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Trauma is a psychological dimension of
oppression. This is true not only in
relation to patriarchy and gender, where the traumatic effects of oppression
have been most widely explored, but in relation to all forms of
oppression. James Baldwin's famous
statement that "to be Black in the Oppression, which is the systemic abuse of
power, renders people powerless. In
turn, powerlessness is the hallmark of traumatic experience. It is therefore inevitable that trauma will
be pervasive in a society organized around domination, both because oppression
creates countless discrete acts of domination and because institutionalized
oppression in itself creates powerlessness and trauma. This is the case with every organized
system of privilege, power and inequality:
racism, xenophobia, class oppression, ableism,
homophobia, and ageism as well as patriarchy.
The breadth and depth of domination in our society generates an
extraordinary volume of recurring traumatic experience. Virtually everyone routinely runs up
against forces on one continuum of oppression or another - individuals in
dominant positions, images, written words, institutional arrangements, cultural
norms, laws, policies - which demean or degrade or devalue or humiliate or
violate or arbitrarily constrain them, and in the face of which they have no
sense of efficacy or control. This
happens at work, at home, at school, on the streets, in stores, in the media,
and in the macro-structures of economic and political power. The result is endless, chronic opportunities
for people to experience themselves as victims and to experience traumatic
rage. Traumatic rage is both valid and
inevitable, and identifying as the victim of oppression is an absolutely
essential step in the political awakening of any oppressed person. But when people become entrenched in victim
status and in the expression or acting out of power-under, traumatic rage
defeats social change. This happens when
our identification as victim prevents us from recognizing our own oppressor
roles. It happens when unfocused
expressions of rage lead us into acts of dehumanization. It happens when we succumb to competition
over the legitimacy or importance of different oppressions, and to
organizational in-fighting. At the other
end of the spectrum, identification as victim creates vast opportunities for
right-wing populism, which is a crucial mechanism for sustaining the status
quo. We have considerable discourse on the
important concepts of "identification with the aggressor" and "blaming the
victim." In this chapter I explore the
political costs of static or chronic identification as the victim. This analysis in turn points toward
strategies for making victimhood a transitional
identity, for finding constructive expressions of traumatic rage, and for a
process of change which can achieve liberation. Identifying as Victim: Obscuring Oppressor Roles
One of the distinctive features of our
social/economic/political system is the way in which it parcels out privilege
and power-over. While there are enormous
concentrations of wealth, status and power at the top, there are also infinite
gradations of economic, social and political standing throughout the rest of
the society. The result is that while
virtually everyone is oppressed in some significant way, almost everyone also has
access to some type of privilege and to one or more oppressor roles.1 This is an aspect
of what Aurora Levins Morales calls the
"interpenetration of institutional systems of power."2 The kinds of complexity I have
explored in Chapter Three on the continuum of gender - the ways that patriarchy
creates conditions under which both men and women are both oppressed and
oppressors - are mirrored and multiplied when we broaden our scope to include
class oppression, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism,
and so on. Consider for example the positions of: ·
white women; ·
men of color; ·
white working
class men; ·
gay professional
men; ·
upper class children. Each of these examples combines an aspect
of privilege and an aspect of oppression in the situation of the same
person. Thus the
example of a white woman, dominant by race and oppressed by gender, or a man of
color, oppressed by race and dominant by gender - and so on. But even these examples vastly over-simplify
real life power relations and people's actual experience. Gender by itself can contain both oppressor
and oppressed roles, as I have argued at length in Chapter Three. So can class, with hierarchies that create
many middle-level workplace roles in which the same person is at once a boss
and a subordinate,3 and
a social structure in which people who are nowhere near the top of the ladder
learn to define their worth by their superior standing relative to those on the
lower rungs: professionals who look down
on working class people, who in turn look down on the welfare poor. So can race, with rankings which assign
different degrees of stigma to people in different "non-white" categories
(Latino, Haitian, Asian, Native American, African-American, and so on) and
"shadings" which rank people of color within the same group based on skin tone
and based on the extent to which they adopt "white" language and cultural
mannerisms.4 Each continuum of oppression, complicated
in its own right, interacts with every other continuum of oppression in the
experience and social standing of each person.
Thus it is misleading to speak of a white woman who is oppressed by
gender and dominant by race because so much is left out of the picture: a white woman of what class position? of what sexual orientation? of what
age? of what physical ability? of
what ethnic background? A white welfare
mother and Hillary Clinton are both "white women." A woman who is a WASP country club member and
a Jewish woman who is a Holocaust survivor are both "white women." The same kinds of questions need to be
asked about people in each of the categories I listed before - and about anyone
- if we want to locate people on a political map that charts the full realities
of their power relations and social standing, their experiences of privilege
and their experiences of victimization. A man of color of what class background and current class position? Of what sexual orientation? A professional gay man of
what race and age and physical ability?
By speaking only of "women" or "people of color" or "gay people" or "trauma
survivors" we too readily narrow our focus to the ways in which people are
oppressed and victimized. Broadening the
focus to look at where each person stands on each continuum of oppression
enormously complicates the picture. But
it is a complexity which is indispensable if we are to understand the totality
of oppression and assess the obstacles we face in achieving political and
social change.5 A narrow focus also too readily identifies
one-dimensional enemies and oppressors.
