Reflections on Identity and Power from Palestine and Guyana
Before October last year, I used to feel pretty anxious speaking up in support of Palestine. I only knew bits and pieces but, even back then, any time discussions came up online or in community spaces, the force they were quickly shut down with was daunting. Even as I developed my own position, I’d lacked the confidence in my own knowledge to feel I could speak up on it.
“The issue is complex. You’d need to understand the history.”
It’s a sentiment that reverberated into how I felt talking or even learning about my own cultural background and history.
When I was a kid, I understood the vague idea that my parents were both descendants of “coolies” or indentured Indians that worked on sugar cane plantations in Guyana and Trinidad. They would often say we were from the Caribbean and the West Indies interchangeably, and while it made sense that Trinidad was a small island off the coast of South America, I would be in my adolescence before I’d realize, embarrassingly, that Guyana was geographically a part of South America. During the last party I attended before the COVID state of emergency was announced, another brown woman scoffed when I included Guyana to explain where in the Caribbean I was from.
The summer after I graduated high school—the same summer of the London riots—I followed a friend on a month-long trip to England where I crashed in my cousin’s small suburban London bedroom. It would be during one of the winding late-night conversations in their living room I’d have with my aunt and cousins (quite possibly as we watched the news unfold) that I even learned that my family had left during their own political crisis.
My twenty-something cousin spoke cautiously and vaguely as he explained that it was complicated, but we’d had a relative who was once held at gunpoint while visiting back home and their car was searched to be sure they weren’t smuggling in flour which had been banned, leading to a food shortage that severely impacted the majority Indian population who relied on it to make one of their staple foods, roti. Perhaps if I’d come a month sooner, he’d have spoken more freely, but as anti-Black vitriol filled mainstream news media, he seemed uncomfortable as he delicately chose his words.
When I returned home that summer, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, my relationship with my father was strained and I couldn’t ask him any questions and my mother barely knew the history of her own country (Trinidad), much less his. My father was in his teens when he came to Toronto and he didn’t talk about “back home” much, but when he did, his voice took on a tone of conflicted reverence. Cursory searches online didn’t provide much information. I never really had anyone to ask until I took a class called Introduction to Caribbean Societies in a New College basement on my second (futile) attempt to finish my undergraduate degree.
But even as my Indo-Guyanese professor spouted very captivating lectures about the history of CIA conspiracies, the “Imperial Eye”, communism and Divide and Rule in the Caribbean, I struggled to find any more information on Guyana specifically that wasn’t from blogs and forums. When I shared what I learned from my professor, I got cryptic warnings that “it’s not that simple.”
Maybe that’s why as the deaths of Palestinian children swiftly outpaced the (somehow continually shrinking) number of Israeli casualties in the early days following the Al Aqsa Flood operation and many people still found the situation too complicated, I found myself compelled on a personal mission to simplify it for anyone willing to listen.
But it also drew me back onto my own journey into learning and understanding my Guyanese history. And beyond how both are apparently some cryptic kind of complicated that can never be fully explained, I began to find even more striking coincidences.
The Historical Context
Following the abolition of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, the crackdown on illegal intercolonial slave trades, the supposed emancipation of enslaved people, and then—finally—the abolition of apprenticeships, John Gladstone (father to William Ewart Gladstone, an eventual British Prime Minister) would initiate what would later be called the “Gladstone Experiment” in 1833 British Guiana.
More than 400 indentured Indians were recruited to make the harrowing journey across the kala pani to begin their five year indentured contracts to harvest sugar cane to meet the labour shortages after formerly enslaved Africans left the plantations en masse, refusing to endure the inhumane working conditions and systematically restricted from buying the land themselves to benefit from their own labour.
