Decompiling Oppression #2
Sam McVeety
Welcome back! In last week's post we started off with a primer on detour-spotting. This week we'll continue by digging a bit deeper into the topic of discrimination. This week's story starts this past fall, when I had the opportunity to take a course in Critical Race Theory at UW School of Law, taught by Professor Angelica Chazaro. The material covered the various ways in which the US legal system has been used in attempts to further or dismantle oppression, particularly along the axis of racial identity. There's a long history to the name, the movement, and so on, that might feature prominently in future topics, but this week, we're going to be focusing on the victim and perpetrator perspectives of discrimination*.
Fundamentally, the victim perspective and the perpetrator perspective are two different (and often competing) ways of formulating antidiscrimination law. Because of the centrality of the US legal system to many parts of our lives, these perspectives can and do spill out into many other related discussions, which makes them all the more important to understand and analyze.
One of my favorite pithy ways to relate to these perspectives is the "Oops, Ouch" ground rule that I've started seeing in group discussions. "Oops" means that participants should be open to having their perspectives challenged, and willing to admit a mistake or rescind a statement that they regret. "Ouch" means that, regardless of intentions, something might happen that might cause harm to someone, and that their pain is real, and we shouldn't seek to rationalize it away or minimize it.
The perpetrator perspective centers the actions of the perpetrator of discrimination. It is heavily related to ideas of demonstrable causality ("direct links") between actions and harm. Legally, the perpetrator perspective holds that, once the direct cause of harm is removed, then the harm has been addressed (e.g. once schools are desegregated, the harm of decades of segregation has been addressed). This means that the conversation often ends at the "Oops" -- once someone stops a behavior or practice that has been identified as discriminatory or harmful, the matter is settled.
Conversely, the victim perspective centers the circumstances and experiences of the victim. It is the "Ouch". Just like physical or mental injuries, the victim perspective doesn't presuppose that the harm stops as soon as the immediate cause is removed. If I've caused someone to feel unwelcome through a microaggression, the harm doesn't necessarily stop once I've apologized -- I may have created a persistent feeling of exclusion and mistrust for the individual involved. To pick an example from a corporate context -- if you promote or hire folks at different rates, but then remedy those processes, the harm still exists for those affected by the previous disparity. Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it best:
"Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife."
One of the most challenging parts of fighting oppression in our modern society is the interconnectedness of the forces that govern our lives, which makes it incredibly challenging to reckon with a legal framework that almost always adopts a perpetrator perspective (with a few notable exceptions like Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which were quietly discarded). It's almost always possible to posit "reasonable doubt" as to whether an action reflects an explicitly discriminatory perpetrator, even if the victim is very obviously suffering. In my view, it's essential that we shift our focus to the victim perspective, in order to truly heal and create transformative change. We'll talk about strategies for doing so in future issues.
Because they're so foundational, we'll return to these perspectives in the coming weeks, but that's it for now! If you found something in the material challenging, or if I said something out of my lane, please feel free to reach out. Before you go:
My invitations to you for this week:
Personal: Read The Case for Reparations with an eye towards comparing the victim and perpetrator perspectives. Think about which perspective the law has typically adopted, and what consequences that has had. Ask: if the law adopted the victim perspective, what would that look like?
Communal: Think about how the victim perspective might inform the communities that you are part of. Are there people who are included or excluded through the legacy of past actions?
Solidarity: Support a reparations cause in Seattle through Real Rent Duwamish.
* These terms come from Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law by Alan David Freeman. It is a great read, but fair warning -- it is also very technical.