Eli Clare illustrates this nicely in her discussion of loggers in the
Pacific Northwest.6 Environmentalists have
portrayed loggers as enemies in their struggle to save old growth forests and
endangered species - as accomplices of the timber companies whose narrow
interests are captured in the bumper sticker reading, "Save a logger, kill a
spotted owl."7 Clare
also notes the racism, homophobia, and sexual violence prevalent among the
white male loggers. Yet she insists on
the complexity of these men and their situation, which not only includes their
economic exploitation as workers, their poverty, and their desperation when
their jobs are threatened, but also their intimate knowledge of the forests and
the deep connection that many of them have with their threatened environment: A few of these loggers and mill workers write about
their work to complete assignments my mother gives them [at the community
college]. She says some of the essays
break her heart, essays written by men who love the woods and the steep hills
of the Siskiyous, who fell and buck the trees, and
know the tension between their work and their love. They also know the two aren't diametrically
opposed. Their long days outside, the
years of trudging up and down impossibly steep hills, chainsaws balanced over
their shoulders, feed their love. And in
turn their joy at the morning fog lifting off the trees, the sound of
woodpeckers and gray squirrels, bolsters their willingness to do the dangerous,
body-breaking work of logging. Other
essays make my mother grind her teeth:
pieces about conquest, the analogy between felling a 300-year-old
Douglas fir and raping a woman only thinly veiled, both acts to be bragged
about…All these loggers are fighting poverty, struggling to pay the rent, the
mortgage, the medical bills on a paycheck that has vanished.8 Looked at either from the point of view of
oppressed constituencies or oppressor constituencies, simple distinctions
between "us" and "them" - between dominant and subordinate, perpetrator and
victim, ally and enemy, oppressor and oppressed - continuously break down. In their place we have a maze of criss-crossing, interpenetrating oppressions: loggers who love and destroy forests;
exploited white workers who are racist and homophobic; victims of racism who
commit acts of sexual domination; victims of patriarchy who have class and race
privilege; abused women who abuse children; white gay men who hold class, race,
and gender privilege; white male executives whose emotional capacities have
been decimated by abuse and who in turn practice domination economically,
politically, and socially at all levels. Within this maze, how people identify is
of crucial importance for maintaining the existing social/political/economic
order or for creating possibilities for transformation. When people identify with their privilege -
or with their aspirations for privilege - it is obviously a major factor that
legitimizes and perpetuates the status quo.
We probably see this most clearly in the case of class and wealth, where
dreams of upward mobility and identification with the rich have always been
driving forces in American economic life.
But there are also prevailing tendencies
for people to identify with privilege and with dominant roles along every
continuum of oppression - surely among the people who occupy the dominant
positions, and also in significant ways among oppressed constituencies. Thus not only do white people identify with
all of the spoken and unspoken superiorities attributed to "whiteness" by
racism; but people of color learn that virtually any kind of social, economic,
or political success in the dominant culture requires that they assume white
language,9 mannerisms, and cultural assumptions. And thus the position of
women who aspire to succeed by climbing into the traditional male roles of boss
and breadwinner. What is crucial about this kind of
identification with privilege and power is that it does not mean consciously identifying as an oppressor. Doris Lessing
observes that "the ruling strata of a country, a state, are identified with
their own propaganda…they are identified with their own justifications for
being in power, always self-deceiving ones.
When has any ruler said ‘I am a wicked tyrant'?"10 I believe that Lessing's
observation applies not only to people at the top, but also to ordinary people
who hold crumbs (of various sizes) of power-over and identify with the system
that allocates some degree of power and status and wealth to them. Most white people and most heterosexuals and
most able-bodied people and most people who hold wealth beyond their needs
simply think of themselves as normal, and think of their privileges as
something that they have earned or that they deserve or that give them some
modicum of social value and self-respect.
People from oppressed constituencies who aspire to privilege and
dominance surely do not think in terms of aspiring to become oppressors, but in
terms of achieving statuses and positions from which they have been categorically
excluded. At the other end of the spectrum, when
people identify as victims of oppression, it can all too easily block their
willingness or ability to recognize the ways in which they also hold privilege
and dominant roles. Levins
Morales writes that in her organizing efforts, "I kept encountering the same
desperate refusal of most people to examine the places in their lives where
they were privileged. The easier place
by far was the place of rage…[t]he high moral ground
of the righteously angry victim…"11 There is an over-abundance of reasons why
this would be so. To begin with, it is
difficult for any of us to acknowledge in ourselves statuses and categories
that carry pejorative labels and that we associate with our political enemies: privileged, dominant, oppressor. Or even more pointedly: racist, sexist, homophobe. It is true that for a long time it has been
conventional wisdom in white anti-racism organizing and education that all
white people, no matter how consciously committed to racial equality, carry
racist attitudes and assumptions. But I
don't think this has been widely accepted or internalized, even among
progressive white people, or that it has transferred to any significant extent
to other continua of oppression - such as men acknowledging their sexism or
people acknowledging and examining their class privilege. So the understandable tendency is that when
you try to talk to people about their racism or privilege or dominant roles,
they feel attacked and respond by defending themselves. It is equally understandable that people
who do identify as oppressed become preoccupied with their conscious experience
of oppression. The recognition that you
belong to a constituency which is systemically and institutionally treated as
inferior - and that your inferior status is constantly reflected and re-enacted
in your treatment by members of the dominant group in the course of daily life
- creates a psychological reality of enormous magnitude. It is a reality that does not easily
integrate with an awareness that there are also ways that
you have access to privilege and dominance, and that you have the capacity and
means to act as an oppressor. There is also virtually no political or
cultural context to support people to identify as both oppressed and
oppressors, as both subordinates and dominants, as both victimized and
privileged. To the contrary, our culture
and our politics are saturated with the tendency to split and dichotomize, to
think in terms of enemies and Others, and to define
our identities and identifications without consciousness of complexity. This tendency to dichotomize and to see
the world in terms of identified victims and enemies, or as neatly divided into
oppressed people and oppressors, is significantly compounded by the effects of
trauma. The essence of victimization is
that you are acted upon against your will.
