C. The Humiliation Dynamic
Humiliation is an understandable consequence of racism, especially blatant and explicit racial abuse. Three players must exist in order to create a dynamic of humiliation: perpetrator, victim, and witness. If these three roles exist in the presence of ridicule, scorn, contempt, or other degrading treatment, the humiliation dynamic is likely to occur.
The humiliation dynamic can cause psychic trauma because repeated subjection to humiliation breeds common contempt, which may be inwardly or outwardly directed. As is the case with stress, individual reactions to humiliation are variable and dependent on a number of factors. The most common consequential responses are:
• the creation of a person who is very passive;
• the creation of a person who is enraged; and
• frustration from the humiliation of racism which can be turned inward resulting in self-abusive behaviors, such as alcoholism or drug-abuse, or in violent acts towards fellow people of color.
No matter the manner of coping, “in any consideration of the humiliation dynamic and racism, it should be noted that among the most potent consequences of humiliation are that it engenders rage and causes damage to victims' sense of self and identity.”
It is indisputable that the humiliation dynamic has been employed against African Americans for quite some time. Social control through the use of humiliation pervaded the institution of slavery as Blacks were sold in public auctions, publicly whipped and disciplined, and invasive inspections of their bodies and the bodies of their loved ones were routinely carried out, often in public. Indeed as Fede has noted, “[a] fixed principle of slave law granted masters the unlimited right to abuse their slaves to any extreme of brutality and wantonness as long as the slave survived. [Laws that] appeared to protect slaves from violent [W]hite abuse [in fact served a] legitimating purpose.” In the context of the plantation, all three players necessary for the existence of the humiliation dynamic were present.
The plantation was the place most masters and slaves struggled to define their relationship . . . Punishment was central to that relationship. There was a coherent purpose in punishment: it was one procedure used to “degrade and undermine” the humanity of the slave and “so distinguish him from human beings who are not property.” At the same time, there were limits on the amount or type of violence that society would accept. . . . But as Daniel Flanigan notes: ‘it was in the protection of [B]lacks from crime rather than the treatment of [B]lack offenders that the criminal law of slavery failed most miserably.’. . .To limit the power of slaveowners was always difficult, and it was not at all irrational to treat the violence they used against their slaves as if it were outside the legal order, as a noncrime. Vicious such a policy choice would be, but it would be logical. . . . The laws actually ‘decriminalized’ violence to the extent that it was thought a ‘necessary’ or ‘ordinary’ incident of slavery.” Whites were actually not discouraged from abusing and humiliating African slaves. Indeed such behavior had moral, physical, and legal sanction.
The cultural imagery of humiliation is a permanent fixture in the lives of many Blacks. In this vein, the role of the media as a creator and purveyor of culture in the contemporary humiliation of Blacks deserves further analysis. The news media, as well as television programs like COPS, inscribes humiliating images on the psyche of many Blacks. As Griffin has explained:
One of the destructive results of the legacy of slavery is that African Americans experience themselves as society's underdogs. They undergo a legacy of repeated public humiliations, symbolized for them by the typical nightly local newscast in those parts of the country where it has become routine to have TV coverage of African American males being led to jail in handcuffs for some real or alleged crime. Night after night African Americans sit before their TVs seeing members of their community arrested on charges that are often dropped or that result in verdicts of not guilty, exonerating outcomes that are rarely acknowledged, let alone featured, by the media. The criminal justice system and the news media play very active parts in the everyday humiliations with the accompanying pain, anguish, and sense of oppression experienced repeatedly by members of the African American community as they watch such biased newscasts.
Media propaganda against Blacks in America has a long history and can be traced at least to the movie “Birth of a Nation.” Other, perhaps more onerous and certainly more obvious instances of humiliation include driving, walking, and standing while Black and Brown. Over the last few years there have been public admissions of what most people of color, especially Black and Brown Americans, have known for years--that racial profiling is a prevalent practice amongst police, security guards, and customs and immigrations officials.
These encounters are humiliating in the least and enraging at most. To be strip-searched, frisked, and wrongly accused of a crime is a terrifying experience that can generate a plethora of debilitating reactions and emotions. For example, the trauma, both mental and physical, inflicted upon the young Black woman who was publicly strip-searched by metropolitan police in Toronto reveals the depth of this injury. Any public search is degrading and dehumanizing mistreatment calculated to humiliate. The mental and physiological sequelae of a public strip search are almost unimaginable. The effects of such humiliation may render the victim mentally disordered and increasingly vulnerable to racial and other forms of abuse.
Black communities and the individuals in them are repeatedly injured by humiliation--injury that begins early in life for Black children. The humiliation of Black children is often present in the institutions in which they must participate, such as the educational system. The body of literature on racial disparities in education is substantial. The literature not only deals with the recent increase in educational segregation and the conditional accreditation of some inner city public schools, but also with the negligent and sometimes oppressive conditions under which Black and Brown children are expected (or not expected) to learn.
One of the more common examples of such educational humiliation is the streaming of Black children, especially boys, into special education classes. Beyond the lowering of personal self-esteem, there is a lowering of esteem associated with one's collective identity, a negative image projected onto entire Black communities. Even for academically successful Black students, it is not uncommon to be taunted by fellow Black students about their academic success. Students are chided about “trying to be White,” their proper English and grammar denounced as “talking White.” It therefore seems that in the academic setting, some Blacks believe that Black academic attainment is an oxymoron or is a badge of inauthenticity or of cooptation into White culture.
While self-hatred, to the extent that it can be assessed is rare, negative group attitudes and orientations are quite common. Each of these is an acculturation and assimilation strategy for coping with a racialized world. Discrimination affects attitudes and behaviors towards these coping strategies and, to the extent that individuals understand racism and its insidious nature, they tend to defend self-esteem and image. The violence is not self-denigration, as much as it is misdirected anger vented on less well defended targets than the racist society inflicting the abuse. This is precisely the self-loathing and self-denigration that has its roots in past and present racial abuses. The result, for some, is the culturally manufactured self-fulfilling prophecy of violence in Black communities and community norms calling for “keeping it real” or authenticity through gang or street culture, as opposed to through the alleged “majority” indicia of success.
The anger and rage experienced during these humiliating encounters that is not sublimated via social activism or other constructive behavior is typically discharged in one of two ways, either inwardly in the form of self-destructive behaviors, or outwardly in the form of other-directed destruction. Even where an individual directs their destructive behavior inwards, they are rendered more vulnerable to forms of abuse, creating a spiral of enhanced vulnerability. Racial abuse, whether explicit isolated incidents, ongoing cumulative humiliations, or structural impediments, wears down even the most resilient victims. What therefore, of the more vulnerable members of the Black community who may lack the coping skills of the Walkers in Bohanon and are without substantial coping resources?
For these individuals, responsive violence may result in prolonged interaction with the criminal justice system. Considering the stigma and loss of liberty resultant from a finding of criminal culpability for murder, relevant information pertaining to the circumstances of the killing and the mental vulnerabilities of the racially abused accused should be considered. Accordingly, critical psychology should be introduced as a consideration for mitigated sentencing where passion exceeds reason.
