Naming systems rather than blaming individuals is the antidote to scapegoating politics

Evidence

This starts with naming, as bell hooks always did, the systems that have carved out the Shadow Lands, deemed them erasable, disposable: capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy. It requires teaching those words, and their true meanings, to the people in our lives, so that the next time someone tells them that their suffering and burdens are all the fault of child-stealing globalists, or job-stealing immigrants, or well-meaning teachers, or the Jews or the Chinese or the drag queens at the library, they will know better. And they will be able to fight better. “We can be hard and critical on structures, but soft on people,” says the civil rights scholar john a. powell. That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1073

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘hard on structures, soft on people’ framing bears on the sacrifice analysis in ‘On Sacrifice’ — scapegoating is the shadow-function of sacrificial thinking.
• SEED: The asymmetry between how we critique structures versus people is a ready essay angle: which failures do we individuate, and why.
• XREF: connects to: Therapeutic self-naming privatises suffering and prevents collective solidarity. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1372; Naming-and-shaming policy fails when shame breeds no guilt or reparation — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 2081; Naming and categorizing contention shapes how authorities and publics respond — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1342