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On Activism, Strategy, Racism, and Global North/South
(Note: written a couple months ago, but not posted till now.) I got myself embroiled in an online chat-based dispute about how to address certain racist stereotypes that were voiced in a community I’m part of. This has sparked a lot of self-reflection on how I approached it, and I wanted to share some of that here.
I’m going to skip specifics, but in short, a racist stereotype voiced by a person from the Global North was called out by a person from the Global South, who also asked for a larger organization-level response. That response—at least the first stage of it—came in the form of an email denouncing racist remarks with clear (though not explicit) reference to this incident.
I voiced the thought that singling out that one person in the email was not the best approach. This ignited further discourse, which I would sum up as critiquing me for centering the feelings of a person from the Global North over the needs, feelings, etc. of the people suffering harm in the Global South. In the course of this critique, I was asked why I was centering the feelings of the privileged, and over the past day or so, I’ve thought about that a lot.
There is not just one answer.
Part of the answer is that, as a person from the Global North, I am more empathetic to that positionality because it is closer to my own experiences, and so I default to showing more empathy for that positionality. That is not a good reason, and—with no good excuse—I did seriously misread the social situation of that chat, in that I did not properly take into account the compounded harm to my comrades from the Global South. From that perspective, anything that further decentered their already marginalized voices intensified the harm to them, and I should have seen that and responded differently.
If I had it to do again, I would try to avoid the futile activity of attempting to discuss a loaded social issue in a chatroom (I know better than that) but take the initiative to pursue some sort of synchronous meeting, primarily by and for people from the Global North—so that people from the South are not defaulted into the role of educators—but with people from the South welcome. In such a meeting, I would hope to better unpack how the initial harm arose and how we can aid in community repair and avoid such harm in the future. (I may, indeed, pursue this.)
But there are also other reasons I centered the feeling of the person from the North, and I think I’ve identified the core one—which I leaned into instinctively.
Content warning and clarification: I’m going to present an analogy to interpersonal abuse, and before I do, let me state clearly that I am not saying my comrade who voiced the stereotype is abusive. This is just an analogy, where I am considering the phenomenon of racism overarchingly as analogous to abuse in that both involve those with greater power harming those with lesser power.
In a situation where one person is abusing another, who most needs to change, the victim or the abuser?
Both may need to, but we would probably agree the person who most needs to change is the abuser. They’re the person committing most of the harm.
When we center the victim—which is a good thing to do!—the social supports go to the victim. This might include help with leaving the relationship, therapy, support groups, etc. That’s all good, and we need a lot more of it.
But what happens to the abuser? Victim-centered discourse tends to say, “That’s the wrong question; we need to center the victim.” Kai Cheng Thom shares an experience from training to help abuse victims; someone asked about supports for abusers who want to stop abusing partners: "The answer was brusque and immediate: 'We don't work with abusers. Period.'" [1]
So what happens to them? Assuming the victim gets away, and assuming the abuser is not a bigwig who can basically get away with anything, they’re probably left feeling thwarted and abandoned. If the abuse is known in their community, they’re probably ridiculed and ostracized. And they probably respond to those things the way most human beings would: by getting angrier, by feeling indignant, self-righteous, and wronged.
What is a person prone to abusing power going to do when they get into another relationship while feeling angry, indignant, self-righteous, and wronged? As soon as they’re triggered, they’ll strike out. They’ll commit more abuse, possibly even worse abuse, feeling justified by their indignance.
They will not change... or if they change, it will likely be for the worse.
Thus, when we fail to provide support for abusers, we fail to address the core problem: abuse. The best we can achieve is good supports for victims to get help quickly—reaction to harm after the fact. The harm itself will keep coming because its source (the abuser) has not been addressed.
It’s the same with racism. Who most needs to change? The people doing/saying racist things.
It’s good and important to center the victims. I did not do this in my chat response and that was a mistake; it compounded harm.
And when we don’t account for the feelings of the people doing/saying racist things, if they get little/no sympathy or support, I can predict that a large percentage of them will respond not with “mea culpa” but with anger and indignance at being morally impugned for something that—in most cases—they probably did not intend to be harmful.
Will they change? If they do, it will likely be toward more adamant that they did nothing wrong. In short, they are likely to become—if anything—more racist, not less.
Another quick clarification: These are generalizations. I am not making pronouncements about the specific mindsets or actions of anyone involved in this particular situation.
This is a big part of why I jumped to centering the feelings of the person called out. Because I know how this works. It accords with how my own mind works; I see it in myself in the massive quantities of guilt (warranted or not) that I carry; I’ve seen a million times in others; it’s an underlying contention of my forthcoming book on relationship cutoff. So I jumped in the direction of saying, “Whoa, let’s not drive into a corner people whose views we hope to change.” Or to paraphrase what a friend said to me in a different context, “What you want to accomplish, this approach will do the opposite.” But I didn’t say it clearly or in the right time and place.
I stand by the principle though: If we want to change racism, we have to change is racist views, and to do that, we must devote some attention to—and empathy for—the perspective of the people who hold those views. On balance, it is probably easier for the privileged to show that empathy to the privileged and doing so may, indeed, be one way we can use our privilege to be allies. As someone pointed out to me in our chat, though, it’s a short jump from that empathy to complicity. It is. This work isn’t easy—but it’s necessary.
