It's my birthday week so naturally I am thinking about humiliation.
I am thinking about humiliation as a system. An oppressive one.
To humiliate someone is to: reduce them to a lower position in one's own eyes or others' eyes; to make someone feel ashamed or embarrassed.
When we talk about oppressive systems, we rarely talk about how they are designed to humiliate certain groups as a means of maintaining a certain social and economic hierarchy.
We don't talk about how humiliation is a key systemic tool in white patriarchic capitalist imperialism.
We don't talk about how we are taught to humiliate each other for not being a rich, white, cis-het male from a Western society. We don't talk about how people are taught to do this all across the world from the States, to Europe, to East Asia to Southeast Asia, to Northern Africa, to Africans to African Americans, and to Latin Americans.
We don't talk about how we're taught to humiliate each other into complying with and submitting to the oppressive world order that we live in.
We don't talk about how men are taught to humiliate women as a form of dominance and putting women in their "place."
We don't talk about how cis folks are taught to humiliate trans, nonbinary, and gender-fluid folks.
We don't talk about how white people are taught to humiliate non-white folks.
We don't talk about how non-black folks are taught to humiliate black folks.
We don't talk about how rich folks are taught to humiliate poor folks.
And we don't talk about the nuance of humiliation, either.
We don't talk about how you don't have to be a millionaire or a billionaire to humiliate someone for their financial state. You only need to have just enough money to pay your rent to feel like you're in a position to humiliate a houseless person.
You just need enough to pay for your next meal to humiliate a person who can't afford food.
Those people "should just get a job." That or they really need to learn financial literacy. Right?
Black women should take more pride in their appearance and stop wearing bonnets in public.
A woman should just be grateful that a man is putting a roof over her head. The fact that he has a daily practice of humiliating her in big and small ways by how he talks to her, demands sex from her, and requires her to be his own personal house slave is of no consequence. He doesn't have to be rich either. He just has to have enough to pay the bills.
In truth, just being a man qualifies him to engage in the practice of humiliating anyone who is not a man according to this hierarchical system we live in.
We don't talk about how you can be sexually queer and feel entitled to humiliate a person who is genderqueer.
We don't talk about how naturally humiliation comes to neurotypical folks when they are engaging with a neurodivergent person.
We don't talk about how Indians humiliate Indian Americans for not being Indian enough and how this is a common practice between East Asians, Southeast Asians, and Africans and East Asian Americans, Southeast Asian Americans, and African Americans.
We don't talk about how the humiliation goes both ways in these types of dynamics.
We don't talk about any of it.
Nor do we talk about what it feels like to be routinely humiliated by oppressive systems.
Over the past couple of months, I've been talking to femme friends who are unfortunately genetically predisposed to find men attractive about what we're learning about our past relationship experiences and the unspoken undertone of all those conversations is how much humiliation we've all endured in the process. Not to mention how normal it seemed to accept that humiliation as a given when dating men.
And I've been watching conversations about the 4B movement on TikTok and while many women express their righteous rage about how men have treated them, very few admit that their rage stems from being humiliated.
The same is true when we talk about race relations. We love to talk about all the oppressive systems except for humiliation. We love to talk about neighborhood redlining. We're fine with talking about police violence against black and brown communities, and we're comfortable talking about wage and general economic opportunity disparities between races.
But we almost never talk about the humiliation aspect.
We don't talk about how we've essentially normalized the act of being humiliated. We expect to be humiliated so when it happens, we accept it and keep it moving as though the humiliation never happened.
We act like the humiliation didn't leave a mark when it did.
We never talk about how humiliating it can be as a black person to have a white person in your life declare that they love you in one sentence and then in the next say that they need to prioritize something over your humanity "for the sake of the economy."
We also don't talk about the white people who claim to love and care for the non-white people in their lives while simultaneously maintaining close relationships with known racists and excusing their racism with a "well you know, [insert name]. That's just how they are." Or my personal favorite "I'm sure they don't really mean it," when everyone in the conversation knows that they most definitely do.
We don't talk about how some immigrants feel like it's their right of passage as a newly minted American to shame and humiliate immigrants in the process of navigating the deeply fucked up immigration system.
We don't talk about how this system of humiliation confers the power to humiliate onto anyone willing to uphold white patriarchic capitalist imperialism and how it creates a sense of belonging amongst the folks who are willing to bully to belong.
And we don't talk about how being granted the right to humiliate, or bully, breaks what would otherwise be key solidarity coalitions amongst the people who lack certain power against the people who hold so much of it.
The truth is that I don't really know what to do about these systems of humiliation. They feel so deeply ingrained into our global society and we've been schooled in humiliation for so many generations now that it feels like basic human nature.
As I write this, I'm thinking about all the places where humiliation lives out in the open right now, and off the top of my head, I'm thinking about how Kamala's campaign is determined to humiliate Trump as a means of discrediting him as a candidate, how Trump and Vance are determined to humiliate Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants as a xenophobic fearmongering tactic to energize their base, and how Zionists continue to humiliate Palestinians in the name of religious freedom, and how willingly our entire global society participates in humiliating poor, black Africans in the Congo and Sudan for the sake of convenience.
I'm also thinking about how humiliation breaks down relating. Because a prerequisite of humiliation is identifying someone as an other who deserves to be humiliated for their otherness.
I'm thinking about how silence about being humiliated and refusal to listen to testimony about how you have been the humiliator reduces opportunities for repair that could potentially lead to increased relating.
And I'm thinking about these supposed loneliness epidemics that we're living through and I'm wondering if part of the isolation is that people don't feel safe relating because they have suffered too much humiliation already and simply aren't willing to risk it without guaranteed safety from the pain and shame that is humiliation.
Lastly, I'm thinking about how humiliation makes people conflict-avoidant, which means they tend to speak up less for fear of being ridiculed, and how that deprives us of so many ideas for how to build and move forward.
So ya, I may or may not be spending this week thinking about how our society could be different if we talked more openly about humiliation and the role that the system of humiliation plays in our society.
And, I'm adding humiliation to my list of hard emotions (along with fear, anger, and shame) that I think are important to talk about as a means for informing how we continue to move along the journey of individual and collective liberation.
Low key, I'm also thinking about deleting my Instagram.
What are you thinking about this week?
May you choose love over fear and safety over comfort,
Brionna
