On Being Authentic
Talking about oppression and the impact it has on our lives doesn’t make us “dangerous”, or “threatening”, or “divisive”, or “manipulative”, or “dishonest”. It simply makes us humans who are asking for help in protecting our human rights because they are systematically removed daily, we suffer and die torturously for it.
We are more than “collateral damage”, or figures and files! We are people who have inalienable rights that go denied because the color of our skin excludes us from being seen and treated as “human beings”. I can’t count the number of times someone of a protected class said “animals can’t help it” as an excuse for treating animals better than Black Americans. It’s a common refrain that we live with all our lives and we are expected to accept such dehumanization without resistance. But we’re the “mentally unstable” and “genetically inferior” people?
When your response to our attempts to speak the truth about our suffering, and our rights being trampled on, is apathy, disbelief, sarcasm, or aggressive and violent then obviously that should tell you that you have a problem. It should tell everyone what the problem is. Why are you angry at targets of abuse for revealing the abuse honestly, openly, and rationally all while asking for help to end the abuse? What rationally thinking person gets angry at someone for asking for help, then abuses them even for doing it??? How does something so basically human become the impetus for a war? How are the most educated, empowered, privileged, and elite people in our society running the government and still denying this is reality? In fact, the opposite is true, they actively fight to continue to maintain not only the lie of equality but the brutal, unfair, toxic, violent system that traps us all into a place of very obvious inequality with no way out.
It’s a difficult cognitive dissonance to overcome, however, if you allowed yourself to believe these manipulations YOU ARE UNSTABLE.
If you were in this position, even just one of them, what would you do? If you are so privileged that you can’t even put yourself in the position to be rendered THIS powerless, invisible, valueless, or unworthy of life, then how do you believe you have the ability to judge me? You haven’t experienced what I have, even if you have experienced your own suffering, you haven’t done what I have done. You haven’t survived what I have. You haven’t walked in my shoes. You haven’t seen, heard, or experienced what I have. How are you qualified to judge and condemn me for being “unworthy”? Who or what gave you that authority that no human has? What’s worst, why would you want to do it?
Authenticity is hard to come by, as is wholeness. Most of the people walking around this world claiming to be one or both aren’t. It’s a show. Authentic humans do authentic human things. You couldn’t hide it if you wanted to, people spot it and respond to it! The proof is in the pudding, inner light always shines. Regardless of circumstances, being authentic is a choice everyone can make at any given moment on any given day. We all show our true selves, even when we aren’t aware of it.
If I, in my unwarranted suffering, can be open enough not to dominate, harm, or abuse you because you are different than myself, why can’t you? Which perspective is “inferior”? Being authentic means that telling the truth is what you do, regardless of who agrees. Even when we are threatened with extreme violence, authenticity doesn't just go away. We simply find the best means possible available to us to get our messages through. If you want to fight me on that, obviously that makes the problem YOU.
