my afro-feminist political education helped demystify the belief that cis-men are willing to learn casually. the more i became educated, the more it strained my relationships to cis-men because they saw me having knowledge as a threat to their projections of power.
i was constantly gaslit into believing that i was weaponizing my knowledge against them?!?! Shish that’s when i realized that all cis men were socialized to believe that accessing knowledge was their birthright instead of a form of intellectual labor
most of our disputes went from accusations of me “thinking I knew more than them” to me “ believing that I was smarter than them because I had a feminist education”... at the end it all came down to them resisting the opportunity to change and interrogate their conditioning
the resistance to engaging with feminist critic would materialize into them experiencing cognitive dissonance: understanding that cis- het men can be simultaneously victims/ agents of the racialized patriarchal order
obscures the belief in their individuality and triggers a feeling of shame that creates a compulsion to reject the reality that they are products of their socialization and not just individuals who can “will power” themselves out of being oppressed oppressors
so many cis het men have to admit that patriarchy literally “dumbs them” down and needs them to stay ignorant & completely oblivious to how this system uses them to continue to function efficiently. this is why they can reject feminism because knowledge is a form of power.
Black feminist historiography has been determined to debunk and demystify the world as it is structured & for too many cis het men that would mean having to interrogate how and whom they really commit to preserving in the process: themselves and their legacies
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