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Shame as a Tool for Justice

Shame has historically been used to establish and maintain social hierarchies and discourage people from engaging in politics. In addition, shame has commonly been employed against women to keep them from being active in politics that may disrupt the social norms put in place by those in power. In this paper, I will use Americanah and At the Dark End of the Street as literary lenses to argue that shame in our society affects women’s ability to engage meaningfully and fully in feminist politics. To do this, I will examine Harris-Perry’s analysis of the two types of shame: reintegrative and stigmatizing. I will then explore whether shame can be used in a way to achieve social justice.

Before we can look at the possibility of using shame to obtain justice, we must understand how shame functions in current politics and social institutions. Melissa Harris-Perry suggests that there are two main “types” of shame that operate in our lives. The first, reintegrative shame, tends to be thought of as positive and is used to instill social expectations in a way that includes the person being shamed. Reintegrative shame seeks to gently guide a person into the in-group by shaming actions that fall outside of what is considered acceptable behavior in a given context. Reintegrative shame is the result of “expressions of disapproval within the context of loving or respectful relationships,” often from family members or other loved ones. Stigmatizing shame, on the other hand, is used for harmful purposes. Rather than an attempt to include a woman in the community, stigmatizing shame seeks to create an out-group and place her in it. It is meant to create an other, and in the context of politics, stigmatizing shame’s purpose is to disable someone from participating fully in feminist politics. Harris-Perry argues that, “African American women are structurally positioned to experience shame more frequently than others” due to centuries of negative stigma placed upon black women as a group to keep them from breaching the racial hierarchy established by powerful whites for the purpose of leaving little room for opportunity. It is stigmatizing shame that establishes ideas of inferiority between races, and allows only those dubbed as inferior to feel that shame. Examining the shaming of victims gives us great insight into how systems are set up to disprivilege women who attempt to defy the power dynamic between the genders by speaking out against violence. It can also help us to better understand how shame is used to discourage women from engaging in politics.

Shame plays a role in almost every political movement in a variety of ways; shame serves as both a catalyst and a stifler in social movements. Long-standing traditions of shame have caused women to be hesitant about actively participating in feminist politics. Constant shaming can cause women to fear the repercussions of revolting against the boxes and stereotypes assigned to them by the powers that be. In this way, shame is an effective tool of the oppressor to keep the oppressed at bay and afraid of confrontation. To overcome this fear, women must learn from their sisters in the Civil Rights Movement who didn’t allow shame to paralyze them into inaction. Rather, the women of the years leading up to the Civil Rights Movement fought against the stigmas placed upon them for the purpose of causing shame and immobility. Every black woman who spoke out against the violence inflicted upon her chipped away at the debilitating nature of shame.

To demonstrate stigmatizing shame, let us examine Ifemelu’s experiences in the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ifemelu experiences shame multiple times in the novel, the most explicit being when she has sexual relations with the tennis coach in exchange for money. After she returns home from the coach’s house, her shame overwhelms her. “She sat naked on her bed and looked at her life, in this tiny room with the moldy carpet, the hundred-dollar bill on the table, her body rising with loathing. She should never have gone there. She should have walked away.” Even in these few sentences, we can see how deeply Ifemelu has been affected by feelings of shame: “She wanted to shower, to scrub herself, but she could not bear the thought of touching her own body… She curled on her bed and cried, wishing she could reach into herself and yank out the memory of what had just happened.” The feelings of shame are inflicted upon her by societal rules and expectations that she has failed to meet. These expectations come mostly from her Nigerian upbringing, but transfer similarly to her life in America. However, in this case, Ifemelu did not need an observer to make her feel shame; she has been so conditioned by expectations that by breaking community expectations, even when physically distanced from that community, she still feels guilt and shame. Ifemelu’s shame from her exchange with the tennis coach is rooted in the long-standing expectations of women to be modest and well-behaved. For women of color, this expectation is stressed even further because of the Jezebel stereotype that frames black women as promiscuous and lecherous. Ifemelu also felt shame because she could not provide for herself financially and felt that she had no other options than to use her body to make ends meet. This shame associated with women using their bodies to make money has very real-life implications for issues facing sex workers or exotic dancers who may feel shame about the way they support themselves and their families. I will return to this when I examine the use of shame for justice.

Another instance that Ifemelu feels shame that is important to examine revolves around her appearance. Ifemelu expresses feelings of shame when she is told to chemically straighten her hair to appear more professional for a job interview. Though American ideals of “white hair” had seeped into Nigeria (Ifemelu had straightened her hair in Lagos), the expectation of Ifemelu to conform to norms is strengthened in a country where white is the majority. Because of the systematic disadvantage that privileges white women over black, women of color must attempt to “stack up” to the white women around them, especially in the professional world where women in general are still largely excluded. The “ideal” hair that Ifemelu has been exposed to in America reflects the hair that white women have, therefore causing black women to feel inadequate in arenas that are white-dominated unless they change themselves to fit the “norm.” Ifemelu’s experience with straightening her hair in America serves as a catalyst for her growth, but she first felt immense shame about her body. Her boyfriend at the time, Curt, is mortified by the burns she received from the straightening chemicals. “‘Why do you have to do this?’” Curt asked Ifemelu, to which she responded: “My full and cool hair would work if I were interviewing to be a backup singer in a jazz band, but I need to look professional for this interview, and professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never kinky.” The shame associated with appearance can be described as stigmatizing shame because it is used against women to keep them out of social institutions and make them feel like less. “Skin color and hair texture,” Harris-Perry argues, “have both been found to evoke a sense of shame that affects black women’s feelings of attractiveness…[and] economic success…” Ifemelu’s shame about her hair comes from whitewashed ideals of beauty portrayed by the media, and eventually Ifemelu seems to (at least begin to) overcome this shame by shifting the shame from herself onto the media that underrepresents women of color.

