I’ve been thinking like that for a long time but recently I’ve been thinking about it in terms of internalized opposition. One of the most pernicious elements of the fight against stupid and bad ideologies is when their framings gain dominance even in the minds of their opponents.

At some point, someone said ‘black people are blah, white people are bleh,’ and the person next to them probably said ‘What do you mean black people?’ because the concept was new but the ideology of race turned into such a common one that people who were oppressed by it were forced to consider what the powerful thought about it, like an atheist prisoner being forced to think about how to convince a Christian jailer to be less awful to them. They internalized it. And now even people who are ‘anti-racist’ often treat ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ as if they were real, and not just conceptually different in the same way you can live in a different country without moving because the lines on a map change. Even as they battle the concept, they try to do it from within the system, prisoners demanding to be free without acknowledging the world outside the prison walls.