The Complicity of Disengagement: Why Silence in the Face of Injustice Isn’t Neutral | Op-Ed
From police killings at home to wars abroad, silence isn’t just absence, but complicity that leaves communities of color and marginalized people carrying the weight. We discuss it here!
Complicity of Disengagement
Credit: Prostock-studio via Shutterstock
By: Jamila Gomez
Every time the world cracks open—another killing, another war, another headline that makes your stomach drop—I notice the patterns. Some people respond with outrage. Some respond with grief. And some respond with silence. That last group—the ones who consistently turn away from tragedy as if distance will protect them—often treat disengagement as harmless. But turning away isn’t neutral.
Avoidance is a privilege, and it’s a privilege not everyone has. Some people can shut their laptops, mute the conversation, or scroll past the news without consequence. They can walk through the world buffered by race, money, geography, or status and convince themselves that the pain doesn’t touch them. But for others, there is no buffer.
For Black communities, for queer folks, for people already living at the margins, the news cycle isn’t just headlines—it’s lived reality. We can’t mute another police killing when that victim could be our cousin. We can’t ignore another law erasing rights when it chips away at our very existence. We can’t dismiss violence in a far-off country when our families are still there. To look away, when you have the option, is to quietly decide the pain belongs to someone else.
The silence that follows isn’t empty—it’s heavy. It doesn’t just shield the one who chooses it; it shifts the burden onto others. Those who keep showing up, speaking out, and carrying the weight end up carrying it alone. And silence sends a message. It signals that injustice can go unchecked. It suggests that grief doesn’t need acknowledgment. It tells us that distance is an acceptable substitute for solidarity.
None of this is to say we don’t need rest. No one can live in a constant state of crisis without breaking. Boundaries matter. Self-preservation matters. But there’s a difference between stepping back to catch your breath and building a habit of avoidance. Rest is temporary; disengagement as a lifestyle is something else entirely. When silence becomes the default posture, it becomes complicity.
And the truth is, people don’t always need perfect words. They don’t always need a plan. What they need is presence. A simple acknowledgment: I see what happened, and it hurts. A check-in: Are you holding up? A refusal to normalize harm by pretending nothing happened. Presence doesn’t solve the problem, but it communicates something critical—that suffering matters enough to witness, even if it can’t be fixed. To show up is to affirm that we are not as alone as the world often makes us feel.
Turning away may feel like self-protection. But it comes at a cost, and others pay it. Witnessing is hard. Staying present is harder. But neutrality in the face of suffering? That’s not neutrality at all.
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