4 minute read

The Politics of Vulnerability

There’s a woman in the front of the room. She’s twenty— your age—and her eyes gather crow’s feet like bouquets. It’s remarkable: survivor of human trafficking, survivor of domestic violence, and her eyes gather crow’s feet like bouquets.

She tells her story in a language you never cared to understand. You knew her name once, but you swallowed it, like you do most things.

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There are thirty of you, writing and blinking and staring and coughing. Not entirely disrespectful—just sitting there, consuming more air than you need. Mosquitoes fly through slats of wood. You worry about malaria.

She cries more strength than you’ve ever known. You don’t know how to write the curvature of her sobs.

She pauses. The interpreter pauses. You scribble: “Pain is painfully translated.”

A Nepali slam poet translates herself in front of several hundred strangers. “My waist is a bed that mothers more weeds than flowers,” she says. “I’m used to taking apart parts of my body and bartering them for self-worth.”

A refugee family registers the birth of their son with a Jordanian UNHCR volunteer. The infant’s eyelashes are so long you’d think they could reach Syria, touch the soil of the place he’ll never know.

A Pinochet survivor gives a tour of the place she was tortured for years. Flowers grow in the absence of the disappeared.

We tell our own histories, our backs aching into metal chairs. It’s Study Abroad Day Two. “Our stories always have to be sadder,” a student of color says. “As if we have to prove our own humanity through our pain.”

Myles E. Johnson, Black activist, lives images of pain. He writes in The Establishment about the “American tradition of consuming black grief,” about how protests have become “politicized public funerals,” about how white photographers make spectacles of Black death. He concludes: “There is most assuredly a market for our pain.”

There is most assuredly a market for their pain, and I’ve called it “education.”

I suppose I always assumed that to be vulnerable is to be empathetic, that sharing pain with others breeds trust and warmth and agency. But I never considered the cost. Who (consistently) expends the most emotional labor in the wake of vulnerability, and for whose benefit? Who consumes whose pain?

Susan Sontag, white activist, made her living on images of pain. She wrote them, photographed them, filmed them. And she criticized her role in (re)producing these images, explaining how they dress Voyeurism in Charity’s clothing, sell neo-imperialist service trips, stoke the self-righteousness of White Saviors. “The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers… and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power,” she writes in Regarding the Pain of Others. “So long as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”

Here, situated amongst these images, Sontag writes against her innocence. Taking photos of violence is not an innocent act. Writing articles on pain is not an innocent act. Witnessing the vulnerability of others is not an innocent act. This is not apolitical; emotions are the broth of politics.

Meanwhile, the headlines read one dead in Ferguson, fifty dead in Orlando, four hundred thousand dead in Syria, and we know violence like we know song lyrics. Somewhere between Emmett’s glass-topped casket, between videos of Black bodies gasping on street corners, between #MeToo and you too and us too, the drums of vulnerability beat on.

“Viral” has never felt so apt. This numbness is contagious. And if our hearts callous, and if others’ tears roll off our backs like sweat, we become eager consumers of normalized violence.

(Have you ever felt your heart callous? Your hands, certainly.

Those half-moon scars etched years ago— you wanted to see how abuse calcifies.

Those cracked knuckles on that cold car window— your uncle jumped into the Bay.

Those hangnails jagged like ribcage— you forgot how the therapist told you to breathe.

Anxious girl, don’t worry so much. The world is your oyster, haven’t they told you.)

I must write against my innocence. It’s easy to preach empathy without acknowledging that we enter vulnerable relationships unevenly. Like everything, vulnerability is rooted in the politics of its context: vulnerability between mother and daughter is not the same as vulnerability between student and teacher is not the same as vulnerability between white peer and Black peer, white protester and Black protester, white photographer and Black griever. Marginalized communities have been violently forced into places of vulnerability for centuries; their grief has been made public commodity; their anger has been invalidated; their tears have been normalized. And what a mark of privilege it is to observe the vulnerability of others in service of my own “human rights” education.

But this is neither cause for defeatism nor excuse for disengagement: action is as urgent as it is complicated. “Compassion is an unstable emotion,” Sontag writes. “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

In the bumpy landscape of vulnerability, what constitutes action?

I first think “awareness”: the knowledge that vulnerable acts are products of difficult—sometimes unwanted, sometimes circumstantial, always painful—experience. And yet “awareness” feels like one of those squishy, nebulous answers that allows self-proclaimed allies to claim a whole lot of social justice capital while doing a whole lot of nothing. I’ve been one of those “allies,” I’ve done a whole lot of nothing, and I know that passively observing pain does not constitute “awareness.” Grief is not mine to witness. Vulnerability, even as it twinges my compassion, does not pardon my complicity in systems of oppression. Nor should it. I don’t need to be “pardoned.” I need to show up.

But maybe there’s a beginning here, something that raises the stakes of “showing up.” Maybe mitigating the unevenness of relationship building and relationship holding requires first conceptualizing vulnerability as a two-way street: witnessing, watching, observing, and listening must all be reciprocated with self-education. Maybe “observation” is not an isolated event but a continual process—one that politicizes vulnerability, allowing us to magnify the headlines and see the way we wield violence inconsequentially. See how edifies of power structure the ways we share and legitimate pain. See how the Spectacle obscures the Everyday.

And here, at the intersections of pain (un)recognized, maybe “awareness” is the vehicle that accelerates observation into conversation into ideological change.

This is my call to action.

By Stina Perkins

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