Pity toward the oppressed naturally becomes outrage at their oppressors

Evidence

Pity and outrage are two sides of the same coin. Pity is powerful, and also dangerous, because it implies that the person who has the emotion is more powerful than the person who is the object of the emotion. Empathy is not a relevant emotion here because it is built on a greater sense of equality between the two parties; the oppressed Muslim woman is figured as coming from a culture so different that it is difficult to understand or relate to. Pity makes outrage easy; feeling sorrow for someone’s distress easily morphs into anger at the circumstances that caused the distress and thus outrage at the men, the culture, and the religion. Outrage emerges from the anger and shock when one’s sensibilities or sense of right and wrong are offended. Pity and outrage lead to experiencing oneself as invested in justice. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 518

Categorization

• SEED: This pity-to-outrage circuit is a mechanism worth tracing: how humanitarian rescue narratives manufacture consent for military intervention.
• XREF: Mirrors the ‘saving brown women from brown men’ logic Spivak diagnosed in her famous essay. — connects to: Pity’s enemies rejected misfortune rather than condoning the powerful; Pity persists as irrational mediation of reason, becoming vice; Moral impulse expressed as duty gave way to pity under modern subjection — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 216 (+1 more)