Unfairness and Injustice: Naming the Fire
For much of my life, I have carried a feeling I could not name. It was burning, hot and close to the surface: like a hollow wound filled with magma, waiting to overflow. Even in moments of calm, it remained underneath, asking to be recognised.
I thought it was anger. Other people thought it was anger too. They would hear me trying to explain the layers of racism, sexism, misogynoir, classism and exclusion, then say: “I understand why you are angry.”
But anger was not the beginning of it. Anger was what people could see. Beneath it was something rawer: pain, grief, exhaustion and the repeated experience of having to prove what should already be plain.
More than rage
For a long time, I tried to explain the feeling in every possible way. I spoke about systems, discrimination, power, intersectionality, exclusion and the ways that structural injustice shapes a life.
All of that was true. Yet it did not reach the centre of what I was trying to say.
You cannot flatten complex emotion into anger. Anger may be present, but it can also be a guard around pain. A fire around a wound. A response to being treated as though the harm itself is less important than how politely you explain it.
First, prove it.
There is a particular cruelty in having to prove that what is happening to you is unfair.
You have to evidence it, demonstrate it, explain it, make it legible and make it acceptable to the people with the power to respond.
That process is not neutral. It can become another trauma. Then the trauma itself is named, assessed and placed inside you—as though you are the problem because you have been affected by what happened.
“The problem is the problem. The person is not the problem.”
Narrative practice principleOutside the person
The problem is not a Black woman naming the discomfort in the room. The problem is not the person who is tired of being diminished, questioned, stereotyped or excluded.
The problem is racism. Sexism. Misogynoir. Classism. Institutional disbelief. Cultural erasure. Funding structures that recognise damage only when it can be attached to a familiar deficit.
The problem is unfairness and injustice—and the way unfairness and injustice is repeatedly ignored when it cannot be made comfortable for the people asked to address it.
What happens when nothing changes?
There are names for the experience. We can call it discrimination, racism, sexism, misogynoir or classism. These words matter because they show that the pain is not imagined and not isolated.
But sometimes the language becomes so technical that the original truth gets hidden.
It is unfair. It is unfair how people are treated. It is unfair that they must prove it. It is unfair that after they prove it, nothing changes. It is unfair that there are so few services, opportunities or resources created to address it.
What remains unnamed
There is a line often attributed to Carl Jung: that until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate.
I understand this now as an invitation to notice what has been shaping us from underneath. Not to blame ourselves for what has happened, but to become clearer about the stories, wounds and patterns that are asking for language.
For me, naming unfairness and injustice has changed something. The external world may not be entirely transformed, but I no longer mistake the fire for a personal failure. I can recognise what it is responding to.
Not the damaged one
If a person can be placed inside a label—low income, traumatised, difficult, angry, at risk, excluded—then the problem can be located inside them.
That makes the person the defect. It makes the person the damaged one. It makes their response to unfairness and injustice look like the problem, rather than a meaningful response to what they have lived through.
But a person’s pain is not proof of their defect. It may be evidence that something deeply wrong has happened, and keeps happening, around them.
Unfairness
By Naz Knight
I thought it was anger.
That is what they called it
when I came with smoke
in my throat
and ash beneath my tongue.
Angry.
Too much.
Difficult.
Emotional.
As though fire begins
at the flame.
As though they had not seen
the hollow,
the wound,
the red-hot centre
I had spent my life
trying not to spill.
Even in peace
it was there.
A magma lake
under the floorboards
of serenity.
I learned balance.
I learned control.
I learned how to sit
with a volcano
inside my chest
and call it calm.
They said,
“I understand why you are angry.”
No.
You understand the heat
but not the wound.
You understand the sound
but not the silence
that came before it.
You understand the raised voice
but not the thousand times
I had to lower it
to be heard.
It is pain.
Raw.
Old.
Repeated.
The pain of proof.
First,
prove that it happened.
Prove the look.
Prove the room.
Prove the closed door.
Prove the missing opportunity.
Prove the silence after the meeting.
Prove the hand that did not reach back.
Prove racism.
Prove sexism.
Prove classism.
Prove misogynoir.
Prove it
until the proving
becomes another wound.
Then they name you traumatised
as though trauma arrived
without a history.
As though it was born
inside your body
instead of placed there
by the world.
But I know now.
It is unfair.
No bells.
No whistles.
No banners.
Just unfairness.
Unfair what happened.
Unfair what keeps happening.
Unfair how we are treated.
Unfair that we have to prove
how we are treated.
Unfair that once we prove it,
nothing is done.
Unfair that the only way
to be funded,
heard,
saved,
is to become
the problem.
But the problem
is not the person.
The problem is the problem.
The problem is the weight
of injustice
dressed in labels,
explained away,
then ignored.
And I am not angry
because I am broken.
I am burning
because something
is wrong.
I am burning
because I know
what unfairness feels like.
And now
I have a name for the fire.
Listen to the poem
Naming the fire
Naming unfairness does not remove the systems that create it. It does not automatically bring justice, funding, repair or accountability. But it does refuse the lie that the person experiencing injustice is the problem.
For me, this naming is part of a wider practice: poetry, narrative work, creativity and language that makes room for the full truth. Not a reduced truth. Not a truth softened to avoid making people uncomfortable. The truth as it lives in the body, in memory and in the world.
Unfairness is not a small word. It contains histories, structures, grief, rage, survival and a demand for something better.
The person is not the problem.
The problem is unfairness.
The problem is injustice.
Reflection question: Is there a feeling you have been carrying that others have named too quickly—and what changes when you find the word that is true for you?