Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming is trying to reroute the moral circuitry of political struggle: away from the satisfying clarity of “enemy” and toward the harder discipline of diagnosing oppression as something people do, not something people are. The intent is strategic as much as ethical. “Naming enemies” is a shortcut that consolidates identity through hostility; it hardens camps, justifies retaliation, and quietly makes violence feel inevitable. By contrast, “naming behavior” keeps the conflict legible without making annihilation or humiliation the endgame.

The line’s power comes from its internal pressure: “hold to our vision” implies that movements routinely betray their own aims in the heat of fighting. Deming is speaking from within the nonviolent tradition, where the means are not a PR layer but the message itself. If your vision is a just society, the subtext goes, you can’t build it using the same dehumanizing categories that sustain injustice. You can confront harm without granting it metaphysical permanence.

There’s also a psychological wager here. Calling someone an enemy flatters our sense of righteousness; it’s an identity we can wear. Calling out oppressive behavior is more exacting, because it leaves room for change, contradiction, and uncomfortable proximity. It forces accountability without foreclosing conversion. In a Cold War-era political culture that prized loyalty tests and purity, Deming’s framing resists the seduction of moral sorting. She’s not asking for softness; she’s arguing for precision - language that targets the machinery of domination rather than baptizing hatred as clarity.