Collective guilt isn’t a fruitful means of change. It may alleviate our pain as victims and oppressors; it may help us cope, but it leads us into a hole of destitution and shame.... To charge someone guilty in a court of law is to strip one of their resources, strip them of their livelihood. Collective guilt creates a space of violence, of hatred, of oppression and invisibility. Oppression does not defeat oppression. However, we will never get anywhere if we don't enact collective responsibility to those who batter us...
We must also end this cruelty towards those who are perceived as other (as woman); stop blaming them and recognize that there is another way instead of pain and shame.
We must also end this cruelty towards those who are perceived as other (as woman); stop blaming them and recognize that there is another way instead of pain and shame.
If Steubenville has taught us anything, it is that we treat responsibility as if it were absolute criminality… as the devil itself. No one wishes to discuss it except when it is the "victim" being blamed; no one wishes to touch it; no one wishes to think of the "perpetrator" as anything but noble…
criminality is tainted, dirty; it’s the black man himself. And to treat a white man as a black man (that is throwing him in prison – in the gates of hell and oppression) is a sin. It is a sin to treat white males as if they were criminals… like a woman, like a black, like a queer or whore.
criminality is tainted, dirty; it’s the black man himself. And to treat a white man as a black man (that is throwing him in prison – in the gates of hell and oppression) is a sin. It is a sin to treat white males as if they were criminals… like a woman, like a black, like a queer or whore.
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