It started with a short exchange on BlueSky — barely a handful of lines. Someone pushed back on a comment I made about how the same behaviour that fuels slavery also keeps disabled people in poverty. The reply stung, but it also made me stop. They were focused on the topic; I was trying to talk about the root.
That’s been the friction point for years: I’m not dismissing history, I’m dissecting the mechanism. These aren’t separate battles. They’re expressions of the same sickness — a belief that domination is order, that controlling someone else is a form of safety, that power somehow equals worth. History just keeps re-skinning the same rotten code.
It’s funny — or maybe horrifying — how language quietly reveals what culture refuses to say out loud. Take the French word disponible. It just means “available.” But look at what happens when it drifts through English: dispensable. Disposable.
That’s the whole moral decay of domination in one family of words. First, you’re available — to serve, to comply, to endure. Then, you’re dispensable — tolerated only while useful. And finally, disposable — erased when your presence becomes inconvenient. It’s linguistic evidence of how easily empathy gets rebranded as excess.
That’s the sickness I’ve been trying to name — the behavioural virus that mutates across generations. It doesn’t care what label it wears: slavery, ableism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism. It only needs one thing to thrive — people who’ve mistaken comfort for morality.
I’ve been treated as if I belong to a dozen different cultures — Indigenous, Latin, Mediterranean — depending on who’s doing the assuming. Sometimes it’s hostility, sometimes it’s a moment of trust, a quiet nod, or an insider comment that assumes shared history. Genetically, I’m white, but those moments have made me aware of how identity is often assigned before it’s understood. Years ago, I stood on the sands of Nicholls Island in Bimbia Cameroon, where Danish ships once traded human lives. I remember the heat, the weight of the air, and the local chief who spoke of memory as duty. It felt like I was being reminded that heritage isn’t something you inherit — it’s something you witness and decide how to carry.
My family has never matched in colour, shape, or surname. It’s a mix of adopted and born, claimed and found. So when I talk about the “root,” it’s not from guilt or abstraction. It’s from knowing how easily systems teach us to rank one another — and how much harder it is to unlearn that reflex.
If we keep arguing over whose branch hurts more, the root wins. The root doesn’t care what you look like or where you fall on the tree — it only needs us divided, defensive, distracted. The real work isn’t pruning; it’s extraction. Pulling the belief that some lives are more available than others out of every institution, every assumption, every quiet reflex that says “not my problem.”
Only then do we stand a chance at growing something different — not equality by subtraction, but dignity by design.
