Shaming the victims.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Employment conditions

I was on a radio show in Minneapolis, listening to the callers tell their tales of economic woe: an eight-month job search followed by a job at half the person's former pay; an eighteen-month search leading to serious depression; a five-year search leading to nothing at all. During a commercial break, my host--the amiable Jack Rice--noted that almost all these stories were told in the third person, usually as something that had happened to a spouse. Were some of the callers just too embarrassed to own their own stories--too crushed by the shame of layoffs and unemployment?

Shame hangs heavy over the economic landscape: the shame of the newly laid-off, the shame of the chronically poor. It's easy enough for enlightened members of the comfortable classes to insist there's no reason for shame: You didn't bring the layoff down on yourself; you didn't determine that the maximum wage in your line of work would be in the neighborhood of $8 an hour.

Snap out of it, I want to say. Blame the economy or its corporate chieftains. Just don't blame yourself!

But shame is a verb as well as a noun. Almost nobody arrives at shame on their own; there are shamers and shamees. Hester Prynne didn't pin that scarlet A on her own chest. In fact, it may be wiser to think of shame as a relationship rather than just a feeling: a relationship of domination in which the mocking judgments of the dominant are internalized by the dominated.

Shaming can be a more effective means of social control than force. The peasant who stepped out of line could be derided for daring to question his "betters." The woman who spoke out against patriarchal restrictions could be dismissed as a harridan or even a slut.

It doesn't always work, of course. Dan Quayle and rightwing writer Charles Murray attempted to restigmatize out-of-wedlock births by restoring the old pejorative term "illegitimate." But somehow the country wasn't ready to label millions of babies bastards.

Shame was far more effective in the buildup to welfare reform. Consistently stereotyped as lazy, promiscuous parasites, welfare recipients largely failed to rally in their own defense. I remember talking to a young (white) woman who professed great enthusiasm for draconian forms of welfare reform--only to admit that she herself had been raised on welfare by a beloved and plucky single mother. That's deeply internalized shame.

The ultimate trick is to make people ashamed of the injuries inflicted upon...