The past two weeks have been emotionally gut-wrenching. The last 16 hours alone have been devastating. Attacks on immigrants and attacks on Iranian civilians are happening in two very different places, but all forms of violence and oppression are inextricably linked. The people who want to hunt immigrants in Los Angeles are the same ones who want a war with Iran. I keep returning to Audre Lorde’s words: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
If you’re part of a group that has been vilified for so long, you are compelled — and often forced or prompted by others — to become a spokesperson for that community. You become an unofficial ambassador for a big group of people, sometimes for an entire region or a whole religion. You might not even be qualified to be an ambassador! You might’ve never spent time in that country or in that faith, you might’ve been too young to recount political history, and yet people (let’s be honest: they’re often white) want your point of view on what’s happening because you are their only point of connection to it.
Setting aside your feelings on being a spokesperson, you feel heartbroken because this situation impacts you on some level. You also try to minimize and compartmentalize that grief, because you aren’t directly impacted. Amidst these intense, conflicting feelings, there are times where you feel so compelled to be the representative for that group, without anyone’s prompting. Something so deeply rooted in you wants needs to stand up for your people, however many degrees of distance and difference you may have with them. If you don’t speak up, who else will? You take this responsibility on because you have the freedom - and the survivor’s guilt - of not being directly at the center of it. This is a tiny price to pay for the life you live.
There’s a Maz Jobrani joke from his earlier days of standup that my mind often goes to when my people are in the news for one reason or another: it’s the desperation of wanting to see your community portrayed as normal, peaceful humans like any other. Twenty years later, this joke resonates just as strongly as it did then. It stings a little more now because it feels like nothing has changed.
What will it take for people to realize our shared humanity? To not vilify one another and instead strive to build respect, understanding, and ultimately, community?
None of us are free until all of us are free.
Love and admire you so deeply, my friend