The privileged: those who live in safety, who hold passports of war mongering nations that destroy the “lesser” nations- the nations of the brown bodies, the nations of the colonized, the nations of erased people whose wealth is leeched to make the future weapons that return to bomb the now impoverished nations who are then blamed for their poverty and “backwardness”- those people? they will never understand that for us- for the refugees, the displaced, the silenced, the exiled in the diaspora, those subject to massacres and genocides, those who face police or state brutality daily, those whose family members remnants have yet to be found under the rubble of bombed concrete buildings, those whose indigenous cultures are erased and then appropriated as exoticized latest trends- politics is not a privilege we seep with a skim milk chai latte at Starbucks and pack away with a click of our expensive ultra sleek apple laptop. For us politics is the poverty of our neighborhoods, the hunger in the belly of our children, the fathers who have disappeared, the brothers who have not been heard from since they left to cross the oceans in search of something better, the entire family members drowned at sea; for us politics is the sea of refugee camps, the raining cluster bombs, the barely teenagers who join the liberation armies, the young girls who leave for the mountains or the depth of the jungles, the graves of the massacred civilians as far as the eye can see, the flat plains that were once villages, the grandparents whose bones still rot in mass graves, the beheaded bodies, the imprisoned uncles, the tortured cousins, the denied histories. For us, it is the colour of our skin, the sound of our religion, the feel of our scarves on our heads, the tone of our liberation rhetoric, the ethics and the rights we refuse to relinquish just as tightly and surely as a refugee mother’s hands holds on to that of her drowning child at sea…
No, the privileged will never understand us.
The privileged choose politics as undergraduate subjects in universities and study it curiously like a zoologist studies species. They consume politics in 30 second news blurbs which they hastily switch when it becomes too gory. They choose politics in discussions in trendy bars and wash away its after taste. They collect activists on discussion panels. They pin safety pins on their clothes as some grand statement of personal ethics and a sign of their momentary commitment to causes they barely understand. They defend the right to ‘Hate Speech’ which they re-brand as ‘Free Speech’ having never been subjected to the systematic and power imbalances or the trauma and violence perpetuated by deliberately vile, racist speech on the already oppressed. They discuss the politics of “all Jews deserve ovens” scratched in letters of pent up rage on subway train maps calmly- and discard how terrifying that statement appears to the oppressed- and they walk away from politics just as easily as they close a book, or finish a bad coffee, or throw away a sandwich wrapper…
No, the privileged will never understand us.
They’ve never been us
Dr. Hawzhin Azeez
