Survival Notes

When someone dies—especially someone powerful, controversial, or harmful—we’re often told that “the right” response is empathy. That if we don’t grieve or soften, we are somehow failing at being human. But for people and communities who’ve lived under harm, withholding empathy isn’t cruelty. It’s survival.

It’s when influential figures use coded language, “jokes,” or rhetoric to vilify a group, knowing it will likely inspire someone else to commit violence—even though they never give a direct order. Think of it as planting seeds of hate in the public square, then pretending you didn’t water them when someone acts.

We were taught to see free speech as a bedrock right. But today, censorship has taken new forms. Speaking up about injustice, naming racism, or questioning power too often leads to retaliation: jobs lost, posts deleted, books banned, entire histories erased.

Dominant culture has a talent for rewriting harm.
It smooths what was sharp.
It softens what was violent.
It reframes oppression as “miscommunication,” “a complicated situation,” or “an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

There is a special kind of cruelty in demanding gratitude from the very people you harm. And yet marginalized children, families, educators, and communities are conditioned from the earliest age to smile through injury, to applaud through extraction, to say “thank you” for treatment that barely qualifies as respect.

This is not gratitude — it’s performance.

Dominant culture loves treating every act of injustice as an isolated incident — a one-time mistake, a rare anomaly, a moment of poor judgment by individuals who should “know better.”
But marginalized communities know better than that. We carry the memory of patterns.

Anger has been constructed as a dangerous emotion — especially when it comes from the people who have every reason to feel it. Black anger is criminalized. Brown anger is dismissed. Disabled anger is infantilized. Women’s anger is pathologized. Queer and trans anger is framed as a threat.

This is not accidental.
This is discipline disguised as morality.

There are people who don’t want conversation — they want containment. They use “dialogue” as a trap: a way to hold your time, your energy, your clarity hostage while they pretend to seek understanding.

These are the people who ask the same questions no matter how clearly you’ve answered. The ones who demand infinite patience while offering none. The ones who insist they’re being “logical” while you’re being “emotional.” The ones who claim neutrality while defending the status quo.

Joy is often presented as something soft — a gentle happiness, an easy pleasure, a simple delight. But for people navigating oppression, joy is rarely soft. Our joy is sharp. Our joy has roots and history and intention. Our joy is a strategy.

“Remigration” Is Not a Policy — It’s a Warning

There is a particular violence in pretending that dangerous ideas are harmless just because they’re spoken in government language.
And yet communities are expected — again — to stay calm, stay polite, stay quiet while officials use a word with a documented white nationalist origin: remigration.