I AM A WHITE MAN

I urge you to please read this short essay I wrote about the things I have come to understand about our world and about myself, the things I find important and want to share. I also want to make it clear that this account provides a somewhat simplified, amplified and generalized perspective in which I seek to highlight what progress is yet to be made rather than what has already been achieved. This manifesto is a testimony to the legacy I inherited and to the revelation I have received and which I hope will bring change.

I AM A WHITE MAN

I am a white man.

I wish we lived in a world where the only implication of this statement consisted in specifying my complexion and gender. Much to the contrary, the vast expanse of the social universe, the space of human relations seems to gravitate toward the senseless sense behind this sentence, its massive, heavy contents drawing and imprisoning light from all around like that of a black hole. For some unfathomable reason, throughout history white men have, in one way or another, oppressed every other group of people – women and people of other skin color. It may seem that it has been like this since the beginning, since the very inception of human nature, but it hasn't. Nor is it an unfortunate result of a random accident, a self-sustaining mishap that has achieved enormous proportions. It has always been a man made thing, a system that requires regular nurturing, a ceaseless input of a mix of violence, cruelty and wrongheaded ideology.

Many years have passed, many generations have changed. And what readily manifests itself to the oppressed has become one of the underlying elements of our culture and our everyday life thereby hiding itself from the view of the oppressing side. Much of its destructive might was alienated and vested in the depersonalized system, a complex anonymous anastomosis of acrimonies at the core of our society, a faceless edifice whose robustness few dare to challenge. This transfer may take the blame off many shoulders and take the guilt off many chests, for many of the new generation never actively and intentionally contributed to constructing this system. But absolution doesn't lead to the solution. Furthermore, the vast and horrifying majority of us still sustain and nourish the monster by staying neutral in situations of injustice. We white men are blindly roaming this world, carelessly and awkwardly groping at the realities of existence. Any time a singular sanitizing thought encroaches on the premises of our reason we either fumble at processing it or allow the hefty legacy of several millennia draw the veil around our eyes and heads tighter so as not to see what we refuse to see. But this same pall wrapped around our heads suffocates us, for the natural order of things consists in being open to the outer world, open to ourselves and to the feelings of others.

A lot of things have changed of course. We no longer do many things we used to do and think many things we used to think. Countless walls have been taken down, numerous dividing gulfs have been filled to form the solid foundation for the brighter common future.

But in every corner of today's world there still are tokens of the crippled past, the seething reminiscences of the battlefield that our world once was. These are living memories, the ones that affect and shape our future. The world is still full of obstacles to freedom and equality. There are still many negative things that a woman or a black person may have to go through that a white man wouldn't even think of. Upon effacing the biggest and ugliest blots from the face of our civilization, we pretended that the smaller ones didn't exist. But these seemingly small smears are the most fundamental and persevering ones. The last ramparts last the longest. They are woven into the very fabric of our society and are incredibly hard to eradicate.

But they are not indelible. There is hope – and in fact, there is knowledge that the right natural order of things will reassert itself. It is incumbent upon us to act and to do our share for the common good. We white men need to learn to understand our privilege and learn to understand that we don't deserve it. And most of all, we all need to learn to stand in the other person's shoes and walk around in them. And the day we learn to do all that, we will have accomplished the ultimate goal of our civilization. The day the words 'racism', 'misogyny' and 'prejudice' become redundant and obsolete, the world will have become the place it has always had to be. In the meantime, we need to do our best to bring this day closer, to make it come sooner.

All of this defines who I am personally. This is the reason why I am a feminist. This is why I use every opportunity and every platform to speak out against racism, misogyny, prejudice and other forms of injustice, to advocate freedom and equality. This is why I'm trying to expunge casual racism and misogyny from my own acts and thoughts whereas the culture I live in mostly fosters their proliferation. And this is why I'm an ally of many groups I am not a part of. I want to live in a world where this necessary change has taken place and this is the kind of world I want my children to inherit. I don't want to be a part of an imposing entity in which I'm inadvertently forced to take away the light. I want to spread the light, I want to illuminate, I want to be the light.