I also cannot stress this enough:
Stop using your trauma as an excuse to be bigoted.
I know what’s like to feel the pain and frustration of seeing humans hurt your kind, both as a human and a nonhuman myself. To reiterate: when are you going to stop and think about the SYSTEMIC issues tied to that pain instead of taking the easy way out by blaming and hating an entire species for existing?
I am Black. I have my own track record of trauma involving white humans. I spent all my whole life in the Southeast U.S. where this is no shortage of white republicans, itching to peddle their racist rhetoric. I was made a target of racism by a white human boy in the first grade. Yet, I’m also aware that it had nothing to do with his species. It has everything to do with the privileges many white people have been allotted in my country and the constructs they’ve either been taught or have adopted into their world view against marginalized communities like mine. I recognize that they alone aren’t the only arbiters of racism, let alone antiblack racism. Racism is systemic.
Day in and day out, I’m sick at the thought of human farmers and agriculturalists poisoning my species (vultures) because they deem us as “pests” when we have just as much of a right to live as they do. Not to mention these poisonings have led to many of my kind’s endangerment and potential extinction. Yet, I also know that there’s plenty of human conservationists busting their asses to save us, reverse the damage that has been done against our populations and educate rural communities on the ecological effects of these poisonings. Abuses against wildlife is systemic.
And before I’m hit with the “These problems wouldn’t exist in this first place if it weren’t for humans!” card, remember that the root of your frustration are societal infrastructures, not the existence of a species. Nobody is exempt of bigotry, not even the most marginalized person you can think of. It’s called having bias, and that bias can always be weaponized against someone or isolate you from the world around you. Some of you KNOWINGLY exude privilege over some demographics of humans while feigning your “right” to be misanthropic. Humans are still your peers— your communities— at the end of the day. We all share this fucking planet, and it’s going to take anything but hate to heal it.
It’s already frustrating that so many nonhumans treat alterhumanity as synonymous with nonhumanity and center that experience over others when addressing the community collectively. I have no tolerance for nonhumans who expect to be given a slap on the wrist for their behavior because whatever history they have, meanwhile alterhumans like myself and fully human alterhumans as well are expected to quietly accept LET ALONE SYMPATHIZE with this behavior. If not that, we’re forgotten completely, so folks act as if their behavior affects no one.
Your trauma holds weight. I get that.
I exist. We exist. You don’t get a pass to be misanthropic in alterhuman spaces simply because you are nonhuman, in community with a lot of nonhumans and/or have a bad history with humans.
Humans exist in this community too, and even if they didn’t, it’s not acceptable to dismiss an entire species as ontologically evil or harmful.
If you can understand why it’s a problem for someone to be bigoted against fictionkind, otherlinkers, physical nonhumans, etc. as a whole in this community, then you can understand why it’s a fucking issue to be misanthropic in and outside of this community.
