gated communities her entire childhood, the finest schools, studying abroad in developed countries, pretty much the kinda financial security that makes problems feel abstractly surmountable rather than viscerally urgent

i grew up somewhere rather different. whenever the context allowed it, and i tried to approach what having grown up in a favela means, not as a dumbass statistic or a stupid sociological footnote but as the texture of daily life,

of having family with ties to the biggest drug cartels in south america, having to worry about my safety just by going outside past 21 o'clock, and how the current administration does nothing but maintain this situation, i'd just be hit back with smth along the lines of "ugh, can we not do politics"

whilst this may sound cliché, your very existence is fundamentally bound by the architecture of political power; one cannot simply opt out of a system that regulates the very means of survival please,, do not conflate the concept of institutional nonpartisanship with an absolute absence of position

this is def gonna sound woke asf but as a neurodivergent trans woman who's also a person of colour, my capacity to live, for instance, is inherently political because the dominant system treats marginalised identities as deviations from the norm

my rights, safety, and representation are constantly up for public debate. it ain't a feat to claim to have popped the bubble and have turned 'apolitical' but a privilege rooted in ignorance. your inaction either passively maintains the status quo or actively surrenders to it

shutting down a debate under the guise of avoiding 'politics' is nothing more than just weaponising that label to silence a conversation, which only further proves that a crisis is irrelevant to you the moment you realise you possess the luxury of being unaffected by its consequences

culture by itself is a political concept. media functions an ideological lens legitimising dominant hegemony, while casual dialogue acts as structural gatekeeping to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

as a case in point, vintage cartoons featuring blackface or tribal caricatures weren't *just* animation. they served as an ideological lens designed to dehumanise minorities and legitimise systemic oppression

the way it was treated as humour in casual banter was a form of gatekeeping that normalised racism as harmless fun. dominant ideologies remain invisible when they align with the status quo. what feels like harmless, everyday entertainment is often the imperceptible machinery of cultural power

if you genuinely believe this is all "apolitical", you've profoundly internalised that hegemonic structure and can hardly think outside of it