The Intoxicating Power of Powerlessness

In the beginning, there was oppression. And it wasn't good. 

Black people were enslaved and segregated and killed for being in the wrong town. Gay people were jailed and chemically castrated and killed for falling in love with the “wrong” person. Jews were persecuted and vilified and slaughtered by the millions for reasons even Hitler didn’t understand. 

But, just as Martin Luther King promised, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. And sure enough, with time and hard work, the world slowly changed.

Black people became the full five-fifths of a person, gay people won equal access to divorce, and millions of Jews outlived Hitler despite his best efforts to erase them.

But while these older generations looked for hope in the future, it feels like newer generations are too busy looking for pain in the past. 

I’m not sure whether to blame therapy-speak or post-modernism or past-life regressions, but there’s a strange idea recently that oppression is a feature of group identities. 

That it doesn’t matter whether you’re a teenage girl whose greatest hardship is an unruly afro or a forty-year-old man who just started experimenting with he/they pronouns, you can immediately cloak yourself in the righteous outrage and historical grievances of everybody who ever kinda, sorta looked like you. 

Are you a multi-millionaire athlete whose skin happens to be brown? Why not portray yourself as a literal slave for sale at auction?

Maybe you’re a mediocre pleb who gets off on intimidating women. Well, if you can convince people that your bullying somehow helps the trans community, maybe you’ll be labelled a hero instead of a misogynist.

Are you willing to accept an unlimited number of dead Palestinian children as collective punishment for the October 7th atrocities? That’s fine, just remember to invoke the holocaust as a shield against criticism.

And if anybody dares to call you out, you can redefine those spiky terms like “white supremacist” and “transphobe” and “antisemite” to mean whatever you like.

For example, when Condoleezza Rice, a black woman born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, says:

...I would like black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their blackness, but in order to do that, I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white.

Be sure to call her a “foot soldier for white supremacy” and claim she wants to “whitewash U.S. history.” Even if you were born after segregation in Boston, Massachusetts.

When Jonathan Glazier, director of the Academy Award-winning holocaust movie The Zone of Interest, says:

Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.

I suggest cutting off his quote mid-sentence so you can disingenuously pretend he said he “refuted his Jewishness.”

And when JK Rowling writes:

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined […] I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

I don’t know, maybe call her a c*nt and threaten her with rape and/or murder? 

I’ll admit, once you convince yourself that some groups can't be criticised, it's frighteningly easy to lose your moral balance.

For example, I know that if a white video game developer posted a video saying he “doesn’t have black people on his team” because “the best way for an environment to be safe is to be around people who are just like me,” that most people would have no trouble condemning him.

But when a black woman says the same thing, I guess it’s…racist to point out the racism??

If a rapist announced, in the middle of his trial, that he wanted to go to a women’s prison, I’m sure the First Minister of Scotland wouldn’t tie herself in linguistic knots trying to defend the decision. 

But if that same rapist claims to feel like a woman (a claim even his estranged wife describes as a “sham”), I guess anyone who questions his sincerity is a transphobe now?

And if a politician openly referring to innocent civilians as “human animals” and calling for them to be “erased,” surely you’d describe them as extremist or even genocidal. 

But when Israeli politicians say the same thing about women and children in Gaza, sorry, criticising them becomes antisemitic. 

The only reason anybody is confused about any of this, the only reason some people accept these bizarre contradictions and insane double standards, is that they’ve mistaken a ranking on the victimhood tree for a character test. 

Call me crazy, but maybe we need a more nuanced way of telling right from wrong. 

The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice because most people are just. 

Most people don't want to see anybody suffer. Most people will do what they can to make others happy. And while almost all of us have blind spots about other people's struggles, most of us are willing to learn if we’re allowed a conversation instead of a sermon.

But as we become more polarised, as victimhood becomes an identity for more and more people, we lean further and further into the idea that most people are our enemies. That everybody with white skin is racist. That criticising Israel must always be weighed against the risk of antisemitism. That maintaining a functional understanding of biology is transphobic.

And most infuriating of all, that these differences in skin tone and identity mean we can never hope to understand each other. 

Not only is this a lie, it’s the same lie, slightly rebranded, behind all bigotry. 

Because bigotry is only possible when we’re more focused on our differences than our shared humanity. When we dehumanise people we disagree with instead of talking to them. When we suggest that some groups deserve more consideration than others. 

If our history can teach us anything, it’s that ideas like these, however well-intentioned belong in the past. 

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