The Laziness Effect
So, for the second time in a week, a woman was violated by a man in public, and nobody did anything. Oh wait, excuse me: bystanders stood by rather than do anything right. People who hear this story are horrified, but as a Black woman, there really is more disappointment than outrage. Black women hear the story as this: because some monsters decided to act a fool in public lately, and others finally held them socially accountable by recording, people are passive aggressively refusing to honor any social contract, smirking while they shrug and imply, “I thought you wanted us to leave people alone.” These are simply more examples of why everyone is done with performative efforts that translate to laziness.
Society keeps giving the dominant narrative all these tests to do the right thing, and it keeps on failing people. All the officials keep demanding that folks call 911, even as police violence has escalated since January 2021 — thus, there is a lack of self-reflection in that admonishment. People will not contact who they do not trust, so no, people are not inclined to call someone to murder anybody, even a criminal. However, there is also the question of why nobody pressed an emergency button that would not have necessarily required a police presence. To me, that is the more prescient issue, because anybody could have come during an emergency.
Black women are used to being in circumstances where we are being attacked while nobody is doing anything to stop it, not even interrupting it. We understand that when we leave our homes, we are on our own, which is why more of us have been working to stay socially isolated as of late. No one is on our side, and almost anyone we go to for comfort will gaslight us into thinking we deserved such an attack, from disrespect at work to being murdered at home. The icing on the victim blaming cake is that Black men were responsible for both of the attacks — notice how the media made sure we saw them right away. Many people safe in the dominant narrative will now gleefully cackle as they perpetuate the circumstances that turn people from being rational human beings into monsters.
Unsurprisingly, the bystanders will not be held accountable for any of their behavior which, again, as a Black person, I expected. “What did you want me to do, stop a lynch mob?” “What did you want me to do, lose my job, too?” “What did you want me to do, stop bullets?” Theoretically, there is a bystander effect, but if people were going to continue to do nothing in the face of oppression and violence, then enablers of the dominant narrative were rioting last year, not protesting, and those enablers destroyed any potential progress that could have been made. No one honestly believes that anybody who fakes innocence, pleading, “What can I do to solve the problem?” If people were that clueless, the dominant narrative would have been dead in the water, and would never have lasted this long.
Some will argue that the global pandemic has kept people pent up, so all of this monstrous energy has been repressed with nowhere to release it. I disagree. I see millions of people who are quietly striking and refusing to go back to places where we know people are too selfish and manipulative for productivity to happen. I see a cultural renaissance with so many folks expressing ourselves, some of us for the first time in our lives, not caring if we become popular, rich, or even extensively validated for our efforts. Indifference would mean that women could live our lives in peace, while people kept their bad feelings away from us; hate requires additional effort reinforced by power, such as demanding to control our sex lives. Just like alcohol, duress and trauma demonstrate who people really are, and during this era of multiple crises, the United States has demonstrated that it violently hates women, especially Black women. If nobody is going to do anything, then why would we trust “small steps of progress” from folks who have nothing to show for it?
