Resilience-based responses wrongly shift blame from society onto individual victims

Evidence

One response to such psychological vulnerability would be to argue that we should find ways of enhancing individuals’ resilience in the light of such negative events and circumstances. However, this response is based on a narrow perspective on resilience that sees it predominantly in terms of psychological resources. This type of response would shift the problem away from the racialized nature of society that directly or indirectly supports racism and discrimination, and away from community action, towards the individual at risk of experiencing racism, placing ever greater burdens on members of marginalized and racialized communities while leaving unchanged, and unchallenged, the underlying causes of racism and health inequalities. Instead, we should focus on community, societal and political responses. — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 337

Categorization

• XREF: A direct argument against individualizing the problem — the same move the 2017 Runnymede report makes against depoliticized, attitudinal definitions of Islamophobia. — connects to: Powerlessness does not explain why a specific group is blamed; Culturalizing explanations of Muslim inequality blame victims while masking structural causes. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 173; Individual resilience framing shifts blame onto victims and leaves racist structures untouched. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 342 (+14 more)

Related

• Individual resilience framing shifts blame onto victims and leaves racist structures untouched. (similarity 0.90)
• Powerlessness does not explain why a specific group is blamed (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Victims’ aggression gets reframed as the victim’s own deviance #exemplifies (0.82)
• Explaining away environmental causes shifts blame onto the victim’s constitution. #contradicts (0.80)
• Social outcomes depend on joint causation, making individualist rule-following wrong for policy #expands (0.78)
• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction #qualifies (0.73) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 95
• Victims’ rational survival choices can become tools of their own destruction #qualifies (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 349
• Political leader responses define how shared tragedies are framed #exemplifies (0.71) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 218
• Technical remoteness from victims enables moral substitution #expands (0.70) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 459