Both/And: Moving Beyond The Binary

At Mission Equality, we see and acknowledge binary thinking as an often harmful and divisive approach, used by design to uphold the status quo…

It's not either or, it's both and.

People keep trying to insist that if you support one thing, you're against the other. 

That in itself is part of the legacy of settler colonialism (and white supremacy) that's responsible for so much death and conflict around the world. 

But binaries don't work here (do they ever?)

Being pro Palestinian liberation is not antisemitism. Being against the death of innocent Jewish people is not Islamophobia. We explicitly reject both Islamophobia AND antisemitism. And we can, and do, mourn with all those who are experiencing loss, whether they are Muslim, Jewish, Palestinian or Israeli.

In all this, there's one thing that isn't complicated at all: genocide is never ok.

And the narrative that values some people over others because of skin colour, religion and other ways of divorcing us from our humanity has to be rejected.

We can't separate what's happening now from the history that got us here. No matter how much many of us want peace, history tells us that liberation from oppression has never come easy. 

And it's worth repeating: genocide can never be ok. 

— Sharon and Lea, Co-Founders, Mission Equality