[1] Thom, Kai Cheng. "What to Do When You've Been Abusive." Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashinha. AK Press, 2020. p 68.
I’m going to skip specifics, but in short, a racist stereotype voiced by a person from the Global North was called out by a person from the Global South, who also asked for a larger organization-level response. That response—at least the first stage of it—came in the form of an email denouncing racist remarks with clear (though not explicit) reference to this incident.
I voiced the thought that singling out that one person in the email was not the best approach. This ignited further discourse, which I would sum up as critiquing me for centering the feelings of a person from the Global North over the needs, feelings, etc. of the people suffering harm in the Global South. In the course of this critique, I was asked why I was centering the feelings of the privileged, and over the past day or so, I’ve thought about that a lot.
There is not just one answer.
Part of the answer is that, as a person from the Global North, I am more empathetic to that positionality because it is closer to my own experiences, and so I default to showing more empathy for that positionality. That is not a good reason, and—with no good excuse—I did seriously misread the social situation of that chat, in that I did not properly take into account the compounded harm to my comrades from the Global South. From that perspective, anything that further decentered their already marginalized voices intensified the harm to them, and I should have seen that and responded differently.
If I had it to do again, I would try to avoid the futile activity of attempting to discuss a loaded social issue in a chatroom (I know better than that) but take the initiative to pursue some sort of synchronous meeting, primarily by and for people from the Global North—so that people from the South are not defaulted into the role of educators—but with people from the South welcome. In such a meeting, I would hope to better unpack how the initial harm arose and how we can aid in community repair and avoid such harm in the future. (I may, indeed, pursue this.)
But there are also other reasons I centered the feeling of the person from the North, and I think I’ve identified the core one—which I leaned into instinctively.
Content warning and clarification: I’m going to present an analogy to interpersonal abuse, and before I do, let me state clearly that I am not saying my comrade who voiced the stereotype is abusive. This is just an analogy, where I am considering the phenomenon of racism overarchingly as analogous to abuse in that both involve those with greater power harming those with lesser power.
In a situation where one person is abusing another, who most needs to change, the victim or the abuser?
Both may need to, but we would probably agree the person who most needs to change is the abuser. They’re the person committing most of the harm.
When we center the victim—which is a good thing to do!—the social supports go to the victim. This might include help with leaving the relationship, therapy, support groups, etc. That’s all good, and we need a lot more of it.
But what happens to the abuser? Victim-centered discourse tends to say, “That’s the wrong question; we need to center the victim.” Kai Cheng Thom shares an experience from training to help abuse victims; someone asked about supports for abusers who want to stop abusing partners: "The answer was brusque and immediate: 'We don't work with abusers. Period.'" [1]
So what happens to them? Assuming the victim gets away, and assuming the abuser is not a bigwig who can basically get away with anything, they’re probably left feeling thwarted and abandoned. If the abuse is known in their community, they’re probably ridiculed and ostracized. And they probably respond to those things the way most human beings would: by getting angrier, by feeling indignant, self-righteous, and wronged.
What is a person prone to abusing power going to do when they get into another relationship while feeling angry, indignant, self-righteous, and wronged? As soon as they’re triggered, they’ll strike out. They’ll commit more abuse, possibly even worse abuse, feeling justified by their indignance.
They will not change... or if they change, it will likely be for the worse.
Thus, when we fail to provide support for abusers, we fail to address the core problem: abuse. The best we can achieve is good supports for victims to get help quickly—reaction to harm after the fact. The harm itself will keep coming because its source (the abuser) has not been addressed.
It’s the same with racism. Who most needs to change? The people doing/saying racist things.
It’s good and important to center the victims. I did not do this in my chat response and that was a mistake; it compounded harm.
And when we don’t account for the feelings of the people doing/saying racist things, if they get little/no sympathy or support, I can predict that a large percentage of them will respond not with “mea culpa” but with anger and indignance at being morally impugned for something that—in most cases—they probably did not intend to be harmful.
Will they change? If they do, it will likely be toward more adamant that they did nothing wrong. In short, they are likely to become—if anything—more racist, not less.
Another quick clarification: These are generalizations. I am not making pronouncements about the specific mindsets or actions of anyone involved in this particular situation.
This is a big part of why I jumped to centering the feelings of the person called out. Because I know how this works. It accords with how my own mind works; I see it in myself in the massive quantities of guilt (warranted or not) that I carry; I’ve seen a million times in others; it’s an underlying contention of my forthcoming book on relationship cutoff. So I jumped in the direction of saying, “Whoa, let’s not drive into a corner people whose views we hope to change.” Or to paraphrase what a friend said to me in a different context, “What you want to accomplish, this approach will do the opposite.” But I didn’t say it clearly or in the right time and place.
I stand by the principle though: If we want to change racism, we have to change is racist views, and to do that, we must devote some attention to—and empathy for—the perspective of the people who hold those views. On balance, it is probably easier for the privileged to show that empathy to the privileged and doing so may, indeed, be one way we can use our privilege to be allies. As someone pointed out to me in our chat, though, it’s a short jump from that empathy to complicity. It is. This work isn’t easy—but it’s necessary.
[1] Thom, Kai Cheng. "What to Do When You've Been Abusive." Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. Edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashinha. AK Press, 2020. p 68.
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The issue itself has not been resolved as of now. It happened just before everyone left for the summer, so the conversation is sort of on hiatus.