On dehumanization, accountability abuse, and transformative justice

CW: abuse, conflict, violence, genocide

In the beginning of the 1985 film Shoah, a Holocaust survivor returns to a site of mass executions. The scene, filmed in the present, is eerily calm; he rows down the nearby river and stands in an open, green field. “It was always this peaceful here,” says the man, to the disbelief of the interviewer. “Always. Even when they were burning every day, let’s say 2,000 people, Jews, it was always this peaceful. No one screamed. Everyone did his job. Everything was silent.”

Dehumanization is a process. Studies of peace and conflict know that societies spiral and become increasingly polarized or unstable before they fracture. How does the process of dehumanization occur?

As an educator studying how to bring divided people together, I’ve had to think long and hard about these dynamics. At the beginning of conflict there can be opportunity for resolution, transformation, but only if the conflict is steered. When individuals get together without the resources for resolving friction, things can go wrong. Sometimes, situations can spiral out of control. While conflicts in a classroom are of course not the same as actual violence, the point is that the roots of dehumanization are always there, lying in wait.

Essentialism is key to processes of dehumanization, but another aspect is the psychological need to regain a sense of stability in an uncertain world. Critical theorist Paul Gilroy once asked why the Nazis needed to put Jewish people on train cars, rather than executing them outright. What purpose does that serve? He stresses that as uncomfortable as the questions are, we need to understand them to prevent them from happening again.

The answer scholars have come up with is: You have to convince yourself those people really are inhuman, to help you do terrible things. (Infrahuman, Gilroy calls it in his 2000 book Against Race.) It was the same with slavery in the U.S. The aggressor had to convince themselves of their superiority, to maintain a distance from the truth — that the targeted person was just as human as they were, if not more so.

We are all human, and so we are all — as much as we don’t want to believe it — capable of the level of violence the Nazis, Japanese, Europeans, Ottomans, Mongols, Chinese, etc. have inflicted on others at various times in history. All it takes is for blood to start flowing in the streets.

The Chinese revolution is a case in point. Roving bands of young Red Guards marched through the streets. Their calls for accountability started with the corrupt, the elites, the ones who you could prove did something wrong. Then it escalated. Soon, anyone was fair game, even the Red Guards themselves. By the end of it, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife who started the whole affair, was imprisoned and, eventually, committed suicide.

The targets were painted with the slur — “revisionist!” — and that alone was enough to be cast out. At a certain point, it didn’t matter what you did. Whether or not you were really a “revisionist” — that was besides the point. The point was someone to blame.

Imagine all your pain, your unresolved trauma, your complex hurt was bottled up with nowhere to go. Imagine tens of millions of people died all around you, just five years earlier, including family, brothers, sisters, parents. Now, someone came along and said: I know who to blame. It is the X. The X did this. Find the X, cast them out! Only once we find all the X’s, will we be free.

That’s a powerful message to someone who’s hurting. They won’t see the manipulation, because they can’t. They’re blinded by unresolved pain. Instead they think — at last, a release. A possibility of release from this prison. And finally, a purpose — to join my comrades in the fight for good.

You don’t need to know who the X’s mother was. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to know what children X has, or friends. You don’t want to know what X likes to cook, what their spouse loves about them, what they’ve been through. You don’t want to know.

Knowing would only break the illusion of safety; it would expose you to the sinister reality of complexity. You’d have to face yourself. But you came to get away from that.

You get angrier as the X tries to explain, defend, apologize. How dare them. They’re an X, and they won’t even admit it! They won’t admit it the way I want them to! How dare they not accept my control! You have to convince yourself they really are an X, worthless, a piece of trash below your feet. Only then will you be free.

Finally, they are cast out. You are relieved. You snicker at your success: “Looks like the trash took itself out.”

These dynamics can play out on an interpersonal level by traumatized people, and they can also play out in social justice discourse online. I am no stranger to abusive dynamics, and so I know, personally, that what appears is not always what is to be believed. Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to have learned this lesson. We are mad about many things — racism, the economy, the pandemic, rising polarization and inequality — and some of us are roving around, looking for someone to blame. Overstatements or mis-statements of individual harm are amplified by algorithms, resulting in pile-ons, invectives, or mass de-follow campaigns.

In We Will Not Cancel Us, Black feminist adrienne maree brown explains these dynamics in her own activist and queer communities. “A lot of messy shit goes down in the name of transformative justice,” she says, adding:

I’ve watched several public takedowns, call-outs, and other grievances take place on social and mainstream media. Some of those have been of strangers, but recently I’ve had the experience of seeing people I know and love targeted and taken down. In most cases, very complex realities get watered down into one flawed aspect of these people’s personalities, or one mistake or misunderstanding. A mob mentality takes over then, an evisceration of character that is punitive, traumatizing, and isolating… Lately, as the attacks grow faster and more vicious, I wonder: is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?

Social justice poses a dilemma: we want to be good, we want to be seen as “on the right side of history” —but that want can create situations where the nuance of actual life is submerged in binary, black/white, winner/loser thinking, supported and amplified by social media algorithms. Despite their commitments to justice, the sad truth is that many people espousing liberal values have little to no experience in transformative justice or peace-building, and the nuance, care, and discomfort that requires. Said another way, they know what they don’t like, but have little idea of the world they wish to build or how to achieve it. Worse, they fail to see how abusing justice processes or rhetoric, as maree brown indicates, can cause the opposite reaction —to push their targets into the arms of extremism.

When social justice starts to repeat the supremacist dynamic above, accountability abuse is Hozumi’s term for it. The term encapsulates many lessons from queer theorist Sarah Schulman’s book, Conflict is Not Abuse (controversial in some circles). But anyone familiar with abusive dynamics in their interpersonal relationships — whether with bosses at work, or intimate relationships — knows that social relationships are often messier than they first appear. Misunderstandings can spiral out of control, especially where hidden trauma is involved.

I have often reflected on an essay written after spiraling accountability processes in the game developer community, when an accused developer committed suicide. In the wake of that sadness, his sister, Eileen Holowka (now a PhD candidate at my alma mater), made an impassioned plea for transformative justice and care:

I know firsthand how broken the legal system can be. It has failed us in so many ways and we’re scrambling to find an alternative. That said, this current system is also deeply broken, because it is not a system at all. There are no rules here, no guidelines, and no accountability. There are no processes for rehabilitation.

Holowka had seen her brother struggle and go through years of therapy to resolve the source of the abuse he had inflicted ten years earlier. But social media folds time. Here, there is no sell-by date. Here, everything is forever.

As brown says, accountability abuse is — notwithstanding the long-term damage it can inflict on those attacked — a PR problem for transformative justice. Until social justice reckons with these dynamics, I fear it will remain too easy a target for far-right media. After all, if the people calling for justice are themselves unjust — why listen to anything they say?

Fortunately, CS education or digital literacy might have a role to play in acknowledging our power in online discourse. Activities can be designed to help students reflect on interpersonal conflict and how the design of platforms may foster or diffuse conflict. Instead of blanket denials about “cancel culture” existing or not, what if we ask the kids what they think? What if we ask kids to design platforms that bring people together? That’s the kind of work in intercultural computing that I’d like to see.