Liberating us from our power-over

Liberation, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. How do you liberate a fish from water? We cry for liberation from the boot-heels of patriarchy, but into what new substrate of our own creation do we splash?

Don't mistake me, I am not advocating for the status quo. But too often our vision of liberation simply means that we, whichever oppressed demography we are a part of, find ourselves the oppressors. It's not that we plan for that. It's just that we can't see another way.

This is particularly true for those of us in the intersectional space of whiteness and queerness. We can't conceive of a world where we don't receive the privileges of whiteness, and so our envisioned utopias fail to create space for our black and brown siblings. Just as walking architects put stairs everywhere and add a lonely ramp around the back for wheelchair users.

Utopia cannot be the vision of one person or one class alone. The future must be liberated from our notions of power. And we must be liberated from the ethos of individualism. Nobody is an island, and those of us who imagine we have pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps are failing to see that it is our boot-heels pushing others down.

We must fall in love not with a utopia where all of our needs are accounted for, but with a vision of the future where everybody's needs are considered and cared for. And it is impossible for any of us to truly conceive of the complexity of that notion. So we need to be comfortable with and enamored of the knowledge that we can see only dimly, and have faith that our liberation from power is possible.

We must liberate ourselves from the idea that our individual vision is 20/20 and invest in the visions of others.