(Including the violence you want me to stop talking about.) There’s a particular kind of betrayal that Black, Indigenous, and other racially marginal
(Including the violence you want me to stop talking about.)
There’s a particular kind of betrayal that Black, Indigenous, and other racially marginalized Survivors know too well:
The kind where we’re invited into spaces of “healing” and “unity”…
—but only if we don’t bring up race.
Only if we don’t mention enslavement, colonization, genocide, or displacement.
Only if we quiet down about how violence shows up differently in our communities.
Only if we erase our truth for the comfort of some fellow Survivors who say they want solidarity—
but only if it looks and sounds like them.
Let’s be honest:
If your version of Survivor “unity” requires me to erase where I come from—
It is not unity. It’s domination dressed in soft language.
You don’t get to ask us to:
Leave generational trauma at the door
Pretend we haven’t survived both abuse and racism
Forget the systemic violence that shaped our families, our silence, and our access to help
Abandon our truth to make your healing circle feel tidy
That’s not safety. That’s a performance of safety that comes at the expense of our lived experience.
You are not wrong for walking away from people who:
Defend your abuser
Defend the system that shaped your abuser
Or ask you to be silent about how oppression made you more vulnerable to harm in the first place
You are not divisive for naming what happened.
You are not ungrateful for speaking of your ancestors.
You are not “making it about race”—it was already about race.
You are just telling the truth.
Some of us are expected to show up in all the spaces:
To support everyone else’s movements.
To advocate for justice.
To be sisterly.
To be brave.
But when we speak our truth?
When we say the words “slavery,” “rape as a tool of empire,” “forced sterilization,” “generational poverty,” “medical racism,” or “state violence”?
We are met with:
Silence
Defensiveness
Irritation
Or complete erasure
And still, we are told to stay in the circle.
But you don’t have to stay.
You are allowed to leave those spaces.
You are allowed to build your own.
You are allowed to speak the full truth—without permission and without apology.
Because a Survivor space that makes you choose between your racial truth and your healing
is just another room that expects you to suffer quietly.
The door closes when you choose their violence—historic, systemic, or personal—over my truth.
Let it close.
Let it lock.
Let it echo.
We are building new rooms where the truth can live in full color.
Where trauma isn’t flattened to one shape.
Where unity means we all get to bring our whole selves.
And until that exists, we’ll build it from scratch—one honest voice at a time.
— WeSurviveAbuse.com
