By now, we are all used to Trauma Parades: events whose sole purpose is to trot out Victims who are, in one way or another, coerced into vomiting out their life stories for the benefit of eagerly awaiting audiences of funders, academics, and writers. If Pride is a parade meant to express the very joy of existence, Trauma Parades are the opposite, expressing nothing but the misery of the lives of the most disadvantaged. The most common sort, especially in left circles, are the ones that feature Youth: young people from what are called underprivileged backgrounds, often pushed onto stage to repeat Litanies of Woe, often in the form of Spoken Word (if Trauma has a genre, this is it).
I’ve written, frequently, about how trauma stories only serve to further marginalise the very communities they are supposed to “uplift” (to use a popular term within the social justice world). Of late I’ve turned my attention from the uses of trauma among, say, feminists to thinking about the uses of trauma on an even broader scale. As a leftist—an ultra leftist, according to some—I’m always concerned about how a discourse fits into capitalism, how it’s deployed as a weapon with which to further rampant inequality and exploitation.
To that end, I’ve often wondered: How does capitalism benefit from trauma? What are the connections between trauma and capitalism? What are the problems with locating trauma as a central organising tool, as is so often the case with many (if not all) social justice campaigns these days? As I’ve written in “AOC and the Weaponisation of Trauma”:
When everything is trauma, then nothing is. If trauma becomes all that we see on our horizon, it becomes impossible to sift through the gradations of everything that happens to us, from insults and slights to painful episodes to matters that truly ravage our bodies and souls.
I want to now add to that and argue that capitalism uses trauma to obscure its workings and machinations. The use of trauma as a narrative—story-telling—hides the particularities of its effects on specific populations and categories of people and obscures forms of privilege that go unnoticed. In all the messiness and the sheer drama of all the trauma stories we are fed so often, we fail to see how trauma stories replicate hierarchies and forms of privilege.
To be clear: although parts of the left and right would like to pretend that there is no trauma at all worth considering, it’s necessary to understand that trauma does exist. We can argue about some of the specifics and also understand that trauma is sometimes invented, especially on a mass scale, but acknowledging the fictionality of some episodes does not require us to simply pretend that forms of abuse and trauma don’t exist. The Satanic Panics of the 1980s are among the best examples of invented trauma, but no one should use that as an example to pretend that child sexual abuse is somehow also largely a construct.1See Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker. It is also pointless—and coldhearted—to argue about the extent of such abuse: our primary task is to make sure that anyone who needs help working through the effects of trauma gets the tools they need.
At the same time, we can acknowledge that trauma stories are now a cottage industry: by the time you’re done reading this sentence, yet another “storyteller” will have spent an hour relating all the horrific experiences they experienced as, take your pick, an immigrant, a rape victim, a refugee, a survivor of a cult, a runaway, and so on.
But are all these examples the same? I don’t mean to ask whether the trauma effect is the same but, rather, the more uncomfortable question: are all these people exactly the same? And how does that matter?
Consider, for example, the undocumented youth movement. When it first burst forth in the early aughts, the press and immigration activists couldn’t get enough of what seemed to be at first a particularly brave and necessary iteration of what was then an unsexy immigration rights movement that focused on the rights of labourers. Here, instead of gardeners, builders, and orchard workers, were fresh-faced youth who could quote bell hooks and Audre Lorde and seemed to be left-leaning, with all their stories of being undocumented. What mattered to media and audiences alike was that their various tales of belonging and un-belonging made them more, ah, relatable than the shadowy, ghostly figures of their parents before them. To American readers and viewers (this was before social media, when everyone still watched what we used to call television, on actual and very boxy sets), the undocumented were an undifferentiated mass with stories that were individually crafted, certainly, but also just versions of the same trauma tale which ran something like this:
I was brought to this country as a child by my parents, who made their way through the borders bristling with armed guards, crossing treacherous deserts and oceans. Once here, my parents settled into a life of hardship and penury and struggled to give me and my siblings a normal American life and I am now here to claim my place as a rightful American.
This is undoubtedly a true story for many (the patriotic rhetoric was seen as a necessary strategy), and it allowed many thousands of undocumented youth activists to make a plausible case for the DREAM Act (the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) which would give them a pathway towards citizenship. Instead, they got a presidential executive order, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which will always be under threat because it has no legislative teeth.
At the time, those of us pushing for much more radical change to the US’s immigration policies pointed out that DACA made people vulnerable because it would force people “out of the shadows” and into the crosshairs of the surveillance state (getting DACA benefits meant revealing oneself as undocumented and effectively being tagged as such). We also pointed out that the youth most likely to experience backlash would not be those in “leadership” positions—people who came from privileged backgrounds, even if they were undocumented—but those who did not have the material, cultural, and political capital that came from being attached to powerful immigration organisations and activists (for obvious reasons, I’m not going to offer any identifying details).2To be clear: this is not true about all those who became leaders of the undocumented movement, but so far no one has publicly pointed out this question of privilege.
This may seem unreal to onlookers, even on the left, who like to think of all undocumented immigrants as more or less the same, and with stereotypical stories of grit through poverty. But the reality is that undocumented people and families have a range of economic origins, and that “undocumented” does not mean the same thing across the board: some are in fact more economically privileged than others, and have far more political capital (and thus, immunity) than others. To raise these complications would be to potentially destroy the movement, according to the mainstream immigration rights movement–which had already seen the fundraising potential in these young people. The trials and tribulations and deathly conditions facing labourers were nowhere as sexy and uncluttered as the sad trauma stories told by the undocumented, all of whom needed to present the same kind of origin story. That some of its leaders were people who coasted upwards on the wings of privilege was—and remains—an inconvenient but hidden fact.3More in my book in progress, Strange Love: Why Social Justice Needs to Die.
