Witnessing discrimination stirs a fantasy of retaliation that never gets acted on.

Evidence

Yasmin slammed the “Stop Requested” tape and got off the bus, angry with herself for not doing anything. As the bus pulled away from the curb, she stood there, frozen in a cloud of diesel exhaust. She grabbed for a pen and scrawled the bus’s license plate on her hand. … She wanted to call. She really did, just to make a point, to make them feel the same way—singled out, powerless, discriminated against, a source of irrational fear. But she didn’t call. In fact, she didn’t do anything, and because of that she was annoyed with herself. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 337

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why does the fantasy of making the perpetrators feel the victim’s fear both arise and remain un-acted-upon? The psychology of imagined-revenge as moral accounting is worth exploring.