In the moment of trauma, as victims we experience no agency, no capacity
to act effectively. We are forced to
rely on desperate survival mechanisms, such as "freezing"12 and dissociation,13 which both reflect and reinforce a state of
profound immobility. In the moment of
trauma, the victim's world is
constricted into a stark and unbearable dichotomy between the passive recipient
of injustice and a malicious oppressor - whether the oppressor is a specific
perpetrator, an institution, or a social or economic or political structure. To the extent that "the moment of trauma"
persists as an active reality in the lives of oppressed people, it stands as a
huge obstacle to achieving any kind of recognition that we could also act as
perpetrators or oppressors. In order to
acknowledge yourself as a dominant or an oppressor, you have to see yourself as
an actor - as someone with the capacity to act upon others. If the essence of your experience is that you
are acted upon in the world, it
becomes difficult or impossible for you to conceive of yourself as having
anything like this kind of capacity. If
the essence of your psychological reality is that you are small and powerless,
how could you possibly hold the power or the sense of agency to be able to
dominate or harm anyone else? In fact trauma victims are all too capable
of acting as perpetrators and oppressors when we occupy dominant positions, as
I have argued repeatedly and have tried to show with examples ranging from
Holocaust survivors to traumatized batterers to mothers who hit their
kids. But the psychology of trauma
severely obstructs the capacity of survivors to recognize our dominant roles
and behaviors. The extreme example of
this is the situation of the male batterers described by Neil Jacobson and John
Gottman who feel victimized in the very act of
assaulting their partners.14 But
it is also true in less dramatic ways and to varying degrees among the entire
range of trauma survivors whose experience of victimization remains a core
subjective reality. Raising social
consciousness about the effects of trauma is therefore critical to promoting a
broad-based political awareness that almost all of us occupy both oppressed and
oppressor roles. Identifying as Victim: Left-Wing Dehumanization
One of the most daunting problems faced by
left politics is how to succeed in seizing power and fostering structural
transformation without re-creating top-down power relations, new elites, and
renewed structures of oppression. In
relatively mild (though still problematic) forms, the re-creation of political
inequality by the left has meant socialist countries with leaders-for-life and
associated entrenched ruling structures.
In extreme forms it has meant totalitarian states and the massive
destruction of human life. Achieving a level of political success
which could create possibilities for abuses of power may seem so far removed
from the current state of the I think that many people associate
socialism with the authoritarian imposition of economic and political
constraints by central government and party elites on the large majority of the
people. This perception surely is one of
the legacies of the enormously effective anti-Communist propaganda strategies
of the cold war, one aspect of which was to reduce all forms of socialism to
Stalinist assaults on individual freedom and human dignity. But there has been enough reality to left
authoritarianism that the issue cannot be dismissed as only a matter of
propaganda. In any case, one of the
major challenges for the left is to articulate a program for economic and
social equality which can convince ordinary people that "equality" would not
paradoxically be jammed down their throats, that left politics are not
antithetical to personal freedom, and that the enactment of a left program
would mean the humanization of economic and political life rather than massive
dehumanization. Left wing dehumanization and its
alternative, radical humanization, are issues of
enormous significance and scope, and traumatic victimization is only one piece
of this much larger puzzle. But it is a
piece of some importance, and one that has received little attention as far as
I am aware. What is at issue here is how
as progressives or leftists we characterize and behave toward the Others whom we identify as enemies and oppressors, as the flagbearers and agents of the status quo. I believe that when we treat our political
adversaries as anything less than full human beings, we lose sight of the
interpenetration of different types of oppression and lose important
opportunities for organizing and coalition building. Even more critically, when we treat our
adversaries as Other we also are committing small but
significant acts of dehumanization - acts which are cumulative in nature, which
plant seeds that can ultimately corrupt social change efforts, and which also
defeat the emergence of a radically humane left program and politics in the
present.15 Entrenched identification with victim
status can lead quite directly to this kind of dehumanization of the
adversary. I want to offer some examples
of this tendency, which I believe abounds in Almost 30 years ago I worked in a group
home for emotionally disturbed children which was part
of a larger treatment center. The parent
agency was a traditionally run, hierarchical organization; but the group home
was run as a collective, and for a period of time we had enough autonomy to
function as tiny alternative institution within the larger conventional
structure. My own identification was as
what Barbara and John Ehrenreich called a "radical in
the professions."16 I
believed that the development of radically egalitarian counter-institutions was
one of the key ways to achieve social change, and I understood my work not only
in terms of the services we were providing to the disturbed kids, but also as a
political effort to create workplace democracy. As a tiny
alternative institution we were deeply vulnerable to the established power
structure, both within the parent organization and in our relations with the
larger human service system. This was
played out in a number of ways, eventually including a decision by the
executive director of the parent agency to remove our autonomy and to put us
under the direct control of an administrator who practiced an explicitly
top-down approach, effectively defeating our effort to achieve workplace democracy. Shortly
before this decision was made, we had a particularly nasty run-in with a social
worker from a funding agency who overrode our approach to working with the
mother of one of the kids in the program and ordered us not to allow the kid to
have visits with his mother. At a long,
unproductive meeting in which we attempted unsuccessfully to appeal this
decision, I felt that the social worker from the funding agency treated me with
great disrespect and at the same time complained that I did not respect her
essentially because I was disagreeing with her.
