One of the most frustrating things about being someone who cares a lot about the oppression of minority groups in our society is seeing how many people are hellbent on gatekeeping or erasing the overlap that many marginalized identities can have with each other. These types don’t understand the true meaning of solidarity and why it’s important and completely necessary to keep movements alive and to keep us safe. Their engagement in this behavior shows that they also haven’t taken the time to really learn about the ways oppressors have and continue to try to stop our progress.
To combat gatekeeping and division, I really urge people to learn about COINTELPRO. It was an operation the FBI put together and executed from the 50’s to the 70’s as a means of destroying activist groups and slowing the progression of civil rights in the US. The government was scared to death of the solidarity these groups were developing with each other that they developed all kinds of methods and tools to chip away at it and undermine the efforts of these groups. One of their most important and successful methods they used was to have agents infiltrate different activist groups and organizations to cause infighting and create divisions. If activists were engaging in infighting over rhetorical differences, then they weren’t focusing as much on engaging in actions that caused change and as the infighting continued, the solidarity that was being built lessened more and more.
Why was this one of the most important aspects of COINTELPRO? Because it’s much easier to subjugate people when there’s a lack of solidarity between them. Fighting between activist groups means they aren’t organizing with each other. Movements fracture and the resulting division makes groups smaller and smaller groups are easier to beat down. There’s less people to fight back. Division means no resources are being shared and lacking resources makes it’s harder for those that have been beaten down to rise again and retaliate. The smaller the group, the quieter the voice. Quiet voices are easier to silence. The longer the silence lasts, the more the public forgets about us. When this trend continues long enough, we die.
The way some people in our own communities act perpetuates the division that our government wants there to be between us. Some of you are causing infighting that’s no different than the infighting infiltrators cause. These things make our groups smaller and quieter and on top of that y’all gatekeep our movements so that they continue to be smaller and quieter.
The only way to keep this from happening is with radical inclusion and solidarity. Our oppressors benefit from people giving in to their exclusionary urges and tendencies, their desire to always be right and to police the identities and experiences of others. Use spite against oppressive systems to motivate yourself to learn how to combat your defensiveness. If we can do that and encourage openness and acceptance, then I believe we will be alright.
