Anti-Oppression, Safe(r) Spaces, and WRFF

Here we see another contradiction; tokenization and paternalism are on any list of “fucked up” behaviors in an anti-oppression practice, thus the practice protects itself from open complicity with the very problems it creates. Human agency is a fundamental component of freedom, perhaps the most important one; therefore if someone is denied agency in their own struggle because the most legit thing they can do is be an ally to someone else's struggle, it is inevitable that they will exercise their agency in the course of supporting a struggle they view as someone else's. To do so, they will either look for any oppressed person who supports a form of struggle they feel inclined towards, and use them as a legitimating façade, or they will try to participate fully and affect the course of a broader campaign or coalition in which they are pretending to be mere allies. In other words, by presenting privilege as a good thing, anti-oppression politics creates privileged people who have nothing to fight for and inevitably tokenize or paternalize those whose struggles are deemed (more) legitimate.