A psychologist from our parent agency, whom I had invited to the meeting
to support our position, wound up siding with the social worker from the
funding agency. For a variety of reasons, this run-in became
a focal point for my rage. An approach
which I had known to be effective in many other cases was being proscribed by
administrative fiat, leaving me and my co-workers powerless to do our work in
the way that we believed was right. This
violation of our ability to control our own work became fused with the much
larger violation of the entire character of our workplace in the decision which
followed on its heals to strip us of our autonomy and
to impose a conventional hierarchical structure on the group home. In both cases I felt that my co-workers and I
were the victims of professionals in power positions who used their power to
impose top-down decisions on us that violated my basic values and beliefs. Eight months after my run-in with the
social worker from the funding agency, and shortly after I had quit my job in
protest against the centralized administration of the group home, I wrote a
long letter to the social worker expressing my outrage at her actions and at
the decision she had dictated to us.
Near the beginning of the letter I summarized her positions and cited
some of her statements at our meeting; then I wrote, You finally told me that what really made you
‘bullshit' was that I didn't respect you.
At that point I baled out, realizing belatedly after three dreadful
hours that you held all the cards - so many cards that you could even afford to
be honest with me. (Honest to a
point. You never said how much you disrespect me.) I could not afford to
be honest then; now I can. You were right. I honestly don't respect you. In fact, I think your head is so far up your
ass it's coming out your lungs. At the time I understand this episode in
explicitly political terms. Later in my
letter I wrote about power relations and hierarchy, and I argued that decisions
should be made "by those who actually do the clinical work." I described the social worker as an
oppressor, and described myself as "trying to create an existence which is
neither exploited nor exploitative." I had no inkling that this goal, which
really did express my deepest values, was starkly contradicted by telling an
"oppressor" in a state of rage that "your head is up
your ass." To the contrary, I saw this
as a small act of militance, something which I was
proud of. It did not dawn on me that I might be
acting destructively toward the social worker, or that there was another
dimension of this interaction which involved me as a man talking abusively to a
woman, or that treating another person this way could not possibly be a step of
any sort toward reducing the amount of exploitation in the world. I could only see myself as the social
worker's victim, and could only see her as someone in a power position who had
used her power arbitrarily and destructively.
To me the social worker had become a figure, not a person, and my letter
to her was a small but real act of dehumanization. It was in the same breath an acting out of my traumatic rage. It is too simple, and misses an important
part of the point, to say that the social worker's behavior toward me had
triggered my childhood abuse at the hands of my mother, and that in my behavior
I was acting out my rage at my mother.
There is considerable truth to that way of looking at what happened, but
it is not the whole truth. In fact the
social worker was in a power
position, did use her power arbitrarily and destructively, and did traumatize
my co-workers and me by making us powerless.
Present-time power relations do not reduce to triggers or re-enactments
of childhood trauma; they often are triggers, but are also important - and can
also be traumatizing - in their own right. But what is also true is that I had no
understanding of myself as a traumatized person - either regarding my childhood
trauma or in terms of what was taking place in the present; and I had no
understanding of how my unresolved childhood trauma was affecting and in many
ways guiding my reactions and responses to the present-time events. There is a difference between identifying as
a political victim and identifying as a trauma victim or survivor. A political identification as victim without
a corresponding recognition of trauma can itself be a trigger which unleashes
(or helps to unleash) the unfocused and destructive expression of rage - the
treatment of adversaries as Others, as political figures rather than human
beings - and this was certainly the case in my situation. Unfortunately, my behavior in this episode
is far from unusual. It is all too easy
to find examples of the politicized expression of rage in which our adversaries
are reduced to something less than full human beings. This has been done quite literally with the
political use of the term pig - as a
name for the police, as a term for chauvinist men, as a description of
capitalists, and so on. By calling
people pigs we are explicitly transforming them into a non-human status, paving
the way for any kind of treatment of them which serves the expression of our
rage and of our sense of victimization. The same is true of the famous slogan that
was current at the height of the Black Power movement, "Up against the wall,
motherfucker" - a motherfucker, not a person.
During that same period I remember seeing two left-identified women
literally jumping for joy when they heard that J. Edgar Hoover had died. A letter published in a recent issue of Z Magazine refers to one political
adversary as "an asshole" and to the "slobbering ass-kissing" of another.17 Eli Clare writes
about environmentalists who "use language and images that turn the loggers into
dumb brutes. The loggers are described
as ‘Neanderthal thugs' and ‘club-wielding maniacs'…To clearly and accurately
report unjust, excessive, and frightening violence is one thing; to portray a
group of people as dumb brutes is another."18
The
dehumanization of the oppressor by victims of oppression is both understandable
and, to some degree, inevitable. Why
wouldn't African Americans, with a legacy of 500 years of the most extreme
subjugation, brutality and dehumanization at the hands of white people - not to
mention the specific history of white men raping Black women - in turn
characterize white people as motherfuckers? Why wouldn't women think of men as pigs? The seething rage which is generated when
people are chronically violated and made powerless expresses itself in these
and similar terms of counter-contempt.
