Polite Violence

For many of us, violence is an act of physical brutality. It can be emotional and coercive.

Yet violence is all around us, accepted as normal. 

Violence is a system that breaks the back of the marginalised, never providing an opportunity. Violence is systemic racism, so baked into everything, that only people of colour know the daily requirement needed to navigate down a street without being harassed or worse. Violence is the world bank extracting interest from the countries they decimated with colonisation, a form of debt slavery that only gets worse.

Violence is the extreme number of black and brown people incarcerated. 

Violence is the ever-present fear of walking a street at night as a woman.

Violence is not being able to speak up against oppression for fear of the repercussions.

Violence is an in-group for whom the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group for whom the law binds but does not protect. (Frank Wilhoit)

The air we breathe is filled with violence, considerably worse for many people who have done nothing to deserve it other than being born.

Once seen as violence, hard not to see. So many people and animals held to intractable, polite violence.

If we want a world with little to no violence, it must be designed and delivered for all life, not just for the few.

Photo Taken September 22nd 2025, Article published September 23rd, 2025