Blamelessness

Blamelessness is a central concept in Juanita's work. I believe she got the concept from the Bible (e.g., Job was a blameless man). This is a hard concept to define clearly--the idea is that one's actions fall within one's rights so that no one can place blame. If you can be blamed, then another person has grounds to do something negative to you.

For example, when I was in the worst class I had to take (we're talking the worst in comparison to my school experience from nursery school through doctoral program, so it was really a terrible class), I had grounds to visit the professors in their offices and state my opinions because that is an adult right. I didn't have the right to tell them that they were wrong outright, but I did have the right to say, "in my opinion..." If I had told them off, they would have had grounds to do something to me, such as flunk me (I got an A). But since I stayed within the boundaries of blamelessness, they didn't have the grounds--the ability to justify--flunking me or even giving me a B.

The basis of blamelessness is personal authority. This involves exercising one's rights to the fullest extent but at the same time recognizing the limits on those rights. Juanita never advocated people turning from victims to oppressors--she wanted people to go from being victims to being adults. So that means expressing opinions but not in a mean-spirited way.

When Juanita and I went to our boss at a shelter where we worked because we wanted to express our opinions about that boss firing another person at the shelter, she presented the letter we wrote (in which we expressed our opinions--we did not ask that this person be reinstated, nor did we make any demands--we just wrote about the person and the characteristics she had that we appreciated), she did so with politeness and caring--love, even. She did not have any fear about her because we were exercising an adult right to express an opinion. Too many of the people at that place were volunteering to give up their adult rights of expressing an opinion because they were afraid. Blamelessness means walking over fear.