Your oppression will not save you

Your oppression will not save you

Your oppression will not save you. Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am extraordinarily lucky and privileged. From the place of my birth to my parents and an easy childhood, free of fear. 

I do not know the feeling of my skin pigment limiting my optionality and safety.

I got to start my life with advantage blessing me in every domain. 

We must account for this. For our beginnings. Those who bow at the altar of meritocracy forget to do this, and it is shameful and cruel.

Do we have to climb a mountain just to make it into our teen years? If we do, let us acknowledge this when we champion success. 

Young people in Australia who go to University begin their careers with forty thousand dollars or more in debt. In the USA, it is worse. My tertiary education was free. The advantage of this is exponential for me and negatively exponential for those who begin with education debt.

I do not know the weight of oppression. I have no idea what life would feel like born buried under hardship, be that poverty, racism, domestic violence or terror.

I have definitely felt the hardships of being a single mother. Of living in precarity day in and out. Of being a self-employed woman. I know gender bias well, as most women do. 

I have a small taste of systemic oppression. But not the crippling ocean that so many people were born into.

We must account for this. 

Yet oppression will not save us. We either live the story of oppression even beyond the oppression, animating it daily, feeding it, having it become the first voice our being speaks.

Or we see it, know its reality, and then remove, with enormous courage and tenacity, its tentacles that insist on keeping us small. If we do not, oppression has won. 

And we must rise above oppression. Not with cruelty and vengeance, for this is to remain oppressed. But with the dignity of loving our being so much that no one, no group, no other, can tell us who we are and why we are so unworthy of being human.

If Nelson Mandela had a message for the times, it was this. 

Photo Taken October 4th 2024