Unlearning Shame: How We Can Reject Self-Blame Culture and Reclaim Our Power is a book by social psychologist Devon Price that addresses the pervasive feeling of shame caused by societal and systemic problems.
Shame shame shame.
Review extracted from my article on shame published on the NYFR - The New Furry Review:
Dr. Devon Price is a social psychologist and author best known for Unmasking Autism and Laziness Does Not Exist. As an autistic, queer person who openly references attending Midwest FurFest (MFF) and International Mr. Leather, Price isn’t theorizing from a distance. He understands masking, performance, and the way subcultures promise freedom while quietly enforcing new rules.
Price isn’t doing self-help fluff. He’s building a framework from the ground up, and unlike authors who focus on individual shame and personal responsibility, he asks the harder question: who benefits when we all feel perpetually not enough?
The answer involves capitalism, white supremacy, and corporate power: systems that profit from keeping us anxious, isolated, and fighting each other. Price calls this Systemic Shame, and it works by keeping us fixated on “the morality of momentary choices, small purchases, and daily habits. Is watching this movie feminist? Is buying this free-range beef good for the environment? Should I list my pronouns in my bio? Am I doing enough? Are my friends? Systemic Shame convinces us we need to stay this anxious” (18).
This Systemic Shame he is talking about, it’s like an operating system that works at three levels: personal (the voice in your head), interpersonal (how we police each other), and global (the structures that benefit from our collective not-enoughness). It teaches us that worth must be earned, that safety is conditional, that visibility is dangerous unless perfectly managed.
And here’s the trick: Systemic Shame keeps us fighting ourselves instead of the system. We think we’re the problem. That if we just worked harder, performed perfectly, we’d finally be safe. We police each other with callout docs and screenshots instead of building support systems. We fragment instead of organizing against the structures that actually harm us—the laws, the media narratives, the economic systems that demand we stay small.
Shame keeps us fragmented. And fragmented communities are easy to dismantle. One person can’t fight back against a tremendous apparatus being reinforced at every level.