By the end of the Indians’ contracts, investigations into the treatment of Indian immigrants discovered so much abuse, the system was shut down for more than five years. The conditions were an improvement from the conditions of enslavement, I should be clear, but they were still deplorable conditions. When it would restart in 1845, it became so profitable that the sugar cane industry was able to pay for bridges and institutions in British territories where the plantation owners called home. By the turn of the century, a growing anti-indenture movement was gaining momentum in South Asia and when the first World War made the shipping passages too perilous to navigate in 1917, the system was once again suspended before being fully abolished by the end of 1919.
At the same time, European leaders had successfully helped an Arab nationalist movement overthrow the Ottoman Empire before they would use the opportunity to mandate the land to different colonial powers—including what would be called Mandatory Palestine which was put under the control of the British Empire after the Balfour Declaration. They then began to sell this land to Jewish proprietors who began to cultivate crops there, to the benefit of British importation.
(3) With respect to coffee: 'At present it is only possible to grow coffee profitably if the cultivation and overhead expenses are
borne largely by the cocoa crop.'
(4) With respect to citrus: 'We understand, however, that in view of the extensive cultivation of this crop in Palestine you consider the future outlook offers such poor prospects for a profitable market price for grapefuit grown in Trinidad that you have deemed it necessary to issue to the Colony a warning not to extend unduly the acreage under this crop.'
Then in 1948, following the failed attempts at forming Zionist settlements in Africa, the UK used Mandated Palestine to fulfill their promise to Jewish people to establish a homeland for them. Unfortunately, they went about it through force, instigating the Nakba including the Deir Yassin massacre that would elicit an infamous condemnation from Albert Einstein.
I’m sure it’s also a coincidence that it was only the year before that the UK’s carelessly (or maliciously) drawn borders to honour the Independence of both India and Pakistan resulted in still ongoing brutality and displacement. Either way, the political tensions from the consequential Hindutva movement of the right-wing Indian government would later be exploited in British Guiana—as the Red Scare swept across the Western capitalist empire—to maintain control as the colony rallied for labour rights and their liberation in the years to come.
The Race / Religion / Western Gaze Problem
When I was growing up, there was a longstanding culturally accepted rule for making polite conversation: Don’t discuss religion or politics. Maybe that’s why what’s been happening in Palestine has seemed complicated for so long and why so many people don’t know about Guyana at all.
In years past, every time I ventured into the conversation about Palestine, I often ran into the seemingly impenetrable wall that was the claim that the “Israel/Palestine conflict” was a religious war thousands of years old. Any opinion on the matter could only be dogmatic; could only demonstrate your own religious leanings and we live in a secular world now so that made you the problem.
While prior to the Balfour Declaration, it’s true that there was only a minor Indigenous Jewish population in a predominantly Muslim region. However, at least under the Islamic rule of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims, Christians and Jewish communities alike coexisted in relative peace for centuries. Even as the demographics changed, symbols and traditions from all three major religions were maintained collectively, and even following the first World War, graves for Jewish soldiers have been well-maintained for more than a hundred years even in Gaza (unlike memorial sites for Palestinian activists that have been destroyed in under a year).
Following the mass migration of East Indians to the West Indies in the mid-18th Century, the landscapes of predominantly Indo-Caribbean countries like British Guiana and Trinidad sprouted Hindu temples, mosques and churches alike. And when many Western nations refused Jewish refugees during the second World War, Caribbean islands like Trinidad offered them a safe haven. While personal prejudices still existed (and continue to exist), there was interfaith and interracial solidarity that evolved from labour movements that began with African resistance to slavery and continued with Indian resistance to indenture.
How did that solidarity evolve into violent racial tensions between Indo- and Afro-Guyanese groups in the 1960s? Short answer: It hadn’t.
The citizens of British Guiana were finally granted universal suffrage in 1951—meaning that was the first time that any African, East Indian and Indigenous/Amerindian adults (of any gender) could have a political vote in governmental elections—leading to the formation of its first Constitution in 1953 and the People’s Popular Party (PPP) lead by the Indo-Guyanese Dr. Cheddi Jagan with Afro-Guyanese Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham as its chairman.
