From One Survivor to Another

82 notes

i never use the social justice tag but okay

February 17, 2012

obvious fact: a popular vote is not useful for a minority group.

i saw this happen with the My Little Pony thing, and I saw it on my dash the other day with the Native American mascot controversy. really.

This should be incredibly obvious, but a popular vote is rarely ever going to be helpful for a minority group. There’s a reason why they are called minorities; that is, there are less of them than the majority.

This includes women, too, because although there is a numerical majority of women, it doesn’t mean that all women are magically un-patriarchal and nonsexist. The same goes for all other minority groups. There’s plenty of uncle toms and fu man chus out there, and so on.

Yes, things like the abolition of slavery have been supported by majority peoples, but these things are not instantaneous. for centuries, white people overwhelmingly agreed that slavery was A-okay. Do you think it would have been useful for the Africans to hold a popular vote? And even if they outnumbered their masters, it’s not like their voices were valued or considered legitimate by the people in charge (who had money, guns, and political power).

Holding a popular vote is not useful, because in any discussion about whether X subject is offensive, hurtful, problematic, etc, it should be the group in question leading the dialogue. But, I guess lots of majority people still believe that they are better experts on racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, etc., than the people who actually experience these things…

So yeah. If you use a poll or a petition as some kind of proof that you are right and I’m wrong…I’m just not gonna waste my time on you.