“Public shaming”? Stocks, pillories, tar and feather, ostracization, reducing access to resources, employment blacklists?

Good to see that most responses to your article are critical of the ideas expressed. However, I doubt even this light form of “public shaming” will cause you to reflect, after all, you know better than us plebes.

Have you ever faced public shaming and has it “ improved your behavior”? As a white person, probably not. As a woman, even a white woman, probably a little. (Yeah, I know you’ve written a book on it, probably based on some single-notion, weakly defended PhD dissertation.)

Shaming only works on the powerless. It does not work on privileged people who think they have the right to break the social “rules” and consider themselves exceptions.

Shaming hasn’t worked on White countries reducing their consumption of natural resources or generating trash. There are no consequences to bad behavior and privilege will allow you to brush off any attempt at shaming. It doesn’t even work for COVID like epidemics if you think it is everyone else’s fault and you can always buy yourself out of sickness. It isn’t a great leveler, the poor and the Black people have higher mortality rates than the rich or the white.