The PPP was a mixed-race working class political party with mixed-race working class popular support that led to its landslide victory in the 1953 election. But it was a short-lived victory as the party’s communistic tendencies terrified the Cold War-entrenched West, prompting Winston Churchill to send a warship to arrest and intimidate Jagan into resigning, resulting in the Constitution’s suspension until the following election in 1957.
By then, the PPP had become divided as Burnham rallied for leadership. After the PPP once again won a majority in the election, he formed the People’s National Congress (PNC), a slightly more politically moderate party that ran on a slightly more palatable socialist platform in comparison to the PPP’s staunch Marxist platform. After Jagan refused to explicitly denounce communism in a meeting with President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Burnham became the American preference for leadership in the soon-to-be independent nation.
Enter The CIA.
Colluding with the American Intelligence agency, Burnham leveraged the West’s ignorance of foreign politics combined with rigged election schemes and both political coalitions and divisions to gain leadership (despite not actually having the popular vote) in 1964, following a brutal riot that resulted in the murders of two oil workers—one Indian, the other African.
After that, the racial divide was successfully constructed. While there was an Indian majority in the population, due to both extremely low literacy rates out of resistance to the segregated Canada Mission-run Indian schools, but English fluency, which many Indians couldn’t speak, was a requirement for any kind of political participation. This pushed most Indians out of higher education and civil employment, and while many had been able to buy the land they lived and worked on from the quickly fleeing plantation owners, roughly 50 percent of them were still living on those plantations by the 1950s, as Gaiutra Bahadur writes in the 2013 book Coolie Woman.
Which is around when the eldest of my father’s siblings were born, in a newly constructed village off the Demerara river. My grandparents, however, were born in Rose Hall, a plantation that would later develop into a town of its own. It may possibly be the plantation my grandfather worked on before he became a bauxite miner, and it may possibly be (at least one of) the plantations that his parents—my great-grandparents—were indentured to.
When my father and his siblings were growing up, only some lucky children would get to go to high school. Those that did often still had to work, alongside their parents and the siblings not lucky enough to attend, at their family farms and businesses. And those that went to school were the first to lose their cultural tongues and traditions.
The class and political consciousness of the Indo-Guyanese was low (by construction). They had little political and economic power within the confines of British Guiana and then Guyana, following its independence in 1966—the independence that Churchill delayed.
But when people in the West thought of “East Indians”, they thought of the burgeoning Hindutva movement that followed India’s own independence. The same movement that rejected returning immigrants, regardless of former caste or status, to the extent that some Indians who’d tried to return to India suffered so greatly that they decided to return to British Guiana to tough it out with the community they’d built there.
Following the 1964 election, Burnham worked with the CIA in secret to pass legislation that allowed expatriates, the majority Afro-Guyanese, to be able to vote from abroad in the elections—though some American “voters” would prove to be falsified. Running on a Black Power platform, contemporaneously as the Black Panther party would gain popularity amongst Black Americans, Burnham presented himself to Afro-Guianese-Americans as an icon of Black resistance.
But this wasn’t even the case for the majority of Afro-Guianese that actually lived there. The PPP had grown in popularity, but with gerrymandered voting districts and a coalition with another smaller party, gave Burnham the majority of representative seats. After he won Guyana’s independence in 1966, Burnham then swiftly turned away from his former American allies to seek support from the Soviet Union and institute the very policies and stances (such as supporting the Palestinian Liberation Movement) as the maligned PPP.
However, this only began the rise of Burnham’s dictatorship, which would harm both Africans and East Indians alike, but the severity of the impact predominantly on the Indian population. Walter Rodney, the Black political activist who wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, vehemently opposed Burnham as he restricted the freedom of press and forcibly displaced East Indians from Wismar, Christianburg and Mackenzie (later renamed Linden) as part of what’s known as the Wismar Massacre—although there are still those who insist that it never happened. A relative told me about the violence that spread to the area of Mahaicony, but due to the restriction of press, there’s nearly no mention of it outside of personal testimony. It was only after Burnham’s death in 1985 and Jagan’s re-election in 1992 that details of the violence began to be covered in press and academia.
