Pathologising structural criticism as anger, or as other negative emotional expressions from dispossessed community members, is easier than interrogating one’s own privilege and position within global power structures, especially when the realities that ‘there’s no such thing as meritocracy’ and ‘everything is political’ are both brushed off as matters of subjective opinion that require “nuance.”

I was once called hateful by a random white Westerner woman on the internet. My rhetoric was promoting violence and hatred, she said. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember the substance of my response to her pathologising me.

Knowing myself, I’m always intentional in my response. So I asked her something along the lines of, “Since I’ve said nothing about your person, but I have laid out the West’s systemic privileges and positionality, even in digital space, did you pathologise me because of a) your lack of political vocabulary to respond, b) your discomfort, or c) the safe space provided by centuries of Western Islamophobic propaganda that paints Muslims as both dangerous and backward? And did you do that because I’m a visibly Muslim woman actively displaying self-agency, political coherence, and historical literacy you hadn’t expected?”

She blocked me.

That was during the time when I was still generous with the benefit of the doubt and grace. I would be civil and polite with everyone. Even with those who talked to me condescendingly.

You see, after multiple long sessions of therapy, I’m now one of those who believe that people should not have to earn respect as a basic necessity. Respect comes with dignity; it’s been ours since the moment of our birth. We can gain more respect as we grow older, absolutely. But the default state is that we’re all dignified and respected just for existing.

The beauty of having free will is that, in our lifetime, the number of opportunities to gain more respect is the same as the number of opportunities to earn disrespect and dishonour. But don’t get me wrong, it is only through your hard work at being scum that you can earn disrespect and dishonour.

So when you see me as hateful, vengeful, envious, psychopathic, abusive, or whatever ableist or classist terms you love to use for systematically dispossessed people who display class consciousness and political literacy on a whole other level beyond the reality where you comfortably operate—I will never correct you. But I will definitely show you what hateful looks and sounds like. Because, at that point, you’ve earned that. And if you are ever near me, you will definitely earn my spit in your face.

“Now, Wanda, wouldn’t that be over the top, and not exactly the kind of bridge-building response within collective struggle?”

Would you welcome someone who threw a Molotov into your front yard yesterday as a guest today, let them enter your living room, and serve them tea?

This reminds me of a quote from a sheikh I stumbled across on Instagram in 2023 about Palestinian resistance forces: “Some people want to criticise the table manners of the starving person.”

That quote recently resurfaced because said sheikh came through my Instagram algorithm again and said something deeply relatable about politics, which eerily sounds similar to what I said to my uni friends more than a decade ago when I was the head of their electoral campaign team. And naturally, with what happened recently, the starving person quote came back in full force to the front of my mind.

Some people do indeed just want to criticise the table manners of the starving person, instead of asking why that person is starved and how to stop the starvation. All the while, they have their boots on the starving person’s neck.

The boots may not be theirs, and they may not be the ones who helped put the boots on the starving person’s neck, sure. But why do they keep the boots clean with the same tongues that criticise the table manners of the starving person?

Remove the boots; maybe then, you can finally see me as a human being. Who knows? Maybe I can also finally stop seeing, in your person, the system that systematically dispossesses my people and those who share several political identity markers with me, while simultaneously benefiting you and shaping you as a person. Only then can we talk about that bridge.

“It could just be your lack of conflict resolution skills, Wanda.”

What conflict? Does inviting the arsonist whose Molotov ruined your front yard, just because it had certain flowers that they hated and because you weren’t home, count as conflict resolution? Do you also go around to people’s neighbourhoods, see a house with its gate wide open while the owners are nowhere to be seen, and then invite yourself in?

There should be a limit to how far the disconnection between people’s claims of political alignment and the aptitude at their disposal to reconcile their material conditions with their political self-claims can go before their attempts to synthesise political theory with their praxis only highlight and emphasise their incompetence and cognitive dissonance.

If you want to talk about conflict resolution, start with dignity and boundaries. Learn what they require before lecturing me about tone.

I don’t see myself as wise, full of wisdom, and certainly not a master of life. But one thing I have learned from my own life is that what we are taught to tolerate can quietly become what we mistake for maturity. If we never examine it, that tolerance follows us into every space we occupy. We start calling self-abandonment patience, calling silence peace, calling domination order, and eventually measuring other people’s reactions by standards that were never humane to begin with. That is true whether the pattern looks harmless, like a quirky habit, or harmful, like letting people dictate what you are and what you must become, letting your personal space be violated, or attributing mutual aid to begging, humiliation, and religious corruption, etc.

mastodon.social/@vsharma2430/1…

Instead of imposing your standards on me, perhaps you should ask what those standards were built from. What have you tolerated happening to you? What did you learn to call maturity, peace, patience, or love? And why do you expect others to accept the same terms before you will consider them reasonable?

The moment you police someone’s reactions to harm that they experienced, you are functionally the same as the one who caused harm, regardless of the political alignment you claim to have.

Solidarity and humanity aren’t conditional or transactional, absolutely. But self-abandonment, enduring abuse, or normalising harm are never required for coalition or bridge-building. What and whom do you fight for if you see yourselves as less than human, undeserving of safety, justice, and peace?

Author’s note:

I originally wanted to post the receipts of self-proclaimed leftists framing me as cold, hateful, unrepentant, misandrist, or disproportionate whenever I respond to harmful stupidity with political clarity and deliberate insults instead of liberal respectability politics. This post was supposed to be a call-out post for that demographic, but I ended up with this instead. I decided not to include them here because the point is not the replies of these leftists. The point is the pattern.

I still stand by what I said about cursing the day someone’s mother birthed them, though.

The last part of this article is for those who insist on bridge-building and reserving massive amounts of love as radical anarchist praxis, unconditionally, in every interaction—with no consideration for systemic trauma coalescing wonderfully with personal trauma in collective struggles. That is a role for those who structurally have the most advantage and the least material risk. Quit universalising.

Stop assuming grace is non-reciprocal or unconditional, or that people owe it to you by default, regardless of your conduct.

Start breaking the frame that the internet is just the internet and not a reflection of someone’s character in real life. Doesn’t the manosphere exist on the internet? The divorces happen outside the internet as a result, sure. But the red-pilling happens through internet algorithms.

USA, Israel, Russia, Indonesia, China, and even Iran wouldn’t have dedicated massive budgets for narrative control in the digital sphere if the internet were merely an unserious place.

@mutualaid @mutualaid @disability @autistics @actuallyadhd @wrzky

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