exist” camp, nothing is getting you out of that camp. Or the misogynist camp (especially post-#metoo) or the homophobic camp. If you’re in those camps, it’s because you want to be there.
I reached some folks who were what I’ll call Racist Light—those who didn’t realize the extent of the systemic racism they’d been supporting, but then were like “holy shit racism is real”. But those whom I’ll call Racist-Racists can’t be reached. They dig in their heels.
And so I purged over 200 Facebook friends. While some of those were just people I never interact with, some were just people who don’t see everyone as equal.
That isn’t about differing politics.
When we both want to make the world a place where all humans are seen as equal but we disagree on how to get there, that’s politics. When we both want everyone to have health care but disagree on how to make that happen, that’s politics.
But when we aren’t both looking at the ideal world as a place where all humans are seen as equally human—a place where all humans have equal rights—that’s.not.politics.
And if you don’t think all humans should have equal rights—every single right, equal—then I just can’t anymore.
