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To Stand or Not To Stand Up? [1]

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Date: 2025-05-26

I seriously debated with myself whether to publish or not this morning… then I looked at my title and chose to do what I always do… Stand up.

Yesterday’s diary entry got a few pushbacks that as I stated then, were fascinating to me. One of the most flagrant bit of inconsistencies in said replies is that, most of those pushing back on me yesterday, maybe all of them, would to a person be the same ones calling out? Scolding? Shaming? Republicans and Democrats for not “standing up” to the doofus in chief…. It was also not lost upon me that they were telling me how wrong scolding and shaming was… while scolding and shaming me. An attitude by the way which missed the whole point of the entry which was: Standing up for yourself, pushing back and calling someone out… is not shaming or scolding.

And that last part is what I want to address today:

The assumption by many that standing up for yourself when it comes to racism and bigotry is somehow automatically viewed as a negative “you’re scolding them” “you’re shaming them” “anger will be met with anger” “it won’t solve anything” “we should try another way”… etc…

What’s fascinating about these reactions? It is that all the push back I got yesterday assumes that pushing back must come from a place of anger WHEN it comes to racism and bigotry. For example, they did not view their pushing back on me as them being angry, or scolding or shaming me (there were a couple of incidents but they were the outliers).

Because good lord I hope that if I said I push back against child sexual abuse or rape, no one would have told me that I shouldn’t scold or shame rapists and pedophiles.

I asked several times how children should be instructed when it comes to standing up to bullies or in standing up for the ones that can’t stand up for themselves? Also what do people think standing up for yourself entails?

Standing up does not mean scolding or shaming. (that was the point of yesterday’s entry. It was missed by a lot of people replying)

Now, I would have thought that was obvious, that my post was about pushing back against the use of those words to describe standing up for yourself… but alas no. It’s like they couldn’t imagine that one can push back against racism or bigotry without shaming or scolding the offending party.

Does some pushback come from a place of anger? Of course some do, but in my experience, it really depends like most things on the offense, or the offenders attitude, no? One does not respond to someone angrily calling you the N word, as you would to someone saying is that your real hair right? Least wise I don’t.

Do some people shame and scold? I will point out one thing though… a lot of people doing the shaming and the scolding? They are NOT from the marginalized community they are doing so on behalf of. You read that right, the scolders and shamers are more often than not, those who call themselves “allies”. When allies decide to defend you they often make things worse.

One of the things I’ve noticed when it comes to the Black community pushing back and calling out racism, is that often people automatically think we are angry when countering racism, mostly we are just tired and direct. Telling someone to shove off, get off, get out of here, you’re out of line, ect… is not “anger” to us. That is also how we speak to each other, a thing that most fail to take into consideration.

The number of people that were putting the onus on the victims of racism, bigotry and other ism, to find a more peaceful way to deal with their aggressors, gave me a pause. Was I wrong? Was I the problem? Was I the one who needed to change? Was I missing something vital? I asked myself all these questions and more. I reread the pushbacks, I read the answers to the pushbacks and realized that no, people actually considered pushing back on attacks overt or not, to be “scolding and shaming” them.

Why is that? I think it’s because any criticism of a certain group’s actions is viewed that way, because by default that group considers themselves to be good, thus even telling them they got something wrong is hurtful to them. The problem is they do not afford the ones they attack the same grace of being hurt. Their victims (for lack of a better word) shouldn’t feel hurt by their words and actions, they don’t even seem to understand why their words and actions are hurtful. Yet, they themselves are more easily hurt.

Let me put it this way; if I see an adult or older child, hit a smaller one, me stepping in to stop it, or saying stop that, or blocking the striking hand is not shaming and scolding them. I should not have to tell the child “you know if you stay very quiet and make yourself very small, they won’t attack you”. If said child kicks their attacker, I should not descend on them like an avenging angel and berate them for getting angry at their attacker.

This is what a lot of the negative feedback from yesterday was. Lots of advice and critics of how the victims of the isms should act in order to not be attacked or to mitigate the effects of said attacks. We were told to be the bigger person, to rise above it, to try to understand the attackers, to not be so aggressive in countering attacks… we were advised to take the attackers feelings into account, to try to reach them, and gain their trust… it was one of the most subtle campaigns of victim blaming, couched in “sage advice” that I’ve ever witnessed.

None of these defenders, had one piece of advice for the attackers. And that is why we are where we are today. Too many people listen to the aggressors but not the victims.

#TheAmericanHaitianPoet #Woke #SocialPoetry

paypal.me/murielvieux to help

#ThePoet - Muriel Vieux – May 25th, 2025, ©All rights reserved

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