Now there are a lot of differences between the dynamics between what’s happening in Palestine and what Burnham did in Guyana: religion was the scapegoat in the former, race in the later; both Africans and Indians were displaced people on the land while Palestinians were indigenous to the land for centuries; Guyana was staunchly socialist and Israel is strictly pro-capitalism; and while there was an eruption of armed violence under Burnham, he was never a military superpower. But the similarities are still hard to ignore.
And what I’d say the main throughline between the two “conflicts” was Western ignorance of global history and the Western vanity that presumes that the conditions that exist in Europe and North America are universal across the globe. It relies on a lack of critical thinking, and the knee-jerk reactions we have when confronted with historical trauma.
In the Western context, both Jewish people and Black people have and continue to face violent oppression while at the same time are accused of conspiracies rooted in anti-Semitic and anti-Black beliefs. The most privileged Hindu and Muslim groups in Asia have both relied on authoritarian and militarized oppression to promote their nationalistic movements.
But that is where the distinction lies: privilege.
While the roots of racism, anti-Semitism and many other forms of oppression have grown from the belief that our cultures, values, intelligence and whatever else were inherent to our racial identities, the truth is that how we distinguish between oppressor and oppressed has to do with power and privilege. And if we aren’t able to identify who holds power and privilege over whomever else, it does make it a lot easier to weaponize DARVO-like tactics to convince outsiders that the oppressor is actually the oppressed.
And you don’t need to rely on identity to figure out who is and isn’t the oppressor. You just have to look at who is more willing to support the Euro-American imperial agenda. So in Guyana I don’t see what happened with Burnham as Indians versus Africans and in Palestine I don’t see it as a “war” between Jews and Muslims. What I see is one group that’s willing to collaborate with imperial agendas and the people that have to suffer the consequences of decisions they have no say in.
Colonial and Capitalist Educations
You see, I don’t believe that every Black-led leadership would abuse their powers like Burnham, just like I don’t believe that every Jewish-led leadership would be the equivalent to Zionism. I don’t think identity, race, religion, gender or even class will dictate anyone’s politics, nor will they define which movements will get promoted or adopted by international political superpowers. What I believe are the reasons that Burnham deviated from Jagan’s more communist policies are the same reasons that the US found him the more preferable ally: education and capitalism.
As my Caribbean Societies professor, Arnold Itwaru, writes about education in his 1994 book Closed Entrances:
For what was taking place was a particular kind of training in seeing where decency was itself given a new meaning. Decency meant the indecency of the loyalty of the oppressed to their oppressor. … This indecency is the invidious infliction of unreason as part of the fundamental unreasonableness of colonial rule. … This Occupation affirmed its presence in the deep wounding of thought, in a psychic cruelty requiring the reformulation of thinking to accept the unreasonable as reasonable, to accommodate the atrocity of British imperial control without this being seen for what it was: British Occupation. (p. 11-12)
In Western Asia, Benjamin Netanyahu, born to a Cornell University professor, attended high school in Philadelphia, completed degrees at MIT and took courses at Harvard (in between stints in the IOF) before returning to Tel-Aviv and politics. And it’s long been established that Israeli schools were designed to indoctrinate children into Zionism before they ever have a chance to formulate their own opinions. And that indoctrination is often perpetuated in schools in the West—including Canada.
Burnham was an Oxford-educated lawyer when he returned to British Guiana to get involved in politics. Jagan also left the country to attend university—to Northwestern where he studied pre-med to become a dentist and discovered Marxist literature.
