Thread by @SamanthaAsumadu

By @PennyRed 'Too many grown adults can’t tell the difference between feeling bad because someone hurt them and feeling bad because they hurt someone else. They can’t handle it. They will do anything to evade that shame: deny, dismiss, destroy.

For an idiotically long time, I believed that if people only knew how much pain they were causing, they’d change course.

I couldn’t understand, even when I was small, why bullies didn’t stop when you were crying or clearly injured - it just made them worse. It made them double down. The prospect of being seen doing something cruel sent them into a wild, weird defensive rage.

But seeing adults behave the same way, as an adult myself, I’ve got a better idea of why that happens.

It’s about shame.

It’s all about shame. It’s the panicked, defensive reflex of children raised in cultures that talk loudly about sin and rarely about redemption and weaponise both to produce compliance.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched people on the left justify treating one another with casual cruelty on the basis that we can’t afford to be kind, or someone will take advantage of us.

I’ve met so many men who are fully aware that they have treated women badly, but who feel they ‘cannot’ stop- because they are in a defensive crouch, terrified to begin the work of change by looking at their own behavior. They know they have no framework for healthy remorse.

They fear they would not psychologically survive the shame of it.

In exactly the same way, fully grown, educated white people can be reduced to panicked infants by the suggestion that whiteness is a structure of oppression, because what they hear is ‘my whiteness makes me a bad person. I should feel shame.’ @PennyRed ❤
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