The threshold of harm. Do you know what that is?
I feel like it’s an arbitrary measurement, practiced deeply and subjectively. It depends on your bottom line, your moral compass, your integrity, your ability to empathize. I’ve mostly seen it practiced as rhetoric.
The threshold of harm is how many people, and to what extent, have to be harmed before anything changes. In civil policy, it’s how many have to be killed, on record, before anyone will actually change how things are done. It’s a point of action, it is the moment something can no longer remain neutral or minor.
Look at the numbers of any tragedy, and the threshold is wildly conditional. That conditionality is indicative of an entity’s values, mission, standard operating procedure, a compass of morality. Citing the impossibility of perfection is usually the first excuse offered for a low threshold. No one being harmed is asking for perfection. How long they have to wait to be counted is the issue.
This conditionality doesn’t happen by accident, it’s completely manufactured. The word used to create fear and intrigue is necessity.
The layers of harm washed away by the necessity of the project are the biggest lie. The necessity is the lie. There’s a conversation about what the community needs, while the main functioning component of that community — the people — isn’t respected. Before respect even enters, I’d argue it isn’t agreed upon in the first place.
So when we say necessity, necessary for whom? When we’re told it helps the lowest common denominator in the room, the lie is compelling, because the masses believe the story is about us, that the people telling it are one of us. They are not.
They aren’t appealing to our needs. They’re appealing to our vulnerability, then exploiting it. The boardrooms, the think tanks, the councils, etc., are deciding policy in rooms none of us are in; it’s ownership deciding what a community needs without asking it. We say we understand it, and still haven’t stopped the lie in action. They leave us to fight over the details and say they at least let us know what was coming.
They did not. There was no consent. Our confused answer to a vague question or explanation was all they needed to prove the masses incompetent to decide, so they could decide for us, when the masses were never given the chance to begin with.
When we ask who benefits from that manufactured consent, the pattern isn’t abstract.
White people align with those making decisions without the consent of the masses, because that latent control is useful to them and, honestly, it’s lazy. Nothing to do when it’s systemic. It already works in their favor. Everyone else, the historically and traditionally excluded, is left to make sense of the wreckage. Are we each other’s enemies? I don’t think so, not by nature. We’ve been handed a story convincing enough that we perpetuate it even within our own communities, holding each other to standards we don’t understand the origins of although we know who started it. Whether that’s a direction out or in depends on who you are.
If white people are cast as saviors of the world, not colonizers, then what’s happening now? Who will save them, if they stand up against complacent bosses, or the predatory ownership practices padding their retirement a few thousand more? What if they just stay quiet, not adding to the harm? Does that count?
It does not, if you were wondering. Silence bought at someone else’s expense is its own necessity. This stands for the Black and Brown bodied people who are quietly doing their best to benefit from the good graces of systemic complacency when you can tap dance like the best of them while keeping one’s own position intact. Same lie, smaller room.
The question now, watching the system disintegrate, is whether white people are waking up in numbers or hiding until the rubble of this fallen democracy clears, ready to say they were just trying to survive what they couldn’t fix. Who’d be left to clear it, and actively blamed for its demise? The rest of us know who.
Are we asking the same questions, accepting the same “reasoning”? Not all of us can be saved. But those of us who can, how is your community doing? Are you in community?
With harm explained away as necessary, where the threshold slides depending on who’s being harmed, it’s past time we question everything that claims to protect us and squarely rely on each other instead.
Ayisha Elliott is an executive leadership coach and founder of Black Girl From Eugene LLC, BlackGirlfromEugene.substack.com. Through internationally recognized coaching and organizational strategy, she helps leaders close the gap between intention and impact — deconstructing white supremacy culture within workplace culture.