For much of my life, I believed people always tried to be good, take accountability, and repair when needed, and if they didn’t, it was because of some situational adversity or other reason. This worldview didn’t leave room for the possibility that people can just be awful. By awful, I mean something specific: people who do not try to be good, who do not take accountability when they harm people, and who do not pursue reasonable actions of repair when needed. I also am referring to the behaviors and traits often associated with “narcissism.”

Dr. Ramani Durvasula describes 5 interrelated traits of “narcissism”: (1) low empathy, (2) extreme selfishness, (3) excessive need for admiration and validation, (4) grandiosity, and (5) poorly regulated anger and other emotions. She also identifies lack of accountability as being one of the primary warning signs of narcissism. These behaviors can present in a variety of different forms, including communal narcissists, who are validated by being perceived by others for doing good deeds and put a large amount of time and energy into maintaining those perceptions. Moving away from the issue of whether or not someone is a “narcissist” and the need to pathologize people, these qualities, especially when they present together and are combined with lying and gaslighting, describe what I would call colloquially “awful people”, or more accurately people who behave awfully.

As marginalized people, we are often led by our own experiences and by community norms to look at the world via a lens of oppressor versus oppressed or privileged versus marginalized. This worldview, however, is incomplete. In particular, if you adopt it as a marginalized person who spends most of your time with marginalized people, this worldview leaves you vulnerable to harm – because all people, including marginalized people, can be awful.

With marginalized people, recognizing that someone is behaving awfully or exhibiting the traits of narcissism can be particularly challenging because (1) many communities prefer to reinforce simplistic binary narratives around harm, (2) these people may center their real oppression and marginalization to distract from harm and deflect accountability, and (3) these people may center their lived experiences and community roles as justification for their behaviors. Some people might wonder why I am spending time picking on marginalized people when there are so many privileged people causing harm; the reason is that I spend most of my time and energy around marginalized people so their interpersonal behavior affects me more. Additionally, I have found the experience of being harmed in these ways by marginalized people to be particularly damaging because there was a greater expectation of trust and safety between us.

I could see someone mischaracterizing this position statement as me claiming that marginalized people are narcissists. To be clear, what I came on here to say is the following: all people are capable of harming people, and people who embody the traits of narcissism and who gaslight other people can belong to any group – marginalized, privileged, or somewhere in between. Recognizing this complexity is essential for us to have honest conversations about harm and repair and to keep our communities safe and healthy. Allowing for this complexity is also important if we are going to move seriously towards noncarceral approaches of responding to violence in our interpersonal relationships and societally.