What Is Evil?

I am forever intrigued by the concept of evil.  Not that evil is in any way appealing to me, but the ways in which the word is used or overused seem to water down or, better, mask the potency of its influence.  What is evil?  Is it when someone misses your birthday?  Is it when a supervisor gives you a bad review?  When we use this word, do we even think about what it actually means?


Dr. Emilie Townes takes on the task of defining evil, a certain kind of evil "as a cultural production... of truncated narratives designed to support and perpetuate structural inequities and forms of social oppression."  In her book, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, she utilizes the methodology of exploring "the twists and turns of the communities" and being sensitive to the "particular" to expose how history and memory have be co-opted by cultural images to form a systematic and systemic oppression of communities in general and black women in particular.  She focuses her exploration to five stereotypical images that "continue to have profound influence in our social order--Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, the Tragic Mulatta, the Welfare Queen, and Topsy".

What I find most evil is when evil has been so entrenched into the culture that a person does not have to be aware of the evil to participate in it.  For instance, the perticularity that Townes consistently points out is commodification of the identity of a person or a group.  In other words, it is evil to own someone's identity to the point where judgment by others is based on the identity you project about that person.  Townes talks about this concept in very specific cases, pointing out that, in the case of Aunt Jemima, black women were stereotyped by a white patriarchal system in the South that wanted to mask the atrocities of slavery and project an image of the "content nigger mammy."  This imagery served not only as a successful marketing tool which grossed millions of dollars for several household products, but is portrayed a "catchy" image that was maliciously engraved into the historical landscape that still has effects in our contemporary context.

I would definitely agree that owning and commodifying the identiity and history of a people for your own gain is the work of evil.  That being said, it is important to not only look at this from a community level.  We must also consider the evil of how we project our own perceptions of other people into our circles of influence.  When we talk about a person in ways that discourage others from interacting with that person, we are coopting a person's identity.  We are assuming that we know all there is to know about that person.  In the least, we are projecting an incomplete image as the sum and total of who that person is.  This is particularly evil when this practice becomes self-serving--profitable financially, socially or emotionally.  We kill the image of others so that our image can be glorified.

I can't help but wonder, Is this why our parents told us, "If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything."?  Did our parents know something, even if only on an intuitive level, about the evils of owning someone else's identity and using it ways that damaged or caused suffering to the actual person?

These are just my thoughts for now as I grapple with the understanding of evil.  I can already find internal rebuttal against what I just said.  For instance, Townes talks about the importance of countermemory as a way to "deconstruct and eradicate systems of evil" by "exposing the truth".  Sometimes the truth exposing negative things about a person's behavior and even their character.  How does a person warn someone about another person's evil behavior without coopting their identity?  Hmmm?