just a little casual silencing

26 Apr 2019

for some of my more radical and outspoken friends, being silenced is a run-of-the-mill experience. but it’s never happened to me before and it happened for the first time on 6 april 2019 at 9.16am!

my twitter account was suspended and i have no idea why! it was unsuspended before i could inquire as to why, but it felt pretty wild to log in and be like, silenced by a global platform.

and speaking of silencing, about two weeks, danya and i were finalizing session 2 of our planning for freedom workshop at harvard and i was looking for text-based version of the ‘challenging white supremacy’ handout.

and then, boom. this.

now, the last time i checked (seconds ago), the website was back up and running. but the fact that it could be taken down as hate speech… well… it’s a tactic as old as oppression itself.

“When you are accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.” — stephanie herrera

if you’re used to privilege, it’s not actually a big deal to claim that folks working for equality are attempting to create reverse-oppression and that they must be stopped at any and all costs.

i write about all this because, as has been happening for a while with liberation (especially black) activists and organizers on facebook, twitter, and instagram, silencing by power structures is a real threat to freedom work. and i mean freedom as in “the ability to experience joy without fear,” not that freedom definition that is “ability to do whatever i want when i want.”

stay woke. actually.

words / writing / post-processing
241w / 10min / 12min