If you could hear the scream I just made https://twitter.com/escoblades/status/1273590948132519937

I’ve been thinking too much about the absence of empathy in public politics to see “ally fatigue” as anything other than the frustrated boredom of being forced to think about the pain you cause others, like how my nephew gets cranky when I try to make him apologize for hitting me

I can completely understand an information overload because I also get overwhelmed on a daily basis. But the attending to “allies” because they have to think about raced or gendered or ableist or whatever oppression for more than 3 minutes a day is, I’m sorry, fucking absurd.

The most important figures in “ally fatigue” are “the humanized perpetrator wounded by the infliction of harm and the secondhand witness vicariously wounded by the evocation of tragic memory” BOTH OF WHOM ARE THE “ALLY” THEMSELF.

https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2019/09/against-empathy/

The “ally” is a member of a more powerful community apparently working in service to a more marginalized community. This isn’t a positioning as horizontal, it’s effectively charity. So basically our charitable patrons are tired of having to donate and need supporting.

“Empathy” is not care. Thinking a lot about this description of the epistemologies of [white] care from Kitty Millett’s “The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust” and how much it deeply resonates with present-day white interactions:

The struggle will last for a long time, there isn’t a need to sprint. But this is some self-centered “white fragility”-coddling mammy nonsense that absolves perpetrators of harm of said harm because “they’re trying their best.” Sometimes your present best sucks.

I always find it ironic when institutions and powerful people try to temper anger and transmute it into empathy because I really don’t think there’s anything more useless than the moralizations of always consumptive empathy or anything more potent + harnessable than anger.

That they’re afraid of anger but wholeheartedly embrace an empathy that shifts focus away from the aggrieved should maybe say something?