Don't speak up now.

It' time again. The cozy kids awake from their deep slumber and get into fight mode. Someone had poked them with a stick. When I say cozy kids, I refer people like those I went to school with. Upper middle-class white, academically educated, able-bodied, mostly catholic, cis-het kids that enjoyed safety, warmth and food growing up. Whoever ticks all the boxes arguably has it quite cozy. Cozy enough to make it easy for them to understand this worlds brutality, its injustices and pain as far-away issues that do not relate to them. Maybe, for some, even cozy enough to understand themselves, however unconsciously, as superior to others.

I am of Kosovo-Albanian heritage. People of my descent are often looked down upon where I grew up. They live in the neighbourhoods you're told to avoid, go to schools that produce the labour class and live in cities that get made into jokes about economy- refugees despite the fact that it was civil war and genocide that drove them to western Europe. I grew up in a German foster family. As part of what is almost another people, I got to see the nonchalance, the casualness with which foreigners are selectively adored or despised, or forgotten in privileged society. Only at times, if comments were too cynical, too hateful, I would remind people that if it were not for the circumstances of my early childhood, I would be one of the people they would so openly judge despite even ever having made contact with them. I also was lucky as to my new and very different upbringing to be shielded, though not from all, from much discrimination as regards my heritage.

I am gay. And it took my youth. Though where I come from, people claim to be progressive and open, I know better. The bullying started before I'd ever think about sexuality, and it did not end up until the day I left the country for good. It was brutal, physical, merciless. It also was silent, subtle, cunning. In what was at least a decade of abuse I believe to have seen every form or bullying there is. If you are part of a minority, and those reading that are part of a discriminated minority will immediately recognize this, it is almost as if you were free game because of what makes you a minority. An instant categorical degradation, that makes you a target and that keeps people from recognising injustices against you because it is so natural. It was, however, almost exclusively cozy kids that took it out on me. And it was almost exclusively people that faced similar challenges that would see, hear and help me. The cozy crowds would just stand by.

And there is a simple reason for it: standing by and watching discrimination and hateful attacks is unbearable to a discriminated person. My heart broke when last year Samuel Luiz was beaten to death for being gay in A Coruña the same way it broke for the 11 victims of Hanau that were killed for their eastern heritage. My heart broke for Daunte Wright the same way it broke for Valera and breaks every single time a person is discriminated, persecuted or killed for their membership to a minority. And yet, in most cases, the cosy crowds do not talk of it. They do not know their names, their stories. They don't take part because they afford to look away and not feel torn apart doing it.

They either took part or looked away when it was happening to me or the few friends I had. All the more confused I am observing temporary sudden-onset waves of "cosy-kid activism" back home in recent years: Ever so silent about the most abhorrent acts of hate happening right in front of them, they awaken every now and then to stand up against what they perceive as great inequalities:

A few days ago, an artist was uninvited from performing at a Fridays for Future event because concerns have been brought forward to the organizer that people attending might feel discriminated against as she is a white woman wearing dreadlocks, a hairstyle that black and brown people have been heavily discriminated for for centuries. Whatever your opinion might be on this, it is the reaction that followed that I simply cannot wrap my head around: Fury. Outrage! Cozy kids around the country rushing to support the devastated artist online, producing a massive shit-storm against FFF, organising protests against the organisation. Global media coverage: Newspapers, TV-Channels desperate to tell her story and how she was wronged. And, again, it breaks my heart.

Dear cozy crowds: It is amazing to see how you can move mountains if you want to! However, this is an organizer taking precautions because of a politically questionable hairstyle. Where was your support when other artists were discriminated against? When Enissa Amani was heavily abused for representing her culture by opening a show with a Persian dance? When Jasmina Kuhnke had to go underground with her family because police published her address, knowing she had been targeted as a BiPoC by right-wing extremists? Where is your outrage when vulnerable people in everyday life are discriminated, abused, or killed? Coming to the defence of Ronja Maltzahn this hard shows just how warped and selective your sense of injustice is. And again, it breaks my heart for every single person that has to suffer violent discrimination in silence without support, without protection and without the opportunity to simply not wear a racially ambiguous hairstyle to make it stop.

Dear bullies: I can see you speaking up. I can see you fight for Ronja. And you do it so passionately. But why now? Why for this? I can see your stories and posts and your accusations of FFF being hypocrites for claiming to fight discrimination while they "discriminate" against a white girl with dreads. I am asking you: If you could beat me up for being gay, how are you right now not a hypocrite? If you could give me urine to drink for being gay, how are you right now not a hypocrite? If you would pay your friends to have a conversation with me as a "dare", pour your drink over me, send me death threats, how are you not the biggest hypocrite right now?

Your activism against discrimination means nothing if you discriminate. And yet you have the privilege of being heard the loudest. Your fight against injustice is weak if your grasp on true injustice is so misguided. And yet you have the power to set in motion the strongest mechanisms of revolution.

Dear Friend, don't speak up now. Do it, when it counts. When it's not just your own kind that needs it. Do it, when it's not just an online controversy. Do it in everyday life, for the people around you that need it. And if you know me, do it for me as I am telling you that even the smallest gestures of support can save your life.

Love,

P