Solidarity. Stand in solidarity. This term, this phrase, kept emerging from the lips of the angered and the fearful on the night of a protest. Between chants, between blurs of words, between songs, solidarity seemed to rise above the rest. Its taste remained on my tongue after the event ended.

Solidarity-what did that even mean? Solidarity-group unity based on a mutual feeling. So why not just unity? Why not alliance? Why choose solidarity? A word that seems so less common, so foreign. I think it’s because it implies something that the synonyms just don’t seem to do justice.

Unity seems to conjure this image of everyone together, but that simply isn’t the case for America. We are a divided country. Many social groups are experiencing oppression. People can not unite with their oppressors. They should not be expected to.

Recently, I have been enlightened by just how flawed it is to spread the idea of loving everyone. To accept hate, to accept someone not recognizing your rights as human beings, is not fair. It just doesn’t make sense. You can’t agree to disagree when it comes to real people’s lives. And minorities should not be expected to take the toil of educating their oppressors.

Alliance, on the other hand, has connotations of benefit. Yes, it is true that building a community and taking a stand can be beneficial, however, I still feel as though that is missing something. Benefits sounds so minimal when quality of life is the subject.

A minority’s life is not something that should be up to debate. It should not be something that people decide can receive benefits. Concepts receive benefits, and people are not concepts. People shouldn’t be conceptualized into these abstract things, although politics often make them as so. Politics affects real lives. Some people who have less at stake can easily ignore this fact, but it’s the truth. Our decisions, our votes, affect others.

And they have been affected. People are terrified. People are furious. People are confused. So many minority groups are banding together that may have not interacted before. A lot of beliefs and feelings are shared. That similar mindset perpetuates them and a community is being strengthened. They are standing together in this oppression.

Solidarity is unique enough to capture what the oppressed are going through and what they desire. They are not coming together to love those who hate them or those who don’t consider them at all. They are not uniting for some kind of benefit. They’re united because they know they have been wronged and they wanted to be treated like the humans that they are.

Through standing in solidarity, they are gathering together into a community of voices that usually aren’t heard. The power of their voice is growing because it’s becoming a collective voice. The purpose of these protests isn’t for someone else. It’s not just because of Donald Trump. These protests serve the people that are chanting and marching.

It’s not for the oppressors. It’s for the oppressed.