In 2018, my first year living in Amsterdam, studying for a master’s degree in the arts, I went to a museum to attend a performance by a group of queer artists addressing questions of injustice. The setting seemed familiar enough until one of the presenters announced that anyone who did not belong to specified “marginalized identities” should leave the room. They began reading a list of those identities aloud. For a moment, I just listened, suspended, trying to locate myself in the list. Then it became clear: the list excluded non-queer, white people. I, therefore, “belonged.” I found that the category I best fit in was “woman of color,” a definition I had never once used for myself at that time. I stayed. The conversation turned to safety in the Netherlands, to harassment and violence connected to skin color, gender identity, sexual orientation. The others spoke from experience I could hear but not share. Amsterdam, for me, had been something else entirely: quiet nights walking alone through streets I did not know, a strange lightness I had no name for yet. No one had stopped me. No one had read me by my color. I am not denying that such violence exists, only that it had not, at that point, been my story. And so, I said nothing. That moment stayed with me. It crystallized something I had been sensing since arriving in Europe: a pressure, felt everywhere in public discourse, to read every experience through the lens of identity. To locate yourself on a map drawn by others and then speak only from that location. What unsettled me was not the artists’ choice to create a protected space. It was the underlying logic, one I kept encountering: in seminar rooms, in cultural institutions, in the language of activist circles. A logic by which identity is constructed entirely on the axis of oppression: one group over another, history compressed into a single narrative, and every human being assigned a fixed position within it. You are either a victim or a perpetrator. There is no third position. The space between is simply erased. When pain becomes a pass When being a victim is the only position that confers moral authority, the only place from which you are permitted to speak without being immediately questioned or condemned, then victimhood stops being a condition and starts becoming a currency. And currency, by nature, is something people reach for. But to understand why this happens so readily today, you have to look at the broader cultural atmosphere in which identity politics operates. We live, as sociologist Frank Furedi argued in Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (Routledge, 2004), in a society that has undergone a profound redefinition of what a person is. Clinical language such as trauma, triggers, nervous system dysregulation, safe spaces and emotional damage has migrated out of the therapy room and into everyday speech, political discourse and social media. The effect is that vulnerability has become the defining feature of how people understand themselves and others. To be a person, in this framework, is first and foremost to be at risk, to be potentially harmed, to be in need of recognition for your wounds. The self is constituted around its injuries. This matters because it explains the ease with which therapeutic self-diagnosis feeds into political victimhood. When the culture already teaches you to understand yourself primarily through the prism of what has damaged you, and when the cultural framework simultaneously grants moral authority only to those who have been damaged, the two systems reinforce each other seamlessly. It offers people a coherent identity, a community, a moral position and a language, all at once. What it does not offer, and what it actively erodes, is agency. Therapeutic culture places people in a permanent state of recovery rather than transcendence: you are instructed to acknowledge your wounds endlessly and to identify yourself with and through them. Applied to politics, this means suffering becomes not something to be overcome collectively but, in a twisted way, something to be performed and preserved because it is the source of your standing. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò put it plainly: “pain — whether borne of oppression or not — is a poor teacher. Suffering is partial, short-sighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different: oppression is not a prep school”. This is a difficult thing to say, yet a necessary one. The experience of injustice does not automatically produce wisdom, clarity or moral authority; it produces pain. What we do with that pain, whether we transform it into understanding and action or calcify it into identity and entitlement is a choice, however constrained. This is far from a denial of real suffering or the importance of standpoint epistemology. It is, rather, an examination of what happens when suffering stops being something we move through and becomes something we inhabit permanently, when it hardens from wound into identity, from experience into credential. At its most extreme in Gaza, we can see exactly where victimhood-as-identity leads. When a people’s historical suffering is transformed into a permanent moral license, it can be used to justify the removal of another people’s humanity entirely. The logic becomes self-sealing: because we were victims, we cannot be held accountable for what we do to others. This is not the exception to victimhood politics. It is its logical endpoint. The guilt that helps no one The second side of this coin is the collapse into guilt. Guilt of a particular, unproductive kind. As one side claims victimhood, the other is left holding the role of perpetrator. When this too hardens into an identity, guilt becomes its own prison. Some people inhabit the perpetrator position and make a home of it either through endless self-flagellation, a performance of remorse that is finally more concerned with the guilty party’s own penitential needs than with any actual reckoning, or through a fetishizing of the victim, in