Resilience Is What Oppressors Demand From the Oppressed
When does resilience stop being a strength and become an excuse for institutions to avoid responsibility? In this episode, Chisom Udeze traces how resilience evolved from a description of systems surviving disruption into an expectation that people must endure harm. Drawing on evidence from workplace wellbeing, the experiences of Black women, and global climate inequality, she challenges the celebration of resilience and asks why individuals and communities are expected to absorb the consequences of systems that refuse to change.
With Chisom Udeze
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Show Notes
In 2015, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute asked the country to stop calling New Orleans resilient, because every time someone says a community is resilient, it means something else can be done to them. Chisom takes her refusal seriously. She traces resilience from the ecologist C. S. Holling’s 1973 description of systems that absorb disturbance to its present use as a demand on people, and shows why its being a common human capacity makes it so cheap to ask for. The episode follows that demand into the workplace, where a study of 46,336 UK workers found no evidence that resilience programmes improve wellbeing, into the lives of Black women, where parts of the expectation of strength carry a cost the body records, and into climate policy, where Global South countries are told to build resilience while receiving a twelfth to a fourteenth of what adaptation will cost. What institutions call resilience has a more accurate name, absorption, and nobody is obliged to supply it.