A response to a framework I spent most of a term arguing with — the one that says harm lives in structures rather than in anybody’s intentions. The notes I quote are from my own class notebooks; the scans are not up yet.
Most of us learn to spot harm by looking for someone who meant it. It is a good instinct in a playground and a terrible one in an organisation, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the difference.
The framework in question is the ordinary one: outcomes are produced by structures — policies, defaults, who gets asked, what counts as normal — and those structures keep producing the same outcomes whether or not a single person in the building wants them to. Nobody has to mean it. It happens anyway.
I resisted this for weeks, and I resisted it fluently, which is the dangerous kind. My argument went: if nobody meant it, then nobody is responsible; if nobody is responsible, nothing gets fixed. Remove intent and you remove accountability. I thought I was defending accountability. I was defending something else.
The diagnostic was already in my handwriting
Here is the page that ended the argument. I had written it weeks earlier, in a session on how to stay useful in a hard conversation, and then never applied a word of it to myself.
Read verbatim, in my own hand:
“When you start to feel defensive, stop & ask yourself why.”
“Has my top priority shifted to preserving my ego?”
“Am I trying to be right, or trying to do better?”
I had been defensive for a month and had not once asked why. The honest answer, when I finally sat with it, was not intellectual. I had heard systemic and translated it instantly into you are one of the beneficiaries and the bill is coming. Everything after that was me negotiating the bill down while calling it methodology.
There is a name for this. Campbell and Kay call it solution aversion: people evaluate evidence partly by how much they dislike the implied solution, then experience the resulting scepticism as if it were about the data. I was not disputing the findings. I was disputing the invoice, in the voice of someone disputing the findings. Once you have seen yourself do it, you cannot unsee it — and you start hearing it in meetings constantly.
The question I could not argue with
“What do I have that I have not earned? We are here to be specific. Depth. Nuance. Specificity.”
This is where the framework stopped being a threat and became a tool. Who is to blame is a question that produces defensiveness and nothing else, because the only available answers are “me” and “not me”. What do I have that I have not earned produces a list. Lists can be worked on.
Mine, when I wrote it out honestly, included things I had spent years describing as effort: the assumption of competence I walk into rooms with in some countries, an accent that is read as charming in one hemisphere and as a deficiency in the other, a name that opened doors in a country I no longer live in. None of that was given to me by anyone with an intention. It was the ambient output of arrangements much older than me.
Where it stopped being abstract
The term also included a session on ableism, and my notes from it are the least abstract thing in the notebook.
“The biggest lie ableism tells: disability is a bad thing.”
“I am disabled on my most boring days.”
Nobody in that room designed a staircase to exclude anyone. The staircase excludes anyway. That is the whole argument in one object, and it is the reason intent is a bad unit of measurement: intent is not observable, and outcomes are. In my day job I would never file a defect against a developer’s intentions. I file it against the behaviour, with steps to reproduce. Nobody experiences this as an accusation, because it isn’t one — it is a description of what the system does.
That is what the systemic framework had been offering me the whole time. I had been reading it as a verdict. It is a bug report.
The metaphor has one limit worth naming, because it is the limit that makes this work hard. A defect gets fixed because everyone on the team wants the same thing from the system — nobody profits from the crash. Structures are not like that. The arrangement producing the bad outcome is usually producing a good outcome for somebody, often somebody with more say over whether it changes. So the ticket gets acknowledged, prioritised, and quietly deferred, forever, by people who agree with you sincerely. Filing honestly is necessary. It has never been sufficient.
Cuts too small to attribute
The phrase I kept circling was “tiny cuts” — harm delivered in units too small to attribute, which is exactly why an intent-based test cannot detect it. No individual cut has an author worth prosecuting. The accumulation is the injury.
The smallest unit of cut is a word, which is where this finally caught up with me. Stupid goes back to a root meaning stunned; blind spot, deaf to, lame — a layer of ordinary English that uses disability as a synonym for failure, which I had absorbed as neutral idiom because that is how it is taught to a non-native speaker. Nobody handed me those words with an intention either. Being corrected mid-sentence used to feel like a verdict on my English; I have come to treat it as negotiating for clarity, the same move run on my own vocabulary. If a word is doing damage I did not mean, the fact that I did not mean it is not the interesting variable.
What I would actually submit now
“How do we create recommendations that are grounded in social science?”
“How do we communicate honestly?”
My response, condensed: locating harm in structures does not dissolve responsibility — it relocates it from who is guilty to who has the power to change the default. That is a smaller, less dramatic, far more actionable group, and it usually includes me.
I had the instrument for this in my own handwriting on day one, and it took a term and a paper about solution aversion before I turned it around and pointed it at myself. My objections felt like rigour. Some of them were. The ones that arrived instantly, fully formed, and conveniently exonerating were not.
(Thanks are owed to the classmates who kept restating the argument patiently while I litigated it, and to whoever decided that “stop and ask yourself why” belonged on the handout rather than in the footnotes.)
The framework was never letting anyone off. It was handing me a work item, and I spent a term reading it as a subpoena.
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