Revolutionaries must fight the world

This may be a misinterpretation of the texts, but what stood out to me this week were the parallels of the black feminist movement and the current feminist movement in Pakistan. The feminist perspective is mostly misunderstood by the masses, who have not studied historical movements and are unable to understand sexist oppression because they have simply never thought about it, and wickedly they refuse to think about it even now, they choose to be snowflakes and outright reject any criticism of society as it stands today, rejecting the critics along with it. Despite rural women working harder than men in many cases, urban men and many women outright reject the possibility, for they have no personal experience with this struggle and at times it is seems unfathomable that they are not able to empathize, but while reading how the voices of black feminists were muffled by the status quo, it makes much more sense; the privileged have always resisted progress. 

The Combahee River Collective categorizes the black woman as being economically the most underprivileged class in the 20th century United States. They go on to define the black woman as inherently revolutionary because of this economic position. I would have to agree with this, in the sense that the true revolutionaries potential will emerge from those at the bottom . To me, this is echoed in the woes of transgenders of Pakistan today. Discarded from mainstream society, often forced to beg for a livelihood, and until recently not even recognized by the state, they do not even have a racial movement to rely upon for their emancipation. Even well-meaning progressives are often times guilty of not acknowledging their struggle as part of the discourse, which again reflects the way black men rejected feminism while at the same time struggling for the rights of their race. I do not wish to romanticize their struggle while enjoying the privilege of not facing their hardships, but this is what learned from the words of black feminists and it helped me recognise the hardships that our own society bestows upon our own people. While I definitely do not claim to have a moral high ground by any means, to me this is what intersectionality is, trying to recognize the struggles of those outside of the mainstream and attempting to bring them into the discourse. 

Furthermore, my understanding of myself as part of the collective struggle, whether it was my volunteering for social causes like helping (in small, insignificant ways) to organize for the LUMS labour movement or the student solidarity march, was highlighted to me by the words of Robin Morgan: "I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power." I always felt like an outsider within these movements, like someone trying to become a part of something that did not welcome me; and I never truly understood why. But reading these lines revealed to me how my position and privilege does make me an outsider, because no matter how much I try to empathize, maybe I can never understand; because as a cis-heterosexual man with class privilege; I have not experienced the sort of discrimination that these revolutionaries have, and perhaps it is that built up anger, that aggregated injustice, that allows one to truly be revolutionary, "because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world."