On the concentric cycle of racism in Australia
View/ Open
Author(s)
Demosthenous, Hellene Theoti
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2012
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This paper examines how social structures and individual processes transform the humiliation of the dominated into the enraged violence of the dominator in racist societies, such as ours. In Australia, all too often racism is depicted through social media, and consequenced by the imbalances of power. The social structures of power within which we live are not merely situational settings, but also serve to constrain and free us. Individuals internalise values and attitudes during, in and through the socialisation process. It is through this process that the oppression and humiliation of the least powerful members of society ...
View more >This paper examines how social structures and individual processes transform the humiliation of the dominated into the enraged violence of the dominator in racist societies, such as ours. In Australia, all too often racism is depicted through social media, and consequenced by the imbalances of power. The social structures of power within which we live are not merely situational settings, but also serve to constrain and free us. Individuals internalise values and attitudes during, in and through the socialisation process. It is through this process that the oppression and humiliation of the least powerful members of society becomes the norm into which most of us have been unconsciously conditioned. Similarly, when social structures are humiliating they do not merely constitute humiliating situations but are internalised as memories that inform our identity; as humiliator or humiliated. What characterises these social structures and personal experiences of humiliation is that they are always dualistic in nature. In other words, such characterisations can be dichotomously represented as the bipolar opposites of the oppressor and the oppressed, the powerful and the powerless, the haves and the have-nots, the humiliators and the humiliated, the proactive aggressors and the reactive aggressors. In essence, the paper considers the crimes of the humiliator and the crimes of the humiliated as different sides of the story of racism in Australia.
View less >
View more >This paper examines how social structures and individual processes transform the humiliation of the dominated into the enraged violence of the dominator in racist societies, such as ours. In Australia, all too often racism is depicted through social media, and consequenced by the imbalances of power. The social structures of power within which we live are not merely situational settings, but also serve to constrain and free us. Individuals internalise values and attitudes during, in and through the socialisation process. It is through this process that the oppression and humiliation of the least powerful members of society becomes the norm into which most of us have been unconsciously conditioned. Similarly, when social structures are humiliating they do not merely constitute humiliating situations but are internalised as memories that inform our identity; as humiliator or humiliated. What characterises these social structures and personal experiences of humiliation is that they are always dualistic in nature. In other words, such characterisations can be dichotomously represented as the bipolar opposites of the oppressor and the oppressed, the powerful and the powerless, the haves and the have-nots, the humiliators and the humiliated, the proactive aggressors and the reactive aggressors. In essence, the paper considers the crimes of the humiliator and the crimes of the humiliated as different sides of the story of racism in Australia.
View less >
Conference Title
Manifestations and Impacts of Racism
Publisher URI
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subject
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences not elsewhere classified
Criminology not elsewhere classified