To expect victims to spontaneously humanize their oppressors - to
spontaneously treat their oppressors with compassion, deep respect, and
understanding of the causes of their oppressive behavior - is unrealistic
unless there are political, social, and psychological contexts and supports
which can enable us to do so. But in the absence of such contexts, the
unchecked and dehumanizing expression of powerless rage cannot possibly lead in
the direction of a more just and humane society. In its milder forms it results in name calling,
in the alienation of potential allies, in lost opportunities for mutually
respectful dialogue, and in polarizations in which the more powerful segments
of society are likely to prevail. In
more extreme forms it leads to unfocused violence, rioting, and to the
conscious use of violence as a means to an end - to the destruction of human
lives because they are not valued as fully human; because they are
characterized as pigs or motherfuckers or assholes or
brutes or thugs or as other reduced political categories rather than as people. Understanding ourselves as trauma victims
and survivors, and developing understandings of how trauma affects us, is a
first step toward countering tendencies to dehumanize our adversaries from the
position of the victim. It is not by
itself enough, because we also need strategies and methods for the constructive expression of rage - ways
to defend ourselves from attack, ways to stand up for ourselves and to oppose
oppression in all its forms which at the same time enable us to maintain
compassion and full respect for the humanity of those whom we identify as oppressors
(including at times ourselves) and those whom we oppose in any given
struggle. But identifying and understanding trauma
in our own lives is an important first step because it can give us language and
a conceptual framework to be able to name the process that leads the victims of
oppression to respond by dehumanizing the oppressor: the language and framework of traumatic rage
and power-under. These understandings
can also help us to build the political and psychological contexts which could
support the constructive mobilization of rage, in ways that I explore in
Chapter Five. Identifying as Victim:
Competitive Oppressions and Organizational In-Fighting Disunity and fragmentation are major
obstacles faced by progressive and radical social change movements. Divisions - or the potential for division -
are everywhere and are constantly impeding our capacity to build and sustain
major movements that can have real and lasting political impact. The fault lines within and between
left-identified movements and organizations mirror and re-enact every
significant form of oppression; and so we have deep distrust and inability to
communicate based on differences of race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
age, physical ability, and so on. There
are important moments when alliances are built that enable us to act
effectively, such as the mobilizations of activism against globalization and
the current anti-war movement - but always with a degree of tenuousness which
threatens, and too often defeats, the viability of social change movements.19 There are
many reasons why this would be so. Given
a dominant culture and economy which foster competition, individualism, and
social fragmentation, it is hardly surprising that these tendencies are played
out in left organizations and movements (as they are played out across the
political spectrum and in all of our social and economic institutions). The kind of concentrated wealth and power
which holds together the major political parties, and which to some degree also
fuels the more extreme right, is not available to (or desirable for) the left. The varying
ideological bases and social change traditions of the left - Marxism,
anarchism, feminism, pacifism, the labor movement, the civil rights / Black
Power movements, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, and so on -
inevitably create tensions and conflicts in political analysis, in vision and
goals, in organizing strategies, and in approaches to building movement
organizations. The multiplicity of
oppressions is certain to cause divisions, compounded by the tendency which I
have already discussed for people to identify variously with their privilege
and with their oppressed status in ways which constantly reinforce these
divisions. There is also the strategic
use of tactics by elites to create and exacerbate splits among actual or
potential social change constituencies, particularly when movements become
strong enough to actually threaten powerful interests. In the context of this entire range of
factors, traumatic identification as the victim also plays an important
role. In the constricted world of a
trauma victim, there can be little or no room to take in the reality or the
magnitude of the suffering of others who are perceived as fundamentally
different from you. As victims we are
understandably preoccupied with our own experience of being acted upon in utter
disregard for our worth as human beings.
Our suffering unavoidably fills up our entire psychological landscape
and - to the extent that we are politically conscious of oppression - our
political landscape. The overwhelming
impact of trauma can make it difficult or impossible to believe that the
suffering of other oppressed groups could be as serious or as profound as our
own. This is compounded by an all-too-acute
recognition of dominant roles of members of other oppressed groups. For example, a straight man of color may look
at a white gay man and see a white person; a white gay man may look at a
straight man of color and see a heterosexual.
If as a traumatized person you perceive someone who claims to be
oppressed as your oppressor or
potential perpetrator, it becomes that much more difficult to respect his or
her claims of oppression. When the entrenched, unbearable suffering
caused by trauma is understood and expressed through conscious political
identification as the victim of oppression, it readily translates into the
belief that the type of oppression from which you (or those you identify with)
suffer is the most fundamental, pervasive, and destructive and therefore is the political root of what must be
changed or dismantled. From this
perspective other oppressions are at best secondary, do not deserve the same
degree of political attention and action, and will necessarily crumble when the
root oppression is overturned. The
psychology of trauma thus feeds ideological competition and divisions over the
relative importance of different oppressions.
