There’s an iconic moment in British TV history, when Chris and Stephen from Gogglebox are watching the espionage thriller Homeland. Chris casually remarks, ‘We all like a bad boy, don’t we?’, to which Stephen replies, ‘Yeah, but not a terrorist, Chris.’

This is how it feels discussing the legacy of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, the right-wing US commentator and Trump ally who was shot dead at a rally in Utah on Wednesday afternoon. Though we are all united in the belief that what happened to him was horrific, we are at odds on how we decide to remember him.

I’ve been told many times that Kirk’s politics were just different from mine. That he had an alternative opinion, and that should not sully his legacy or interrupt this period of mourning. However, how can I not when he so proudly despised people who looked like me? A difference in opinion is: ‘Love is Blind is better than Love Island’, not ‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.’ It feels like overnight, the word opinion has adopted an entirely new meaning that now includes hate speech.

The past 24 hours have felt like an unravelling. My feed is filled with people I once saw as allies, who are now posting compassionately about someone who truly hated people like me. What is going on? Christians are referring to him as a Martyr, and others are understandably devastated for his family. The thread linking every mournful post about Kirk is the insistence that we put politics aside and remember he was just a ‘human.’ I can’t argue with Kirk being a human, but I have to acknowledge that so were the people he directed hate and vitriol towards. In mourning this man, why have we suddenly lost the ability to extend the same sympathy to others?

When Charlie Kirk said, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,” weren’t all those who died from gun deaths human too? When he mis-quoted scripture calling for gay people to be stoned to death, “God’s perfect law”, are queer people not humans? When he called George Floyd, whose brutal recorded death was broadcast across the world, sparking a wave of protest, a “scumbag” who wasn’t worthy of the attention, where was the compassion for his personhood? Is it because these are people who hold much less power, rendering their lives unimportant?

Kirk’s legacy is defined wholly by his words and actions. How he is remembered, spoken about, and enshrined in history is all a result of the way he used his platform. So I don’t understand how re-sharing his firmly held and fiercely argued beliefs means we are celebrating his death? More than anything, this is a question about privilege: who gets to die a hero despite spending their life as a villain to many? Those who are white, male and wealthy. When we ask people to canonise someone so hateful by disregarding their politics, we not only signal to people that it is OK to be hateful because in death you will be revered, but we also rewrite history, which is a dangerous precedent to set.

Being able to say ‘who cares if he spent his time travelling the country comparing abortion to the holocaust or denigrating trans people‘ shows that his words are meaningless to your lived reality. Being able to separate his politics from his legacy tells the world you are lucky enough to never live in fear that your very identity was a threat. The pieces praising him as a skilled debater who was unafraid of confronting people who disagreed with him gloss over the way his words became weapons for those on the receiving end of his attacks. For those of us without the political power to protect our communities, seeing the way people have been quick to disregard the politics of Charlie Kirk has been painful. It feels like we are learning in real time how much our lives are irrelevant when compared to preserving the legacy of white men.

Politics is not something most of us can just opt out of. It’s happening to us every day in ways that we have little control over; from legislating women’s bodies to the racist immigration and asylum policies. If you are from a marginalised community, your entire life is defined by the politics happening to you. There is no separating the violence that the state can inflict from the rest of your life: it is your life. When I see people sanitise the history of those who have spent years building a career out of making those most affected by politics feel unsafe, I wonder if they truly know the weight of their actions.