Just over an hour’s flight away in Trinidad, Eric Williams, its first Prime Minister and an early supporter of Jagan though would later distance himself from Jagan’s staunch communist values, was also Oxford-educated. But Williams was among the first to celebrate the contributions by East Indians to the development of T&T, including a chapter celebrating and memorializing their contributions and tribulations in his national history book and in public lectures in Woodford Square.
Reading about Trinidad, there’s a pride in their multicultural history and speaking to other Trinis, both Afro and Indo, I’ve been encouraged enthusiastically to embrace my heritage and welcomed to the culture with warmth. While personal prejudices still exist, they embody the racial and religious tolerance that so-called Canada is often portrayed to be a beacon of. There’s nothing inherent to the racial and religious tensions that exist elsewhere. The difference was that, after the discovery of a pitch lake and oil, Trinidad was willing to play in the capitalist game.
But in Guyana, as one of my aunts tells me, they didn’t learn about their own history in school, only England’s. My grandparents couldn’t afford to send all of her seven siblings to the nearby private high school. They couldn’t afford to attend the more prestigious Queen’s College secondary school in the capital, Georgetown. Guyana didn’t even have a university until around the time my father was born; students had to win scholarships to travel abroad to get a university education. My professor was fifteen when he created a local library in his village and began teaching.
Before the 1880s, when the Canadian Presbyterian Church established the first Indian school in Berbice, there was no school system for Indians in British Guiana. The Canada Mission used the school system, developed in Trinidad, to save the East Indian “heathens” through Christianity. This would add language and personal barriers that my father and his siblings faced in learning about it from their families; the younger generations grew up speaking English, the older ones speaking some dialect of Hindi.
My grandfather’s mother was indentured but none of my family can tell me much about her because she died when they were young and she didn’t speak much when she was alive. Neither did my grandfather, who was born on a plantation and who helped raise me before he died when I was around five years old—I know nearly nothing about his life from before he was a father. “Their life was very hard,” is all anyone can tell me. As they’ve been teaching me about their personal histories, I’ve, in turn, been teaching them about their academic history.
However, seeing the complex ways that Palestinians deconstruct colonialism and knowing that they have a 97.7% literacy rate, I have a much deeper understanding why education was revered in my family, as much damage it had done to our own identity. Seeing the way that not even knowing what your family and community has been through has convinced members of my family that their suffering is their own doing. Access to knowledge and our histories truly is power.
Translating from Macro to Micro
Even if you prefer to stay out of politics—which can be a very political statement in itself—these complexities in identity don’t just exist on an international scale. Power doesn’t exist in a binary, neither does oppression and neither does identity. Power exists in a complex system that can be wielded in complex ways. Identity goes beyond race and religion, just like race goes beyond Black/White. Our identities are constellations of every facet of ourselves that shape our experiences.
Intersecting axes of privilege, domination, and oppression. Adapted from Morgan, 1996 [27] (p. 107).
Image Description: A circle of intersecting lines that pass through the same centre. The X-axis is labelled Domination. Each line represents a system of oppression with the ends of the lines above the X-axis labelled with the privileged identity and the ends below with the oppressed identity, indicating two ends of a spectrum. Lines include:
Genderism, with "Male and masculine" and "female and feminine" above the x-axis and "Gender 'deviant'" below; Sexism or Androcentrism, with "Male" above the x-axis and "Female" below; Racism, with "White" above the x-axis and "People of color" below; Eurocentrism, with "European heritage" above the x-axis and "Non-European Origin" below; Heterosexism, with "Heterosexual" above the x-axis and "LGBTQ" below, Ableism, with "Able-bodied" above and "Persons with disabilities" below, Educationalism, with "Credentialed" above and "Non-literate" below; Ageism, with "Young" above and "Old" below; Politics of Appearance, with "Attractive" above and "Unattractive" below; Classism, with "Upper and Upper-Middle Class" above and "Working class, poor" below; Language bias, with "Anglophones" above and "English as a second language" below; Colorism, with "Light, pale" above and "Dark" below; Anti-semitism, with "Gentile Non-Jew" above and "Jews" below; Pro-Natalism, with "Fertile" above and "Infertile" below
Henriques, Ana & Rafael, Sónia & Almeida, Victor & Pinto, José. (2023). The problem with gender-blind design and how we might begin to address it: A model for intersectional feminist ethical deliberation. 1-12. 10.1145/3544549.3582750.
