It’s My Job to Pick up the Trash

It’s my job to pick up the trash. After years of claiming to be a social justice activist, I cannot expect to end oppression if I expect other people to clean up the messes I make at social justice events. Those other people are, more often than not, from economically disenfranchised classes. They are white and black and brown and yellow. Expecting them–and not the middle class and rich people who convened the meeting–to clean up the meeting, to pick up the garbage reproduces the very oppression I and we of my class background seek to end.