I need to say something that I think a lot of people in ostensibly progressive spaces are either not aware of or not taking seriously enough.
I do not want to be part of any ideology, movement, or community where dehumanization is treated as acceptable rhetoric.
And I don’t mean that in an abstract, “let’s all be nicer uwu” way. I mean it very concretely.
When I see people say things like “this group shouldn’t be happy,” or “these people are inherently harmful,” or even escalate all the way to “these people should die,” I am not processing that as edgy venting or shorthand for structural critique. I am processing it as a statement about what kind of world you are willing to live in, because there is no clean line where language like that only ever applies to the exact target you intend.
Once you normalize speaking about groups of people as if they are disposable, as if their inner lives don’t matter, as if their existence is a problem to be solved, you have already crossed into something that I cannot trust, and that has consequences for how safe I feel around you. Not because I think you are literally going to harm me, but because it makes me question whether your sense of compassion has limits that I could fall outside of even when I am trying my best.
If the standard is that certain categories of people can be talked about as if they don’t deserve happiness, dignity, or even continued existence, I am hearing that compassion is conditional. And if compassion is conditional, then I have to wonder what happens when I fail to meet whatever criteria you have for deserving it.
That is not a stable or livable foundation for me.
I am already someone who thinks a lot about my own behavior. I am already willing to reflect, to listen, to adjust when I’ve caused harm. What I am not willing to do is exist in a space where I am also expected to accept rhetoric that treats people as fundamentally expendable.
Because that kind of rhetoric doesn’t just stay “out there.” It changes the atmosphere of the entire space.
It turns every interaction into something that feels a little less safe, a little less grounded, a little more like you are one misstep away from being recategorized as someone who no longer deserves care.
That is not what I signed up for when I tried to move toward something more compassionate than what I used to believe about the world.
If your politics require you to speak about people in ways that strip them of humanity, I am not going to follow you there.
Not because I don’t care about harm, or injustice, or the realities of the world, but because I do. I do not believe that a framework that relies on dehumanization, no matter who it is directed at, can ever produce something genuinely humane.
I am not asking for perfection. I am not asking for people to never be angry or never say something harsh. I am asking for a baseline of not normalizing talking about people as if they are disposable. If that baseline cannot be met, then I need distance from that space. Not as a punishment, not as a statement, but because I need to be able to exist somewhere that does not make me feel like my humanity is contingent.
