Feeling guilty is not a form of activism.
To be completely clear about my position: Racism is bad and the police are being incredibly terrible right now.
I could make many more strident statements, but in the interest of my own mental health and that of others:
Feeling guilty is not a form of activism.
Spending all your time checking your privilege is not itself virtuous. Guilting other people by saying that “if you aren’t spending all your time thinking about this, you are a bad person” is not effective praxis. In my experience, it leads to people getting stuck in guilt spirals. Triggering someone else’s OCD episode is not helping the world.
I think guilt-as-an-end-in-itself is a remnant of Puritan culture, a form of self-punishment that you were supposed to engage in because you were afraid of God. I can’t be sure of this, and even if I was, I don’t know how I’d back it up with citations. But my parents were Asian immigrants, so I inherited a rather different set of neuroses, and this is what I see.
Human brains were not built to watch helplessly as people suffer far away. Bystander PTSD is a thing that exists. It is OK to pull back and focus on what you can control in your life. It is OK for you to take care of yourself and the people around you. We need to support each other emotionally, too.
It’s a lot of work - real work - to be trans, to deal with PTSD, to have chronic health issues. If you, like me, are severely depressed, if you have OCD, if you have CFS/ME, if all you can manage to accomplish on a good day is rolling out of bed and you’re lucky if you manage to cook an actual dinner: Existing while disabled, continuing to live and find occasional moments of joy despite being “objectively unproductive”, is already a protest. You are defying capitalism and ableism by continuing to exist.
As the information leaflet in an airplane says, you need to put on your own oxygen mask first before you help others. Otherwise you will pass out and be useless for both yourself and anyone else.
Please take care of yourself. Please take care of each other.
“Spending all your time checking your privilege is not itself virtuous. Guilting other people by saying that “if you aren’t spending all your time thinking about this, you are a bad person” is not effective praxis. In my experience, it leads to people getting stuck in guilt spirals. Triggering someone else’s OCD episode is not helping the world.”
And let me add: if you’re on a public platform there is ALWAYS very likely to be someone with a mental illness who is watching what you post. Even if you don’t know who they are. (Indeed if you don’t know who they are, the more likely they’re going to be hit by a guilt spiral.) They may even be the in the exact intersection of whatever axis of oppression you’re trying to raise consciousness about and mental illness. And yes, that kind of guilt crap can hit even them. (Sometimes even worse.)
Is it harder and more effort to consider how you phrase your calls to attention and action to avoid hitting those buttons? Probably! I’m not sure why that’s surprising.
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