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The root of inequality is the simple but sinister idea that some people are inherently inferior to others. I’ll give Sowell and other conservative media figureheads the benefit of the doubt that they do not personally believe young black men are inherently more dangerous and violent, but that’s all the more reason not to play into such biases and fan the flames of white racial anxiety. Sowell and others should understand that, in America today, this is how racism operates—not primarily through explicit epithets and force but through subtle winks and nods to the prejudices on which our society remains built.

Because she believes in the literal “truth” of flashback memories, Caruth privileges the allegedly special knowledge of the survivor. Caught in a “collapse of witnessing,” the survivor is transformed into an eidetic device—a medium upon which the truth is inscribed (like an image on a videotape), and through which it can be played back again and again without degradation of quality. The survivor, however, can no more understand or assimilate the truth (“the impossibility of knowing”) than a video tape can, and it is left to the psychotherapist/reader to impose meaning on the events that the survivor/tape has merely recorded. Caruth’s sense of the survivor as medium is underlined by her claim “that the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another.” In other words, if a video tape is played without an audience, the events it records might as well not have occurred.

Borrowing loosely from recent neurological studies that indicate transformations in brain chemistry result from traumatic stress, Caruth formulates a theory in which “the elision of memory and the precision of recall” create a “history that is constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence.” She returns, again and again, to the “exactness” of the recollection, its “etching into the brain,” and seems to forget—in her repetition of the word “truth”—that there is a vast difference between precision and accuracy. Caruth doesn’t consider the possibility that the encapsulated memories are not, in fact, perfect records of actual events but are already interpretations, revisions, mediated images shaped or influenced by the perceptual framework within which they were received. Clinical studies might demonstrate that trauma survivors have precise memories; however, they cannot demonstrate that such memories always document historical events in a faithful fashion. Caruth’s theoretical position is based on her unsupported assumption that traumatic memory does possess a certain authenticity.

It’s a sad irony that we promote self-defense classes as a way of combating violence against women, yet many of the women of color, trans and cis alike, are currently imprisoned precisely because they fought back against violence in their homes and in the streets.
Too often trans and queer women of color survive violence in their homes and on the streets only to have the police, courts and prison-industrial complex come after them for having the audacity to survive in a world where, as Audre Lorde said in her poem “A Litany For Survival,” they “were never meant to survive.

Even if all fat people are the way they are due to their bad choices, even if every single fat person is unhealthy, that does not justify sub-standard treatment. How can the health of strangers possibly inspire such vitriol? If you remain convinced that others’ bodies are your business and people must justify their existence to you, perhaps you should consider the possibility that you are an arsehole