So, one of my favourite topics was raised by CruelestYouth, logic and rationality (read these two posts for context).

Something I’ve written about many times is the inherent white supremacy that informs and enforces the continual calls for people to be reasonable, rational, logical, etc. So much so that I’ve had people call me lazy, anti-rational, and so on.

The notion of logical consistency makes me laugh because so many people misunderstand what that concept really means, even white people. White people who think they know shit about logic.

They have also bought into the myth that logical inconsistency is a disastrous thing that must be feared and avoided at all costs. This is true in mathematics, physics, etc. But not even all true all of the time. Calculus was inconsistent for a century or so before someone figured out how to fix it. Yet, it was still a highly useful mathematical tool the entire time it was inconsistent. The world didn’t explode and nothing bad happened.

But I also wonder if you realize that there are systems of logic where some of your precious tenets for logical consistency actually fail. Yup. Some systems of logic recognize true contradictions. In some the law of excluded middle fails. Some recognize degrees of truth. Some recognize different kinds of truth and different kinds of false. I’m not sure when (if) you’ll ever get it through your heads that the world is diverse and not everyone does (or should) do shit your way. As much as you’d like us all too…

One of the things I like best about not being in academics anymore is not having to take all of my ideas, bleed them dry, sanitize them, and serve them up in tidy packets to be consumed like supermarket chicken cutlets or something.

Because fuck that shit. Seriously.

I am (we are) whole people. Asking poc to cut out our emotions and reason with people who are killing us, is to again, ask us to be willing to be less than human. When there are studies showing that health care professionals are less empathetic and willing to give pain medication to Black people, it is disgusting to ask us to pretend like we aren’t hurt.

We have been trying to get you fucking people to see our pain since forever. And after all the disgusting, inhuman shit that has been done by reason without emotion or empathy, asking us to be like you (cold. reasonable. logical.) can only be met with ugly rage, sorrow and all that messy shit you can’t seem to stand.

At the end of the day, I’d rather be human, emotional than win some meaningless debate with some white person who knows less about logic, reason, and truth than a child still capable of believing in the tooth fairy and the magic of rainbows.