The same is true of the category of Underprivileged Youth, young people who are pulled into often unwilling service by rapacious organisations, universities, and artists. I was reminded of this some years ago at an event hosted by a very wealthy and gentrifying university who, along with its recently installed and internationally acclaimed “artivist,” tried to allay the concerns of a neighbourhood whose residents were troubled about being priced out of their homes.
But there were red flags all along: the event began at 2 p.m on a weekday, ensuring that a vast majority of its supposedly intended audience would not be able to attend (and ask probing questions). The capacious hall, inside a building owned by the university, soon filled up with academics, artists, students, and high profile activists who had made a point of attending a very schmoozy event. I saw faces I recognised: heads of well-funded nonprofits that paid a lot of lip service to inequality, artists, fresh-faced young academics, faculty and students, all their faces aglow with the need to Do Good. We had already been handed introductory pamphlets sprinkled with all the right language about neoliberalism and gentrification and how to “centre communities”: they knew the lingo, and they knew how to weaponise it.
But perhaps worst of all was a Trauma Parade in which young people, all of colour, came onstage and participated in various bits of theatre, ranging from Spoken Word to poetry to dance, to describe their lives under capitalism, neoliberalism, Rahm Emanuel’s devastating closure of no fewer than fifty schools (as discussed by Eve Ewing and others), ongoing problem of food deserts, the lack of jobs and opportunities, and so much more. All of this under the roof of a university whose gentrifying force had been, from its inception, a primary cause of their troubles.
One by one, young people of colour were trotted out to perform bits of spoken word and poetry about their lives. One by one, we heard about life in the “ghetto”—a word that struck me as completely out of place and time, even when uttered by a young Black man—and all the hardships they had to endure. I sighed inwardly and in sympathy: by then, I had been at too many such events and knew that the youth, representing various nonprofits, were forced to dramatise their lives in such fashion, compelled to act out their traumas in order to authenticate themselves as subjects deserving of sympathy and funding. Each one was forced to tell a trauma story, to sing for their supper.
But one young person’s presentation struck me as oddly discordant.
Let us call them X.4I use gender neutral pronouns in most cases, partly to obscure people’s identities. X’s story was about having been nervous to come out to their parents and finally having the courage to do so.
That their parents turned out to be more than supportive was no surprise to me or, I suspect, most of the people in the room: X is the child of extremely privileged, well-known parents who count left and liberal politicians, queer scholars, and activists among their family and friends. A recipient of some of the most elite education in the city and the world, they are on a first-name basis with leading scholars in several fields, including gender and women’s studies, and imbibed critical theory and left politics from birth. Coming out is a different process in every situation and family, and I don’t wish to negate or deny the great nervousness that X described, but there’s a material difference between coming out in such a progressive set of circumstances and coming out into a neighbourhood that is always under attack by the city and state and that offers few educational opportunities or jobs.
As I recall, X’s story was the only one about queerness and coming out, and it lent a further gloss of diversity to the whole event—which further allowed the university and the artivist to smugly present themselves as having “represented” every possible kind of youth. But their presentation occluded all kinds of privilege, like their own, and obscured the rapacious gentrification of the university by effectively giving it a softer, kinder, more diverse face.
What of the others? Most or all of them will more than likely end up spending the rest of their lives and careers reiterating, for endless audiences, their trauma stories of being Underprivileged Youth until they age out of the whole process. The lucky few will find employment in places where they can actually put their talents to use, but many will be left on the roadside by universities, artists, and nonprofits for whom they prove useless after a while. Meanwhile, the “storytellers”—the already well-off professionals who mine their trauma stories for a living—will be more than fine. People like X will continue as political influencers, that new breed of organiser who hops from cause to cause, nimbly shape shifting from one job to another, always fluent in the language of a critique of neoliberalism, yanking out a trauma story only when absolutely necessary, perhaps ending up as the head of a nonprofit that compels youth to keep repeating their stories of trauma.
Whenever I find myself forced to watch a Trauma Parade, my instinct is always to rush onto the stage, screaming, “Your trauma story will kill you!” And it will: if not in a physical sense, then certainly in a psychic one. How long can you go on repeating the story of the thing that left you most vulnerable, that thing that may have almost killed you, the thing that you need to work through rather than what you’re forced to do for a living? How long can you relive your story every day, repeating it to strangers licking their lips as they keep asking for trauma porn? Those who use vulnerable and economically precarious survivors of trauma as fundraising tools will never bother to make sure that they have, for instance, adequate coping mechanisms like analysis. If anything, they need and require such people, in their most vulnerable periods of life, to keep bleeding onstage.
Trauma is becoming bigger than capitalism, and it distracts us from the operations of material economies, like those of universities and “social justice” movements.
What if we had no stories?
Yasmin Nair has been writing about trauma for several years, and some of her work on the subject can be found here and has appeared in Current Affairs under her own name. It has also appeared under various pseudonyms in publications like the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and in corners of Substack.
Many thanks to Gautham Reddy for his invaluable help in thinking this through. For organisations that don’t exploit youth or women by forcing them to tell their stories, see Chicago Freedom School and Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration.
For more, see:
“Undocumented: How an Identity Ended a Movement.”
“Stop Fetishising Youth Organisers.”
“On Hasan Minhaj, Trauma Passports, and Immigrant Fictions.”
“The Perils of Trauma Feminism.”
I spoke to Karma Chavez about Trauma Feminism, here.
“AOC and the Weaponisation of Trauma.”
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