When Understanding Is Mistaken for Endorsement: A Reflection on Agency and Accountability

I’m beginning to take note of a recurring corrosive pattern. Almost every time discussions arise around abuse, injustice, racism, or even the seemingly simple matters of relationships, boundaries, and self-agency, the conversation sidesteps the real casualties. It avoids the weight of consequence.

Instead, what surfaces is a rhetorical maneuver: a shift from the lived experience to historical abstraction. Slavery is invoked, Christianity is weaponized, and suddenly, the person articulating their understanding (not their endorsement) of abuse or systemic inequity is positioned as the perpetrator of moral failure. This insistence that acknowledging reality equals condoning it is absurd.

The moment someone speaks from lived awareness or observance, they are told they are “endorsing victimhood” or “embracing abuse.” Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Understanding is not approval. Insight is not complicity. Agency is not guilt.

Consider this: a discussion about a woman abusing a man, or even a white woman exercising abusive power over a Black man, is suddenly reframed as a discourse on systemic slavery and religious oppression. My point was clear: there is a distinction between systemic forces and individual self-agency. There is a difference between what a structure enforces and what a person chooses. Yet merely stating this distinction transforms one into the “bad girl” in the eyes of those unwilling to separate conceptual clarity from moral accusation.

This is not a matter of arrogance. It is not a matter of insensitivity. It is a reflection of a culture unwilling to confront complexity without collapsing it into moral binaries. To contest your life, to defend your awareness and integrity, should not become an indictment of character. Yet the pattern is persistent, and it is exhausting.

To witness, to name consequences, to recognize patterns, and to assert agency are not sins. They are acts of survival, of discernment, of ethical rigor. And when others attempt to weaponize history against your lived insight, remember: the axis does not orbit perception, it defines it.

History, systems, and faith carry weight. Individual choice carries power. Conflating the two is a strategy of distraction, not justice. Recognize it. Name it. Move with your axis intact..