What is probably even more important is that trauma impedes the
capacities of oppressed people to bridge differences, to engage in constructive
dialogue, to notice commonalities and build coalitions, and to affirm the
validity of the suffering of others. Trauma also feeds the tendency toward
in-fighting in left organizations. As I
have observed in Chapter Two, it commonly serves the immediate psychological
needs of traumatized people to identify and lash out at a proximate villain - someone who is known, who is within reach, and
who can be blamed for the intolerable pain and sense of injustice that the
survivor experiences. Within movement
organizations, it is fellow-activists who can readily become the objects of our
rage - over heated ideological or strategic differences; over the more mundane
frustrations and conflicts that arise in any organization; and, perhaps most
poignantly, when we believe that people with whom we thought we held shared
values are acting outside of those political principles. The sense of being betrayed by those we
had trusted to any degree is enormously evocative and triggering for trauma
survivors. In the context of social
change organizations this can lead to truly internecine and irresolvable
conflict, to vicious circles of rage and counter-rage: the "enemy," who was supposed to be out there
in the larger society, is suddenly perceived as being in the room. One prominent example of this kind of
internecine conflict was the struggle for control of Pacifica Radio between
1999 and 2001. While the substance of
that conflict was significant, for here the relevant point is how venomous it
became. According to a recent account,
"Some activists attacked each other at every possible opportunity, especially
on email…and displayed an insensitivity to diversity
issues that left the movement constantly open to race-baiting by The intensity and viciousness with which
activists attack each other can understandably appear baffling or
incomprehensible - and can also be incredibly frustrating and
demoralizing. Thus one observer writes
about being "fed up with folks at An understanding of trauma and the
dynamics of power-under can, at the very least, make this kind of in-fighting
and mutual vilification among activists more comprehensible. This can help us not to be taken by surprise
when internal conflicts erupt and are waged in the manner that occurred at If I identify not only as a victim of
oppression but also as a traumatized person, it may give me a new perspective
on my reactions and feelings toward members of other oppressed groups. This may be as simple as being able to
recognize that it is hard for me to appreciate the suffering of other oppressed
identities at least in part because of my own traumatic experience. If I identify as a traumatized person and
have some understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, I may be able
to take a step back from my rage and sense of betrayal at (for example) the
dominating behavior of other activists and note that my reaction has to do with
my own history of trauma as well as with their behavior. This does not mean that I should accept
dominating behavior, but rather that I can respond to it more effectively if I
am not overwhelmed by traumatic rage.
Consciousness of trauma does not necessarily prevent rage or the impulse
toward divisiveness; but it can temper these responses by offering us a
conceptual framework that gives us a new perspective on them. It can also offer a basis for dialogue, and a
language to dialogue with, among
oppressed constituencies and within splintered movement organizations. Identifying as Victim: Right-Wing Populism
Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism,23 written from a left perspective when the Nazis
came to power in I think that the left faces a similar kind
of question today - not in the extreme form raised by the political triumph of
fascism, but at a time when mainstream U.S. politics have moved steadily to the
right. The last 20 years have seen both
major parties embrace reactionary policies, ranging from the decimation of
welfare and affirmative action to the massive upward redistribution of wealth;
from globalization and the re-establishment of military intervention as an
acceptable tool of How to explain the success of right wing
politics over the last quarter century? One answer is that values and attitudes
remain widespread which lead people to tolerate or actively support the right -
racism, xenophobia, class contempt directed variously at the working class and
the welfare poor, sexism, homophobia, ableism,
contempt toward children, and so on. But
this answer invites the same basic question:
why do so many people who are themselves oppressed in significant ways
tolerate or endorse the domination of others, and identify with values and
politics which maintain intact a total system rooted in oppression and
domination? Conventional left explanations focus on
extreme concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn place control of the
electoral political process and of the media and other vehicles for propaganda
in the hands of economic and political elites.
The ideological legacies of anti-communism, and the political impact of
the fall of Soviet empire, have further bolstered a climate in which capitalism
is portrayed as the only economic option and the Trauma also has something to tell us about
the appeal of right-wing populism in Consider for example the politics and the
psychology of the anti-abortion movement, which has been a mainstay of the
right for the last 30 years. Defining
fetuses as human beings, anti-abortion activists have repeatedly dehumanized
women seeking to exercise reproductive rights and health care workers offering
services related to abortion, with tactics ranging from verbal harassment to
threats and acts of violence.26 While it
is a fringe of the anti-abortion movement that engages in or actively supports
the use of physical violence, acts of verbal violence and intimidation are
considerably more common; and the demonization of
pro-choice women and health care providers is pervasive among the right's
popular base.27 The attitudes of this movement toward
women - and toward children once they are born - as well as the widespread use
of verbal violence and sporadic physical violence all flagrantly contradict the
professed devotion to the sanctity of life as represented by the fetus. I don't doubt that in part this reflects
hypocrisy and demagoguery among right wing politicians and "pro-life" movement
leadership. But what about the ordinary people - women
as well as men - who comprise the popular base of the anti-abortion
movement? I take at face value that by
and large these are people who honestly and deeply believe that abortion is the
murder of a human being. If that is the
case, how can people so passionately value human life (in the form of fetuses)
and in the same breath so passionately devalue
human life (in the form of women, children, and health care workers)? One part of the answer surely has to do with
the values and ideology of the Christian fundamentalism that informs and
inspires large segments of the anti-abortion movement and the resurgent right
as a whole.28 But
I believe that another important and overlooked piece of the answer rests in
the politics of trauma. Anti-abortion activists deeply identify
with a perceived victim who is tiny, totally helpless, and at the mercy of
forces of annihilation. This is the
basic theme of traumatization. For these right-wing activists, abortion is a
personal issue - it becomes their own violation. Of course I cannot know with certainty how
many of these people have been abused and traumatized, and are playing out
their own experience of trauma through their identification with the threatened
or annihilated fetus; but trauma is such a pervasive experience in our society
(as I have tried to show in Chapter One) that it is reasonable to believe that
something of this sort is true for many of them. Even apart from projecting their own
experiences of helplessness and victimization onto the fetus, deep
identification with a class of victims can create a kind of secondary traumatization, which I think many leftists have also
experienced in our identifications with groups of oppressed people. It is a very short step from identifying
with the victim - or identifying as
the victim - to dehumanizing the perpetrator.