I saw an illustrated cartoon once that depicted a chain of “bullying:” An employer yells at his employee who turns around and yells at his wife who turns around and yells at her child who turns around and yells at their younger sibling. In the context of childhood bullying, we seem to understand how someone can be oppressed in roles where they don’t hold power while being the oppressor in roles where they do.
Yet as soon as identities like race, religion, gender, class, disability or whatever other axis (or axes) of oppression gets introduced, the concept seems to confuse many people—especially once you add in cultural or historical ignorance. The result can end up perpetuating oppression with the veneer of political correctness.
The first time I realized I’d fallen into this trap was back when an essay went viral describing the sexual misconduct of the Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari. Experiencing and witnessing the ways that white women had fetishized and objectified and demonized me and other brown people in my life, my own knee-jerk reaction was to question the severity of the claim and the impact it could have on racialized men. I’m very grateful for the people who commented on my post to gently (and not-so-gently) call me in, because it made me reevaluate the lens I was understanding abuse and harm and even my own experiences that had been so normalized in my own life.
I had come to the essay looking at the power dynamics as Brown Man vs White Woman. But that was still an oversimplification of the dynamics at play. Ansari wasn’t just your average Indian man. He was also a famous and beloved comedian in his mid-thirties and Grace, the anonymous author of the article, was also a virtually unknown photographer in her early twenties who met him as she worked an Emmy Awards after-party.
So maybe it was karma that I would relive my own iteration of the experience from the other side after coming out about the abuse I endured by my ex. Or maybe it was that if we allow others to use their identity to deflect from the harm they’ve caused, they’ll freely use the same tactic against ourselves.
He moved here from Guyana a little over ten years ago which is why a previous ex-boyfriend introduced me to him at a party in the summer of 2019 and why he was on my Facebook friends list when that relationship ended a few months later. When we started seeing each other, I was just blossoming into my career and he’d been a comedian for a few years and seemed to know everybody. Long before I developed my self-esteem, I was enamoured and in disbelief that someone like him could be attracted to someone like me. And I wouldn’t believe it until he would spend the next few months, at least three of them after the onset of the COVID-19 state of emergency, trying to convince me otherwise. By June 2021, despite numerous red flags he always had “reasonable” explanations for, I moved in with him which began the worst year of my life.
By the following June, he’d moved out after I began to speak out about how I’d been treated and I’d lost any doubt I previously had that the abuse wasn’t out of ignorance or misunderstanding—it was intentional. But even though, during the year we lived together, he showed no interest in attending or performing at events in spaces I’d feel safe or welcome in (or at least as he explained why he never invited me to join him at any), that summer he performed at Pride, was posting selfies with prominent members of my community from their events, and trying to date someone who I’d connected with for mentorship before it rolled off my radar during the cyclical upheavals he began to put my life through. So I began to warn my community.
And while many people I admire, respect and trust listened, asked questions and negotiated support boundaries with me before they ultimately agreed with me that my abuser was unsafe, a certain collective (that often leverages terminology like transformative justice, disability justice, intersectionality and abolition to leverage themselves to receive community support and grant funding) completely dismissed me—even after someone reached out to share how uncomfortable they’d been seeing him at one of their parties—before pushing me into a mediation where even though everything I said was “valid”, I felt like I was being coerced into retracting my story because my abuser was a Black man and sharing my story was more harmful than anything he’d done to me.
