Unlearning Shame

Shame tells us that we are bad, which itself is an incredibly terrible feeling. But Systemic Shame teaches that entire groups of people are bad, and that through our choices and our identities, we constantly signal to other people whether we belong to a redeemable group or to an innately wicked one.

When a marginalized person holds themselves personally responsible for solving the problem of their own oppression, Systemic Shame is the overwhelmed, hopeless feeling that results.

When oppressed people fail to recognize that we are targeted on a systematic level, and instead only understand our lives and the choices we make through a personal lens, finding belonging and demanding better for our communities becomes impossible.

You might get to thinking that the challenges you're facing are not as legitimate as other people's. But it's this very feeling of isolated helplessness that actually binds you to the majority of humans living on this planet.

True solidarity building requires that we acknowledge people's struggles as legitimate-even while upholding that some people's struggles intersect in far more ways, and some who suffer hold the power to make others' suffering worse.

When we discuss the weight that stereotyping and Systemic Shame carry, it's hard not to contrast the lives of marginalized people, who are under nearly constant attack, and the lives of the comparatively more privileged, who carry the mark of Systemic Shame far less visibly. For the groups directly targeted by systems of oppression such as anti-Blackness or homophobia, the strength and stakes of Systemic Shame are undeniably more extreme. Yet it is also true that the varying degrees of isolation, self-blame, and societal condemnation that we all experience under Systemic Shame are of the same piece and that this massive social sickness of Systemic Shame will get better only once we begin to realize that we're all affected by it.