For a moment let's take this question out of the context of abortion and
identification with the fetus, and place it into the context of situations in
which we are being acted upon,
malevolently and brutally, against our will.
In the moment of trauma, it is virtually impossible for any of us as
victims to maintain a sense of the perpetrator's humanity. Through the eyes of the victim, the
perpetrator is not acting like a human being.
How can those who rape two year-olds, or who make lamp shades from human
skin, or who in countless other ways commit atrocities which strip every
vestige of humanity from their victims be viewed by the victim with any degree
of compassion or understanding - as anything but the malevolent Other? Even in cases of less "extreme" violation, I
believe that for trauma victims the same question applies. When someone makes you powerless and denies
your humanity, the natural and understandable tendency is to view the
perpetrator as inhuman. If we now return to the anti-abortion
movement, the framework of trauma helps to make sense of the political stance
and actions of "pro-life" activists. What is blatantly inconsistent or
contradictory rationally is coherent psychologically and subjectively. If you honestly believe that women who have
abortions and the health care workers who perform or facilitate abortions are
murderers, and furthermore murderers of the most innocent, vulnerable and
powerless forms of human life, it follows all too easily to define those
associated in any way with these "murders" as inhuman monsters - not as human beings. If in addition you carry your own legacies
of being brutalized and acted upon against your will, your own festering
traumatic rage finds a readily available target in those who would annihilate
the unborn children with whom you so deeply identify. Subjectively, the unleashing of this rage is
entirely about self-protection and the protection of the helpless and
defenseless fetus against overpowering destructive forces. It is difficult to overstate the extent to
which the imagery of abortion captures and evokes the themes of traumatization - the experience of being small, helpless,
powerless, violated, coerced, overpowered, annihilated - given the premise of
the fetus as human life. The same theme of traumatization
runs through many of the right's staple populist appeals. The attack against "big government," which
has always been a smokescreen for an agenda of shifting federal priorities from social welfare to the military and
to the active promotion of corporate interests, has played well politically in
part because it resonates so deeply with so many people's experiences of being
overpowered by "big" forces that are beyond their control. The same is true of attacks against "tax and
spend liberals" who are portrayed as victimizing
over-taxed working people. The old depictions of the communist
menace, replaced in recent years by "rogue states" and particularly since
September 11 by the demonic figures of Osama bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein - appeal in very similar ways to our fears of being
victimized and overwhelmed by malevolent Others. Reaction against affirmative action has
portrayed white people as "victims" of "reverse racism"; no matter how bogus
these claims, they are effective politically not only because they give a
legitimate face to white racism, but also because they offer ordinary white
people a place to direct the rage that is rooted in the real ways that they
have been victimized and made powerless in their lives. In situations where government policies
really do make white people powerless, such as forced school busing, the venom
unleashed against people of color has been sharply focused and brutal. It is the genius of right wing populism to
politically manipulate traumatic rage into support for reactionary policies by mobilizing people around causes that direct their rage downward at oppressed and scapegoated groups.
As Jean Hardisty observes, "[w]hen the right
mobilizes intolerance against a minority or an out-group…, it blames and
demonizes the hated group and, at the same time, draws anger away from the real
sources of social ills. By displacing
anger onto such decoys, the right allows for greater dominance by elites, while
creating the impression of increased empowerment for those expressing their
intolerance."29 The
targets of right wing populist appeals are people of color (including
immigrants), the welfare poor (also stereotyped as non-white), third world
countries (also largely non-white), gays, women exercising reproductive
rights. In each case, there is an
enormous amount of social training, political propaganda and fundamentalist
religious ideology which predispose people who identify in varying ways as
mainstream (white, non-poor, male, straight, Christian and so on) to define
these groups as the Other and to gain some sense of legitimacy or
self-validation from their dehumanization.
But these reactionary appeals are emotionally compelling because they
resonate so deeply with so many people's actual experiences of victimization
and trauma. While the specific claims of these appeals
are bogus, they tap themes and images - of being small and powerless, of being
acted upon against your will, of being threatened by alien and malicious forces
- which evoke the real (and often unacknowledged) traumas in people's
lives. If it is true, as I have argued,
that virtually everyone has been abused and traumatized as a child, and that
childhood trauma is compounded and reinforced by lifelong experiences that make
people devalued and powerless through a criss-crossing
maze of institutional and interpersonal domination, this creates an almost endless
potential for the political scapegoating set in
motion by right-wing populism. Despite
widespread public cynicism about politicians, when they present themselves as
standing up for "little people" against Them - people of color, foreigners, big
government, terrorists - the appeal is strong because it gives many people a
legitimated outlet for their for rage, a sense of being able to act on their
own behalf, and the illusion of protection against the overwhelming forces that
threaten them. To build more effective social change
movements, we need to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of why
right-wing populism has been so successful.
It is critical to expose the demagoguery of I think that any strategy for countering
right-wing populism needs to take into account the breadth and depth of
traumatic experience in our society. The
challenge for the left is to develop a populist politics which can resonate
with people's experiences of victimization and trauma, but can do so in ways
that direct rage upward at the real forces that make people powerless and
devalued, and which offer people options for the constructive expression of
their rage. Linda Stout's account in Bridging the Class Divide of the
organizing efforts of the Piedmont Peace Project in The strategy of the Piedmont Peace Project
is "to deal with oppression up front. We
talk to folks in the community about how our own oppression can destroy us as a
mobilized force moving toward social change."
