On Bullying

How to identify one in the wild (or in yourself) and how to respond

By Jared Feuer

I joined the baseball team freshman year of high school. Well, I tried. I was undersized and not friends with the jocks who populated the team. At our first practice, a group surrounded me and shoved me into the ground, where I smashed my head onto a rock. The co-editor of Chorus of Union, Micah Weiss, loyally tried to step in. It didn’t go well for him either.

About five years before, I was one of just a few Jews at sleepaway camp (how my parents managed to find the only camp without Jews in the Catskills is a question I’m still asking). Sitting in the gazebo one day, a bunch of campers started to tease me about my semitic features. This continued till I bolted out, tears in my eyes.

Two decades later, I attended a work retreat when I was at Amnesty International. At the retreat, a group of staff came up with a ‘funishment’ rule that if you were late for a session, you’d have to sing in front of everyone or perform some other embarrassing act. I returned to a session with a second to spare on my watch but the clock on the wall had a different time. The staff demanded I do the funishment. I refused, explaining that a human rights organization should not shame people and that my watch said I was on time. Staff started attacking, noting my positioning as white, male, and senior staff. They accused me of taking advantage of my identity to ignore the rules. As I refused to concede, the energy turned even more negative; I needed to admit I was wrong as though in a struggle session. The accusations were coming from all directions at this point and my head felt like it was on a swivel. I noticed that the critiques were no longer what I did, but about who I was.

I share these three personal stories (of unfortunately more) to demonstrate my issue expertise - when you’ve been bullied, you develop a deep understanding of tormentors. I have learned that there are two broad categories: the insecure and the power-rushers. The insecure are akin to the Amnesty colleagues; many felt vulnerable growing up with a marginalized identity or in some other way had felt hurt or powerless. So they spend the rest of their lives looking to flip the script. 

The power-rushers are akin to the jocks on the baseball team; they enjoy the feeling of stepping on someone. They never really experienced insecurity or vulnerability growing up, and without those feelings, developed little empathy. This is paired with a general feeling of boredom in not having to struggle or manage lower level needs. Survival - whether economic, social, or emotional - was not at risk and so attacking others became entertainment and a source of endorphins. It also is a form of social peacocking; a way of creating a collective and ideally standing in the alpha position in the group.

Now for a disclaimer: I obviously cannot read minds, but what follows is not idle speculation. I am interpreting motivations based on the words and positioning of the bullies I have encountered in person and witnessed on social media and in the public eye. From that evidence, I believe that the bullies of the left and right broadly align with the insecure and the power-rusher categories respectively.

As an example of a bully on the left, consider the writer Saira Rao. Rao, who is Indian American, found her ethnicity a source of vulnerability in the wake of perceived post-September 11th xenophobia - in her words, “I left my apartment that day as a model minority and returned home as a would-be terrorist in the eyes of white America.” Feeling insecure, she sought to flip the script and found a victim: white women. She now organizes dinners where she is paid by white women to berate them. She tweets such comments as “Who needs enemies when you have white women friends” and “Does someone have an umbrella for white women tears.” One of her tweets reveals her underlying pain, “If ‘white woman’ or ‘white man’ or ‘ginger’ is the worst thing you've ever been called, consider yourself blessed.” Unfortunately, she responded to her pain by causing it for others.

For bullies on the right, consider Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene grew up wealthy, cared for, relatively attractive (Micah and I disagree here!), and without a struggle. Bored, she found a rush in extreme workouts and then an even better one in attacking people. She gained notoriety for chasing a survivor of the Parkland shooting around the Capitol. She called Caitlyn Jenner a “man in a dress, ” Democrats “pedophiles,” and said Muslim Members of Congress “should go back to the Middle East.” And of course she dog-whistled about the Jews with her infamous space laser remark.

In terms of which is worse - the insecure or the power-rushers - it depends on whether the question is impact or moral repellence. The power-rushers can cause damage on an unmatched scale because they leverage their relative strength. History is full of tragedies - war, genocide, torture - caused by chasing their rush. But I actually think it’s more evil (and I use that word deliberately) to start from a position of vulnerability. The power-rushers are ignorant about the perspective of the bullied; the opportunity for empathy never developed. But those who attack from a sense of vulnerability know, acutely, what it feels like. And rather than use that empathetic understanding to heal, they force their hurt on others. Due to the awareness of the torture they are inflicting, insecure bullies are using their specialized knowledge to enhance suffering instead of exhibiting empathy. This is evil.

Social media is uniquely situated to facilitate bullying. Perhaps patient zero was Justine Sacco. In 2013, the then 30-year old tweeted, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” to her tiny group of followers. Then she got on a plane for eleven hours. The remark, which one can read more charitably to be calling out hypocritical standards of attention for public health, was sent by one of her 170 followers to a reporter for Gawker, who posted it and in so doing put up the figurative piñata. The Internet quickly grabbed their bats, saying things like, “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

The joy was that this white, blond woman had said something arguably racist and was now literally unaware and defenseless about what was coming. What fun! #hasjustinelanded was the number one trending hashtag; people even went to the Johannesburg airport to watch her land, turn on her phone, and get figuratively punched by tens of thousands of people at once. Needless to say, she was fired. This map is what her bullying looked like in terms of geographical expanse. 

