Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Many people have been deeply hurt and angered in the course of their experiences of oppression, and these feelings of hurt and anger can be hard for others to hear. Even when the ways they choose to express these feelings seem unproductive or antagonizing to those who have not shared their experience, it is important that they be supported in doing so?otherwise, how are people to learn from one another and gain perspective on themselves? If rage and pain are hard to hear about, imagine how much harder they are to live with and give voice to!

Likewise, fighting racism and white supremacy isn't a matter of simply learning not to say the wrong thing. At worst, would-be radicals can approach these issues in a self-serving manner, focusing on how to avoid being accused of racism and privilege instead

Anger, Silence, and Guilt

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of concentrating on actually combating them. If we are to effect real change in our society, we will do better to deal with everything openly, however clumsily, than to keep silent in fear of ourselves and each other.

Those who set out to contest their own privileges will inevitably struggle with feelings of guilt. Such feelings can be powerful resources; they can also paralyze and incapacitate. Guilt can motivate one to act in accordance with one's conscience, fostering self-awareness and courage; it can also trap one in a closed circle of self-recrimination. When those with privilege make their own guilt the focus of their thinking about oppression, it can be a way of re-centralizing their own experiences, turning away from the experiences of those who bear the brunt of injustices and from the question of what can be done.

When deahng with guilt, begin by analyzing what it is that makes you feel guilty, and move swiftly on to the matter of what concrete steps you can take to redress the situation. Focus on this, rather than on shame and self-flagellation. However complicit you may be in oppressive systems, however much more you may benefit from the status quo than others do, you too are deserving, you too are unique, you too suffer, just like everyone else?^that is never in question. The question is what you can do to stop being comphcit, to stop benefiting at others' expense.

Understanding What Oppression Is

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Oppression is a network of forces and barriers that are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but systematically related in such a way as to catch one between and among them, restricting or penalizing motion in any direction. The experience of being oppressed is similar to the experience of being caged?all avenues, in every direction, are blocked.

Imagine a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire of the cage, you cannot see the other wires. You could examine that wire, up and down the length of it, and be

unable to see why a bird would not Just fly around it any time it desired to. Tliere is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that would reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it. It is only when you step back to view the whole cage that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere. Then it becomes obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, in conjunction, are as confining as the soHd walls of a dungeon.

Oppression can indeed be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care wdthout seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without recognizing that one is looking at a cage.

With this understanding of oppression, one can distinguish between the terms oppression and domination. Domination occurs when an individual or group coerces, controls, or intimidates others. Domination is noxious in all its forms, but not all domination is oppression. Domination is being blocked by a single wire of a birdcage. For example, when the one white boy at an aU-black school is taunted and even physically assaulted, these are acts of domination, not oppression. Some would call this reverse racism, but that expression is misleading: it suggests that the boy is experiencing the same thing the black students are by growing up in a white-dominated society, which is not the case. Oppression is not merely individual instances of domination, prejudice, or ignorance; it is the systematic privileging of one group over another. It is not possible for a more privileged group to be oppressed by a less privileged group: therefore reverse racism is a contradiction in terms.