The blame game

When I went to grad school, I focused a lot of my research and projects on poverty. It made sense since I was working in a homeless shelter and wanted to understand how poverty worked essentially. I was genuinely surprised to learn how many systems kept poor people poor, instead of the rhetoric of poor people being lazy being proven true.

I feel like I have learned that this is true of many systems. And it is frighteningly common to utilize the person blame approach. The person blame approach basically says that a person is in charge of their experience. If a person gets a ridiculous bill from their insurance, it’s not the insurance company’s responsibility to educate more about the coverage, it is the person’s negligence in understanding their insurance plan. I see the person blame approach in healthcare, in parenting, in the food system and in typical consumerism. It is really convenient, to shift the responsibility of education and ethics to an individual, because that frees the system to behave in all kinds of distorted ways with no recourse. Sound familiar?

I don’t want to get weird and messy.

All I want to do is say that blaming people for some system they are impacted by and have little influence on creates responsibility without power. And responsibility without power is a recipe for shame. And shame deteriorates mental health, physical health and all kinds of hope and creativity and peace. It is important for us to put responsibility with power for the sake of our mental well-being.