every decoding is another encoding

So, editors at the campus paper had taken it upon themselves to cut my opinion piece from 550 to 450 words. And it's interesting actually, because the two white student editors had cut several of the tiny hooks I had put in the piece specifically for people of color.

A paragraph on the word 'exotic' was shortened, the word 'normal was gone, a sentence about African-Americans was gone, and the expression 'my people' was gone. Their version reads as if I can't take ANY jokes about Swedes, and they had changed the ending so it sounds as if I think an understanding of oppression follows naturally from an emotional response to injustice.

That last thing really pisses me off because the important point is that those two are different things. Everybody can feel sorry for somebody, but to understand oppression you need to be able to see the structure. That takes intellectual effort.

The interesting thing is to see how people cut things that have no meaning to THEM, without letting it cross their minds that it may carry meaning for someone else. So in a way they just proved my point.