fugue-stasis:

People who batter can use their own vulnerabilities (such as their own experience surviving racism or homophobia, dealing with a mental illness or a previous assault, or facing exploitation in their family of origin or in the workplace) to control and manipulate friends, lovers, family, colleagues, and comrades. They set up loyalty tests. They believe that they are the victims. Often their vulnerabilities are real—and everyone’s vulnerabilities matter and merit reasonable attention—but their sense of persecution and entitlement is devastating to their loved ones and the community. Activist communities may believe that we are immune to such manipulations, but that’s simply arrogant and wrong of us. We are the least immune because we are the most compelled by the interplay of the individual condition with the systems of oppression operating in our world. Activist communities are particularly susceptible to manipulation by abusers because we are most likely to have compassion for how abusers experience institutional oppression and to understand how they are victims of unjust systems. Our empathy confounds our ability to see people who face oppression as people who could also be capable of, and should be accountable for, abuse.

(from “Think. Re-think.” out of The Revolution Starts at Home)

I’m hunting around for some commentary about abuse specifically in “”radical”” communities by Ssitara, because I feel like I otherwise haven’t seen much about the specific dynamics of abuse culture in social-justice or radical-left spaces.

Both of my former abusive partners identify as “radicals” (LOL), and I feel like what Burk is saying above was true for both relationships—abusers draw attention to their very valid unmet needs, oppressions, and experiences of violence as a way of dodging accountability for the violence that they perpetrate.

But I also feel like another component is the way in which radical frameworks about shifting power can be mis-used abusively, and how many many radical people are completely unable to identify the mis-usage. Because, of course, as social-justice-peeps, we accept that people are going to react with anger and that we’re all going to have to change our behavior and language! Of course. But without serious critical thought, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish someone’s activism from the way they terrorize, control, or (nonconsensually) dominate their partners.

Yessss