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I am not blaming anyone, I don’t care whose fault it is. I am focusing on what an individual can do because focusing on anything else is a waste of time.
by boronine 7y ago
I am not blaming anyone, I don’t care whose fault it is. I am focusing on what an individual can do because focusing on anything else is a waste of time.
- kjsbfkjbf 7y agoSince when was societal change a waste of time? Was the civil rights movement a waste of time? Fighting for worker's rights? Independence?
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoFocusing on what the individual can do _is_ a tacit form of victim-blaming in many situations. For many types of victims, drawing attention to remedies that rely on that person’s agency, rather than wider remedies predicated on greater social responsibility to fix the underlying problem, is a tacit way of putting the onus on a class of victims to “deal with it” and to view whatever type of abuse was inflicted on them as if it is their own private burden, instead of being _everyone’s_ burden to fix. In other words, changing the conversation to be about “what you can do” tacitly reinforces the stance that it’s nobody else’s problem to fix, which is precisely blaming the victim for being in the situation (e.g. “if you want things to be different, it’s on yourself to do it”). You may not be consciously aware that your behavior is tacitly blaming victims, but nonetheless it still absolutely is.
- boronine 7y agoIf “drawing attention to remedies that rely on [one’s] agency” is victim blaming, then I’m all for it.