The original reporter gloried in his creation, saying, “No one cares that I was first but I will know I united black and white twitters. Welcome to post-racial twitter, you're welcome, god bless.” Incidentally, I watched this story in real-time because the chief antagonizer from my Amnesty struggle session was, of course, an eager participant in the pile-on.

Ten years after that Amnesty encounter, this behavior is mainstreamed via social media. Day in and out, I watch voices from the left mock those who are seen as more privileged (‘punching up’). Bullies wait till the ‘privileged’ say something wrong, demand they be fired (often tagging their employees), insult them as bigots or racists, threaten, and urge others to action. It is done in person, online, in whispers, and openly. This behavior is accompanied by a communal groundswell of support and huzzahs. As a result, I cannot even recognize what has happened to much of the human rights field. It is in danger of becoming a movement of bullies.

A recent example is that the New York Times was criticized for a few articles that engaged some of the nuance around youth and transition. Their colleagues and an advocacy organization consequently called for ‘accountability’ to be enforced and when it wasn't, one of the journalists was spit on. Here is the tenor of the responses to that act.

On the other side of the horseshoe, the right rallied behind a presidential candidate and then president whose entire persona is being a bully. Donald Trump came to fame via a show where he berated and fired people, entered political discourse by bullying President Obama about his ethnicity, and then held rallies where he would work the crowd into a fever around a victim or victim group du jour. This is someone who once mocked a disabled journalist. He openly courts power and admires other bullies, particularly dictators, only deferring to perhaps the world’s alpha bully - Vladimir Putin.

It is important to understand that we are not helpless in the face of bullying. We have agency in our response, ultimately, but we have to first recognize whether we are encountering bullying. It can be identified by the same five tactics: 

1). Seeking a crowd - Bullies are performative; they want a crowd to authenticate their worth. When you notice their attempts to gather a group to be cheered on, you are witnessing a bully.

2). Inflicting pain - Bullies want to hurt; they are not seeking to help. They work to cause anguish and if possible, real-world consequences like termination (often called ‘accountability’). If you notice the goal is harm, you are witnessing a bully.

3). Lack of empathy - Bullies show no concern for their victim; they are so caught up in the rush of the performance and power differential that the victim loses human shape. If you notice that they are not speaking about the target as a complex individual or group of distinct individuals, you are witnessing a bully. 

4). Lack of complexity/Surety - On that note, bullies do not see nuance. They do not concede mitigating factors, difference of opinion, or lack of knowledge on their part. The object of their onslaught deserves the treatment - end of story. If you notice that they are speaking in broad strokes, you are witnessing a bully.

5). Identify focus - Bullies may need to be in front of a crowd, but they also need to be a part of it. Bullies seek to create commonalities with those who will cheer them on and then ostracize the target. If you notice they are calling attention to the identity of a target (and thus calling attention to their own), you are witnessing a bully.

(Quick note - I use bully and bullying interchangeably. The reality is that no person is solely a consistent identity. But when they take on the behavior, it’s fair to switch the word from a verb to a noun.) 

So what to do about bullies? A few categorial suggestions:

1). When in a crowd: A few nights ago, a group I am a part of was creating solidarity by talking shit about someone who wasn’t present. I noticed that they had progressed into bullying, and I simply articulated that I didn’t agree with their assessment and that I liked the person. The tenor changed. Bullying relies on unity and simply standing apart takes away its energy.

2). If you are the bully: Keep an eye out, especially in the rush of an interaction, if some or all of those five conditions are driving your behavior. Notice - is there a crowd behind you, are you dehumanizing the other person, are you seeking to cause pain because it makes you feel better, are you acting overly sure and ignoring nuance, and are the other person’s feelings not front of mind? If these are the case, stop immediately. Turn to the crowd and critique them for following along. You have power in that moment to change the dynamic, not just in that situation, but longer term. 

3). When you are being bullied: It’s pretty simple, and it sucks: stand your ground and take the hits. Don’t apologize. Don’t concede. At the Amnesty meeting, I refused to do the funishment. The energy got more and more feverish and then oddly turned into confusion. At a certain point bullies look for a way out. At that moment, there’s an actual opening to try for common ground. They might just walk away, but if they don’t, show your human side and relate to them. There might be some truth in what they are espousing or some hurt that they want seen. You can keep your integrity while still engaging them as a fellow human. 

4). After being bullied: Last fall, I disagreed with the focus of my former rabbi’s sermon. He took to Twitter, calling me out as a “straight, cis, white man” and gladly kept going when someone asked him if he was subtweeting. I took that experience and used it to co-found this substack. I want to add a voice to the growing chorus emphasizing complexity, humanity, empathy, and individual thought. When the pummeling has ended, dust yourself off, and dedicate yourself to the world you want to build.