If You Love Us, Why Are You Fighting for the Right to Hurt Us?

Harm does not always arrive announcing itself as hatred. Sometimes it comes smiling, agreeing with 80 percent of what you say, and spending the remai

Harm does not always arrive announcing itself as hatred. Sometimes it comes smiling, agreeing with 80 percent of what you say, and spending the remaining 20 percent figuring out exactly where to place the knife. While standing right next to you like they remind you constantly and boast about all the time.

There is a peculiar kind of visitor who comes to a wounded community carrying bitter medicine that costs a lot and doesn’t do a damn thing.

They know some of the songs. They co-created the songs. They know the jokes. They have eaten at your Mama’s table, lived in the neighborhood, dated somebody from the community, marched once, bought the T-shirt, wore the outfits, and learned the latest dances. They have learned enough of the language to feel familiar. Then, somewhere along the way, they begin asking for something.

Permission.

Permission to say the thing people outside the community have used to humiliate y’all. Permission to cross a boundary. Permission to tell the people who survived the history what that history really means. Dictate. And told you to pull out your pad and pen. Permission to decide which wounds are serious and which ones everybody ought to “be over by now.”

And when the answer is no, suddenly they have discovered a cause worth fighting for.

This is happening around women in ways that deserve our attention. Women are talking about rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, stalking, coercion, pornography, exploitation, medical neglect, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, marrying as girls, being pimped out, and the ordinary calculations women make every day to remain safe. We are saying no. Stop. Listen. Learn what happened to us. Help prevent the next woman or child from going through it.

Yet there are people who can hear all of that and somehow become most animated about their freedom to call women degrading names. Their right. Even worse, they don’t want to talk about any of the things that are important to women, and they don’t want you to talk about it either. Let’s talk about makeup, hair, clothing, celebrity gossip, and who men temporarily desire more.

Think about that.

Women have spent generations fighting to be recognized as full human beings. Our foremothers fought against laws and customs that placed wives under husbands, enslaved under people who called themselves “masters,” restricted women’s property and political rights, excused enormous amounts of male domination and treated women’s ambitions as dangerous or ridiculous. Women organized shelters, rape crisis centers and hotlines because violence that had been dismissed as private trouble was leaving real women frightened, injured and dead.

The women doing that work were challenging society to listen.

So when a man insists that he loves women while fighting harder for his right to slur women than for women’s right to live safely, or tell women to stop talking about their boundaries and rights because male feelings are being “hurt”, women are allowed to examine that contradiction. Love is revealed by what you protect. Friendship has evidence. Respect eventually has to become behavior.

You may believe people have broad freedom to speak without volunteering yourself as the personal defense attorney for every degrading word they choose. The same strange performance happens around Black people.

Black people know what it is to have somebody adore pieces of us while resisting responsibility toward us. Come to us for extraction like a well that never needs anything in order to keep giving water.

They can love Black music enough to know every lyric and still refuse to learn WHY Black people had to sing some of those songs in the first place. They can love hip-hop, jazz, blues, gospel, R&B, our language, humor, clothes, dances and inventions. They can grow up beside Black families, have Black friends, and collect enough proximity to believe they have earned special access.

Then comes the request. Let me say the word too.

And when Black people say no, some people become more passionate about securing permission to use a racial slur than they have ever been about understanding the history that made the word a slur.

That tells us something. More than we can say. More than we choose to say. Even in our giving there is so much more in the vault. Globalwide, that’s what culture is.

The history surrounding anti-Black language did not begin when somebody heard a Black rapper use a word in a song. These words traveled through worlds in which Black people were enslaved, segregated, terrorized, caricatured, excluded from institutions, driven from communities, and told where we could live, learn, eat, work and sit. Language participated in that arrangement. Words helped establish who was considered fully human, who could be mocked, who could be dismissed and whose suffering required no answer.

Living beside Black people does not erase that history. Loving Black culture does not grant ownership of Black memory. Knowing our music does not make somebody more qualified than we are to tell us what racism means.

Women have to be careful about this too. Black people have to be careful about it. Every community does. Our wounds should never become somebody else’s permission slip for cruelty.

A person who challenges a community can be precious. We need people who warn us, disagree with us, uncover hypocrisy, question leaders, expose abuse and ask us to consider whether or not our own behavior has wandered away from our principles.

10 Signs You’re Being Dehumanized—Even by People Who Say They Support You – WE Survive Abuse

For Survivors, there is another lesson here worth keeping close. Pay attention when someone repeatedly argues with your boundaries instead of becoming curious about them. A person does not have to understand every experience you have lived through before respecting your no. They do not need a dissertation on your childhood, your previous relationship, your assault, your fear or your reasons before deciding not to hurt you. Yes, the trick is that some people try to make YOU believe that they need all of this before they accept the boundary. Not true. Never true.

A boundary is not an invitation to litigation.

Women know how exhausting it can become when every no summons a courtroom. Why can’t I say it? Why can’t I call you that? Why can’t I come in? Why can’t I touch you? Why are you offended? Why can’t you take a joke? Why should I change?

After enough of this, the woman finds herself explaining while the other person remains comfortably unchanged.

There comes a point when the question belongs on the other side of the table.

Why is hurting me this important to you?

Black people can ask it.

Women can ask it.

Survivors can ask it.

And we can pay attention to the answer that behavior gives.

And when someone tells me they love people like me while spending their strength and passion defending the right to degrade people like me, I am allowed to believe what their priorities are showing me.

Because love cannot live forever as a claim.

Sooner or later, love has to come over to our side of the street.

It has to listen to our no. Learn our history. Care whether we are safe. Stand against the people hurting us. Refuse to make entertainment out of our humiliation. Hear what we actually think instead of telling us what we ought to think.

You do not have to agree with everything a people says to love them.

But if the freedom you keep fighting hardest for is everybody else’s freedom to wound them, quit calling that love. Unburden yourself from that entire lie. Everyone in the entire world has made allowance for change—tariffs, taxes, and inflation too. Yesterday’s prices do not have to be today’s prices.

In all relationships, “when you know better, you do better.” Maya Angelou