which people who have suffered are elevated into symbols of injustice rather than encountered as full human beings with complex, irreducible lives. The European who is not allowed to examine their own history except through self-condemnation. The one who can speak about every injustice in the world except the societies they come from, and when they do, the only acceptable register is public shame. As though guilt has become a substitute identity: if you cannot be the victim, you must perform permanent contrition for being the perpetrator. In both cases, performed victimhood and performed guilt, the relationship between the two parties freezes. Nothing moves. No understanding is built, because understanding requires seeing the other person clearly, and you cannot see someone clearly when you have already decided what they represent. The victim becomes a symbol. The perpetrator becomes a function. And both are stripped of the one thing that makes genuine reckoning possible: their full humanity. This produces moral paralysis. When every conversation about privilege, wealth, or political power becomes synonymous with personal accusation, many who maybe do not feel privileged at all due to the rising economic pressure and feel abandoned by democratic representation, do not know how to respond. So they deny. Or they shut down. Or they radicalize. Privilege as responsibility, not guilt There are people who genuinely try to engage with histories of colonialism and privilege, who attempt to sit with that discomfort honestly. But, most of the time, the framework offers them no room to do so. Their whole personhood collapses into a single data point of guilt, permanently fixed to what their identity supposedly represents. At a certain point, many stop trying. And when the only alternative to guilt is denial, some go further. They tip toward the far right, not despite the left’s moral intensity, but because of it, trading the burden of perpetual self-condemnation for the relief of belonging somewhere that does not demand it. The rise of hard-right politics across Europe cannot be fully understood without accounting for this dynamic. It is not the whole story. But it is a part that maybe the left has been too uncomfortable to examine honestly. Frantz Fanon wrote, “I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.” The same liberation must be available to everyone, not only to the descendants of the colonized, but to anyone trapped by a historical role they did not personally choose and cannot personally undo. What I am arguing for is not the erasure of history or the denial of injustice. I am arguing for a space outside the binary of victim and perpetrator, where it becomes possible to say: yes, I hold certain privileges of class, of gender, of nationality, of education. It does not make privilege a curse. It makes it a position. One that carries with it an obligation to understand the structures that produced it and a responsibility to act from that understanding. Privilege, seen clearly, is not a source of guilt. It is a place to stand and do something. I watched this play out once during an artistic residency. Our group was mostly from working or middle-class backgrounds, with the exception of two women from very wealthy families. One knew her position clearly and did not apologize for it. She used what she had in ways that benefited everyone around her as much as possible. The other hid her background, performed a working-class aesthetic, and applied for the same grants we genuinely needed. Her guilt did not make her more just. It made her less honest, and it took from others. The difference between them stays with me. Not thinking that wealth is neutral, but because one saw her position clearly and turned it into something shared, while the other’s performed guilt was not solidarity. It was self-protection dressed as conscience. In A critique of solidarity, Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh has written critically about a certain kind of European solidarity, the solidarity that flows downward, from the powerful to the weak, from the safe to the suffering. A solidarity built on pity. Coming from a position of guilt that requires self-purification. This kind of solidarity, he argued, ultimately reproduces the very hierarchy it claims to challenge. It keeps the privileged in the position of generous benefactor and the marginalized in the position of grateful recipient. Nothing structural changes. The roles are simply performed with more feeling. Real solidarity is different. It begins from the recognition that we are all caught inside the same systems of power, capital, climate, war and patriarchy and that those with more room to maneuvre have more responsibility to act. Not more virtue. Not more authority. More responsibility. This is solidarity between people who happen to occupy different positions within the same structure, not charity dispensed from above. The difference between the two women at my residency was exactly this. One understood her privilege as a position that carried obligations. The other used guilt, her own performed marginalization, to escape those obligations while appearing virtuous. I guess what I am trying to say is that solidarity is about seeing your position clearly and acting from that clarity toward something shared. And positions are never simple: a victim of one structure can simultaneously hold privilege within another: of gender, of class, of sect. Acknowledging this does not diminish the original injustice. It adds complexity to it. And complexity is precisely what the binary cannot tolerate, because complexity does not produce clear enemies, and clear enemies are what the binary runs on. The question of what structures oppress us and what we might build together across our differences keeps getting buried under the question of who suffered most. That substitution is not a path toward justice. It is a way of endlessly deferring it.The post Beyond useless guilt and insatiable victimhood first appeared on Mada Masr.
