Liberals are really great at standing up for the rights of the innocent. The rights of the guilty, most especially the guilty of violence, not so much. They have a tendency to melt back into the woodwork when they can’t construe the object of concern as an innocent victim, e.g. the Laverne Cox/Synthia China Blast controversy. So, when it comes up, liberals will change the topic of discussion from reducing the US prison population to the topic of releasing non-violent offenders, in a kind of wishful thinking that the problem is just that people who never needed to be removed from society were incarcerated, and once that is rectified by releasing the not-really-all-that-guilty, we can declare civil rights victory and go right on as we were towards the deserving-their-fate-wicked.
We can see this same pattern in how advocacy for the mentally ill functions: great, so long as the mentally ill in question aren’t violent.
Thus we see the horrid spectacle of activists for the rights of the mentally ill do everything in their power to distance themselves from the mentally ill who have committed or are at risk of committing violence. From those people. The bad mentally ill. The mentally ill who in some way are like the stereotypes. The ones who make the mentally ill look bad.
There’s a term for it when a minority tries to erase some of their members to make the rest of the minority look good. That would be an example of respectability politics.
Violence and Mental Illness: How Not to Do Social Justice
Published
Kimchi and Justice 