But once again, the power dynamics weren’t just Black man versus non-Black person. I’m physically disabled, visibly transmasculine, autistic, already a DV survivor trying to reconnect with community after being isolated for six years and had been living severely below the poverty line for years on my self-employment. He was none of those things. He was however, a light-skinned mixed Black cis man who immigrated in his adulthood from a country that my family had to flee, where he went to a prestigious high school where his classmates and teachers would predominantly look like him and where he was given more leniency because his mother taught there; he was shortly made permanent at his full-time finance job and given health insurance after I moved in with him; he’d wielded transphobic and ableist vitriol any time I displeased him; and he knew that he was my only connection to a country that had irrevocably shaped me since I’d been estranged from most of my family. When you consider the exponentially higher rates of abuse that disabled people, autistic people, and trans people experience, it’s clear who held the most power within our relationship.
This doesn’t mean that I can’t engage in anti-Blackness, especially when we both live in a city where there’s rampant police violence, but it does mean that I can’t wield it with the same power as a white cisgender person and that there are still many ways that other forms of oppression can be wielded over me as well, even if in very different ways.
Not to mention how disingenuous it felt to have privately reaching out to community organizers about my abuser compared to “community policing” while the members of the collective didn’t even blink an eye hearing how he’d actually threatened to call the police on me when I had a breakdown and then—after claiming he’d respect the safety plan we developed after I gave him all the statistics of police violence for all those groups including the stories of Sammy Yatim and Reyal Jardine-Douglas—lied about me holding his stuff hostage when I felt unsafe, after he physically abused me, to get his friend to threaten me with the police again. Even though my abuser also knew that I’d been unable to get my previous abuser to move out of the apartment in my name because I’d refused to involve the police. And then he’d also threatened me with legal action even though he couldn’t (and still hasn’t) explained what it was that he thinks I’m lying about or how I’d abused him. It was especially disingenuous when only a few months later the same collective reached out to me to create a workshop for them on how to make safer spaces for queer disabled artists.
Using this type of deflection ends up harming survivors of abuse and exploitation as well as the marginalized communities that get used as scapegoats because it limits how and when we can speak up about our own stories—especially if they’re true. When we discourage people from building the skills to judge people by their actions rather than their identity, we only perpetuate the idea that those identities exist as a monolith.
I don’t believe that abusers represent the values or views of their entire communities, just like I don’t believe that Zionists represent all Jewish people, just like I don’t believe that Burnham represented all Afro-Guyanese people. But when third parties involved project that conflation onto our stories, then we’re forced into a position where we can’t just speak to our own experiences, we have to be experts on systemic oppression. And if we don’t speak up, especially if our abusers leveraged their association with us to gain the trust of other multiply marginalized members of our communities who look up to us for our work, it gets really difficult not to feel like it’s your fault if even more vulnerable members of your community end up harmed by them—which is usually only a matter of time before other stories start surfacing.
That’s why many Black and brown marginalized genders who are survivors often disappear from spaces virtually moments after they gain any kind of visibility, while their abusers will continue to run through rounds of relationships with newly rising members of the community. In my experience, a lot of the time it feels easier to just quietly walk away and give up opportunities and the careers we worked for or picking up and moving away if we can (I’ve thought about it many times myself to be honest, but none of the women in my family were ever really good at submissively and quietly accepting mistreatment).
As Bahadur and Black feminists have noted, when we allow one group, like racialized men, to use their identity to deflect responsibility from their actions, it only makes it easier for them to abuse and exploit the people within their own marginalized group who experience more marginalization than they do. I didn’t care if he continued to pursue comedy or continued to act how he chose after our relationship—as long as he stayed away from people he could wield power over who wouldn’t receive the same kinds of protection or support as he could.
So whether on the international level or an interpersonal one, we need to be able to engage with our communities about the complexities of power and oppression if we actually want to claim that we are capable of protecting each other. Our allegiance needs to be with liberation, not a single identity, or else we open ourselves up to perpetuate the abuse or exploitation of others by proxy. I can only speak for myself, of course, but that’s not something I want to keep adding onto my conscience.