Before beginning an organizing project, organizers are "up front" with
people in a community that they make links between oppressions based on class,
race, gender, and sexual orientation.
They anticipate the ways in which one oppressed constituency may
scapegoat another, and they work proactively to raise critical awareness of
potential divisions in order to prevent them.
"We have full discussions and only then do we go forward with the
work. We include some kind of training
on oppression and internalized oppression at every gathering, at every board
meeting, at every conference."31 "Victim" as a Transitional Identity
Radical politics are only possible if
enough people become aware of themselves as victims of the existing political,
economic and social structures that shape their lives. But, as I have tried to show, the victim identity
is severely double-edged, because it can so readily lead to destructive
behavior and to counter-productive results.
Without a left perspective - by which I mean an understanding of how the
concentration of wealth and power leads in myriad ways to the domination and
victimization of individuals - identification as victim feeds right-wing
populism, is expressed through the political scapegoating
of disenfranchised groups, and bolsters the status quo. But even with a left perspective, chronic
identification as the victim is unlikely to serve as the foundation for social
transformation in the direction of equality and radical humanization. It is a stance in the world which is too
prone to unfocused rage and dehumanization; too self-absorbed and too
preoccupied with suffering to build inclusive coalitions and embrace the
suffering of others; too entrenched in being acted upon to act constructively
and effectively in the world; too insistent on the innocence of the victim and
the malice of the oppressor to accept and work with the complex political
reality that virtually everyone houses both oppressed and oppressor roles. In the language I have developed in this
book, power-under - no matter how understandably and inevitably it emerges from
traumatic experience - cannot serve as an effective mechanism for social
change. What is needed is a political context
which enables people to move through
consciousness of victimization as a transitional identity. But transitional to what? You do not stop oppression in your life, or
the traumatic effects of oppression, by simply saying that you no longer think
of yourself as a victim. Nor is identity
necessarily a matter of the words we use to describe ourselves. The kind of transition in identity that I am
thinking of has to do with making a shift from being acted upon to being an
actor; from subordinate to equal; from power-under to power-with. In order to move beyond the victim
identity, we need resources that enable us to act constructively at every level
- psychological, personal, social, organizational, and political. It is the task of Chapter Five to explore
strategies for developing these resources. Notes to Chapter Four 1. I
have developed a detailed analysis of interlocking oppressions in The Politics of Human Services
(Boston: South End Press, 1984), Chapter
Five. 2. Aurora
Levins Morales, Medicine
Stories: History, Culture, and the
Politics of Integrity (Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 1998), p.122. 3. See
Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The
Professional-Managerial Class," in Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston:
South End Press, 1979). 4. See
for example Michelle Cliff, "If I Could Write This In
Fire, I would Write This in Fire," In Barbara Smith, Ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist
Anthology (New York: Kitchen
Table: Women of Color Press, 1983). 5. C.f.
Levins Morales, "Circle Unbroken: The Politics of Inclusion," in Medicine Stories. 6. See
"Clearcut:
Brutes and Bumper Stickers" and "Clearcut: End of the Line," in Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999). 7. Clare,
p. 45. 8. Clare,
p. 50. 9. See
June Jordan, "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You And the Future Life of Willie
Jordan," in On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, 1985). Linda Stout, in Bridging the Class Divide (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1996), describes a similar discrepancy between working
class language and "acceptable" middle class language, and her need to learn to
speak middle class language in order to be taken seriously by middle class
progressive activists. 10. Doris Lessing, Afterward
to The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8 in 11. Levins Morales, Medicine Stories, pp. 93-94. 12. See Peter Levine with Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997). 13. I discuss dissociation at length in Chapter
Two. 14. Neil Jacobson and John Gottman,
When Men Batter Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); see my
discussion in Chapter Two. 15. C.f. Levins Morales,
"Torturers," in Medicine Stories. 16. Barbara and John Ehrenreich,
"The Professional-Managerial Class." 17. Z
Magazine 13:4 (April 2000), p. 2. 18. Clare, Exile
and Pride, p. 46. 19. For example, see Robin Hahnel,
"Speaking Truth To Power: Speaking Truth To Ourselves," Z Magazine 13:6 (June 2000), pp. 44-51,
for a discussion of the challenges faced by the movement against corporate
globalization to forge and maintain unity. 20. Andrea Buffa, "Pacifica Radio Crisis is Settled," Z Magazine 15:4 (April 2002), p. 20. 21. Susan
Douglas, "Is There a Future for 22. Quoted in Buffa, "Pacifica Radio Crisis is Settled,"
p. 20. 23. Wilhelm
Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970
[originally published in 1933]). Reich
was an extremely supple political thinker who grappled with crucial questions
about both the rise of fascism in 24. Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch
Society to the Promise Keepers (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1999). 25. Hardisty, Mobilizing
Resentment, p. 8. 26. See for
example Bill Berkowitz, "RU-486," Z
Magazine 27. See Hardisty, Mobilizing
Resentment. 28. See Hardisty for an analysis of the relationship between
Christian fundamentalism and the right-wing popular movement. 29. Hardisty, p. 51. 30. Stout, Bridging the Class Divide, p. 90. 31. Stout, pp.
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