Hegemonic Narratives: “It takes time”
CW: Victim erasure, murder, suicide mention
Relatable
One very common narrative you’ll be happening upon when discussing oppressed people and how to achieve their liberation is that “it takes time” for things to improve in some way. They say it takes time for society to become more tolerant, it takes time for bigoted people to unlearn, it takes time for people to get used to treating certain people like actual humans, etc.
And if you’re in any way privileged over the oppressed people in the respective conversation, especially if you consider yourself “progressive” and/or “liberal”, this probably seems to make a lot of sense to you. After all, we all have our habits and the older the habit, the harder it is to break, and no one likes to be criticized, right? And if you don’t like to be criticized, then you get defensive and we get nowhere if people just get defensive. Also, of course, it takes personal growth to realize that you are part of the problem, and personal growth, that takes time. If you want to successfully improve society and make people better, you gotta give them time. Time to reflect, time to think this through, time to lower their guard, time to get used to people being different, but still people, right? Right?
Well, yes, but actually, no. No. Not really.
Complicated
The things I mentioned before do happen and they are factors in how people get better in some regards. And in its abstraction it’s not in itself wrong, it’s more about all the unspoken assumptions and norms that have to be in place for one to be satisfied with this abstraction. And that is the perfidious nature of this kind of hegemonic narrative: They present you with a mostly innocuous seeming front and the actual dynamics that drive it remain hidden.
In this case, the most obvious aspect is that the victims of the bigotry/oppression in question are entirely erased. The concern for the victims is just a vague shimmer in the distance, the vague goal of achieving a society without the bigotry/oppression in question, but the only people that find a place in this narrative are the people doing the bigotry/oppression. The perpetrators in this narrative do not exist in a relationship to their victims, but rather in a vacuum that focuses on the humanity of the perpetrators by reducing the existence of victims to a narrative formality that does not get mentioned.
It’s basically the reversal of the narratives of what happens to victims of bigotry/oppression, which are most often written in passive terms, as something that happens to the victims, not as something that someone does to the victims. Victims get “hatecrimed”, but the perpetrators are not really part of the story. By removing the perpetrators you remove the ability to inspect the relationship between victims and perpetrators, which serves you especially well when you want to avoid any discussion, criticism, or worst of all actual change of the systemic dynamics at the heart of it. The humanity of the victims cannot coexist with the humanity of the perpetrators without endangering the system that put each in their respective places.
Compassionate
So with the victims removed from the equation, all that remains are the perpetrators and the empathy necessary to help them become better people in a way that affords them the most possible comfort. The focus is so much on lowering their inhibitions, is so understanding of their likely resistance and so gracious with the time requirements to get them there. But how in the fuck do we just end up in a hypothetical situation where the relationship to the victims can just be ignored like that? I mean, if we were their doctors and the perpetrators were sitting in isolation cells where they cannot hurt anyone but themselves and our only concern really only was how to turn these miserable fucks into a semi-decent human beings, yeah, sure… but… that’s not the case. Heck in most situations in which the narrative is brought up we usually do not even have the perpetrators’ attention, much less sufficient influence or control over them to get anywhere in the first place.
The narrative just immediately leads us to empathize and be compassionate with the perpetrators. There is no way to empathize with and be compassionate with the victims, because they do no exist in this narrative. They do exist in reality, though, and the existence of the bigoted perpetrator affects them, right now. This is usually brushed off with something akin to “Of course I care for the victims, that’s why I am talking about how to effectively improve things for them!”. Yet this is exposed as mere lip service when you consider that having empathy for and being compassionate with the victims would prioritize what helps them right now. It would prioritize how to stop the perpetrators from victimizing anyone as quick as possible.
If someone stepped on your foot, you’d ask them to get off of your foot before continuing any discourse with the person that stepped on your foot. And if they didn’t want to get off after being asked, you’d make them. Yet what people trying to sell to you is that you have to give someone who is stepping on someone else’s foot time to realize what they’re doing, come to terms with it and then decide from their own improved awareness that they should get off the respective foot they’re standing on. And this is why you hear this narrative from people who’s foot it most likely isn’t, because it’s easy to expect patience from someone you don’t really care for and whom you’ve been conditioned to at least unconsciously dehumanize. And it’s easy to care for the motivation of the foot-stepper, if you don’t have to feel the pain.
Elapsed
And the probably worst aspect of the whole narrative is that the people spouting it either never bothered to ask or deliberately want to make you ignore the question: When it takes time, whose time are we talking about?
Whose time does it take?
Because the passing of time does not affect us all equally. The victims have to endure whatever they’re face with while the perpetrator deliberates at their leisure. And this might be where the dehumanization of the victims is at its most ugly, because the clear implication here is that the suffering of the victims weighs less than the discomfort of the perpetrators when confronted with the harm they do and prompted to stop that harmful behavior. They are seen as an acceptable sacrifice to suffer and die, but it is not seen as acceptable to discomfort and upset the people who are responsible for — or at the very least complacent with — the victims’ suffering and deaths. And I’m not exaggerating for dramatic effect. Every kind of bigotry and oppression kills people every day. Whether by the immediate affects of bigoted and oppressive physical violence or the soul crushing torture that is living as the marginalized and dehumanized othered, which leads to early graves, through negligence, at their own hands or because their bodies simply cannot absorb any more emotional suffering.
This is the time it supposedly takes. And if that’s what it takes, maybe it’s just not worth waiting for people to change for the better. If we truly believe in the humanity of everyone, then we cannot afford patience for the privileged at the cost of the marginalized anymore. Then we cannot allow the oppressor to live off the stolen time of the oppressed anymore. Then we can respect the humanity of the perpetrator after we ensured the safety of their victims.
Time’s up.
