This normalization of power relations with all its excesses is not a natural process as the oppressors want to make us believe whenever they run out of arguments: The naturalization of socio-political and economic relations is particularly suited to legitimize a policy of disenfranchisement.The myth of the human condition is based on a very old mystification, which has always consisted in placing nature at the bottom of history. Through this naturalization, social injustice and inequality can be deprived of their history and criticism and thus become fixed. This process of normalization is human-made, that is consciously produced with the aim of making the voices of the oppressed inaudible by all means. In order to make the systematic discrimination denounceable they have to be named. And this is exactly what we will continue as long as the supporters and producers of fortress europe continue to write colonial history by dividing, categorizing and dehumanizing. Discourses and the realities they produce are always fought over! We will never hand over the power of definition to them without writing our own history and we will never give up the fight for the voices of the oppressed to be heard!
At this point I feel it imperative to define who I mean by we. Power has always been given to those who are closer to the preferred, privileged characteristics, the so-called norm – which of course is also produced to to legitimize any form of oppression. The more our “type” corresponds to the respective ideal of power, the more privileged our life is, the less disadvantages block our way. This modern understanding of “privilege” dates back to a 1988 article in which Peggy McIntosh explained white and male privilege. “Because there are other advantage systems at play besides skin color and gender,” McIntosh wrote, “we must also explore what it means in everyday life to have advantages based on other factors. Age, ethnicity, physical ability, nationality, religion, and sexual orientation.” When I speak of we, I am aware that I write and speak from a position of privilege. I am not the one whose voice is suppressed and whose reality of life is affected by it first. But I am convinced that people have to use their privileges to make oppressive systems and their structures – as already mentioned – accusable and thus changeable! When I say we, I mean the people who are not be prevented of beeing „able to response“ because this is our response-ability. We, that are in my definition all those, who fight these different fights in one struggle, each according to his_her abilities, each according to their needs! Or to finish it with another phrase that still means a lot to me: Lets be careful with each other so we can be dangerous together.If we want to be a we, we need to connect our struggles. Connecting struggles requires sensitivity and inter sectional awareness. An inter sectional approach means recognizing the historical contexts in which problems are embedded.
The treatment of minorities and refugees is a measure of how societies defend their self-imposed standards (human dignity, human rights, rule of law). If this is exactly where disenfranchisement structures occur, this also affects the (host)-societies. The process of authorization is all-encompassing and does not stop at anyone. With hegemony, following Gramsci, “a type of rule is named which is essentially based on the ability to define and enforce one’s own interests as social general interests.” People are not merely forced into pre-existing categories, but a kind of bourgeois consensus is needed to produce them. This, in turn, is mediated by the institutions. Cultural hegemony does not work top down, but from the middle of society. This means that complex relations of domination can be explained much more credibly by internalizing them than by the theory of force and coercion. Bourgeois society must feel that it lives in the “best of all conceivable worlds.” The bourgeois consensus is indispensable for the constitution of hegemony