10 Ways Your Social Justice Work Might Be Inaccessible and Elitist (And Why That’s a Problem) [View all]

[KamaAina]

http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/inaccessible-elitist-activism/

I’m an artist first. But I decided long ago that my art would be in the service of fighting oppression.

Since then, I’ve waded more deeply into social justice spaces, and I find myself surrounded more and more by people professing these same aspirations....

But some of those ways are too insidious to recognize even within these spaces. Some are, in fact, unique to these spaces. Some oppressions are fostered by the very things supposedly set up to help justice spaces thrive. Inadvertently, they create power structures mirroring those they’re working to address.

Being in these spaces for a while now, I’ve noticed that I’ve been increasingly receiving feedback that my writing is inaccessible. I dismissed a lot of this critique on the basis that I am, at my core, a big idea and theory girl. My way of communicating isn’t supposed to be meant for everyone.