Ifemelu shifts the shame by exposing Curt to the racially skewed nature of media, and specifically magazines. After Curt makes a comment about Ifemelu’s Essence magazine being racially skewed, Ifemelu feels the need to stand up to the industry that has been teaching her to be ashamed of her body by calling it out, even if only to Curt. She takes him to the bookstore, where she asks him to count the black women he sees in the magazines she pulls off the shelves. When he counts a maximum of four, she pushes him even further to consider the skin tones of the women he identified as black, all of whom are racially ambiguous or biracial. “‘Not one of them looks like me,’” Ifemelu notes, and explains to Curt that all the beauty tips exclude her and other black women because they are not for her or other black women.

Shame also plays a large role in the sexual violence highlighted in At the Dark End of the Street, which focuses on the institutional shaming of black women’s bodies through sexual violence laws (or the lack thereof) and racial stereotypes. In the decades leading up the Civil Rights Movement, rape was used by white men to instill fear on black communities. However, many black women drew on a history of storytelling to fight back against the violence inflicted on their bodies and “used their voices as weapons against white supremacy.” The courage of survivors to speak out against their attackers helped “expose a ritual of rape in existence since slavery, inspired a nationwide campaign to defend black womanhood, and gave hope to thousands suffering from similar abuses.” Despite the bravery of victims to come forward in an environment where their lives could be endangered for doing so, they rarely received the justice they deserved. Jim Crow south operated so well for such a long time because of the systems set up to deeply disadvantage black women who accused a white man of sexual violence. Shame played an integral part in maintaining the social order that allowed countless white men to rape and assault black women with impunity.

McGuire invokes the Jezebel stereotype (the same that likely caused Ifemelu shame after her encounter with the tennis coach) to help explain shame’s role in rape politics of the South. McGuire uses the stereotype to explain how black women were shamed in rape and sexual assault cases in an attempt to tarnish their reputations. By drawing on this harmful stereotype, defendants in cases about rape were often able to convince the jury that a rape victim was sexually promiscuous, had seduced the man, or simply deserved the assault. Joan Little, a young black woman who was accused of killing prison guard Clarence Alligood as he sexually assaulted her, experienced this sexual shaming at her trial. McGuire states that, “since many whites still could not believe that a black woman could be raped, they fell back on old stereotypes to explain…Alligood’s death.” She goes on to say that whites in Washington “pegged Little as a stereotypical jezebel, and rumors about her respectability, or lack thereof, spread through town.” Drawing on the Jezebel stereotype also fed into the politics of respectability, a tool used by whites to undermine the violence against black communities. By framing black women as lacking respectability, white powers managed to shame them into an out-group that were not worthy of the institutional protection against rape that was allotted to white women.

Contrary to popular education about the Civil Rights Movement, sexual violence against women was the motivation for the Montgomery boycotts, as abuse on the buses grew more and more violent. Bus drivers would sexually harass and abuse black women who were boarding or riding the buses. Bus drivers would humiliate black passengers in a variety of ways: they would slap black women; refuse them entrance; hurl insults; and force black riders to pay their fares at the front of the bus, exit, and reenter at the rear. This practice was meant to decrease the chances of any contact between black and white bodies and remove opportunity for any move towards social equality between the races. It was another calculated social rule that enforced the superiority of whites and instilled shame in African Americans about their bodies. Harris-Perry addresses this in Sister Citizen by drawing again on the purpose of state-sanctioned shame: “Something different happens when the state seeks to shame its citizens by imposing a lasting stigma on their very identity: it is proclaiming that the person herself or himself is defective.” McGuire demonstrates this idea well in her book by pointing out the ways in which institutions have been specifically designed to disadvantage black women, from the police force to the court system to access to adequate living conditions.

It is important to note that the shaming of sexual assault victims did not end with the civil rights movement. We have seen this phenomenon continue in the recent cases of Steubenville, the fifty-five colleges under investigation for the handling of sexual assault cases, and beyond. The politics of shame are seen in almost every facet of modern American society. Because a history of shame haunts black women, they often feel incapable of integrating feminist politics into their lives. “Not only must African Americans overcome structural and psychological barriers to political action; they must also counter real physiological barriers,” Harris-Perry argues. “It is harder to engage the external world when you feel ashamed. It is particularly difficult to engage politically, because… political action requires demanding recognition.” The demanding of recognition means that women must begin to fight back against powers that are invested in silencing who they are as individuals. The problem is that black women aren’t being recognized; stereotypes about them do not reflect their lived experience, but rather “limit African American women to prescribed roles that serve the interest of others.” Misrecognition can cause physical distress because it means that the world sees a woman in a way that gives her no room for individuality. While she might see herself in very positive ways, misrecognition caused by stereotypes and shaming makes others see her in a very different, more negative way.

The deep shame felt by black female victims of sexual assault was a driving force in the movement for civil rights and autonomy over one’s own body. However, shame is also deployed against social movements by opponents. The reproductive rights movement, for example, faces strong criticism from people who try to frame pro-choice activists as shameful proponents of murder. In some schools, sexual education classes seek to turn sexuality into something shameful and claim abstinence is the only way to avoid that shame. However, studies have proven again and again that abstinence does not work, and rates of pregnancies and STDs are much higher in states that don’t require comprehensive sex-ed. Shame is often used to silence people, especially people who threaten privilege and social order. A history of shame has created a culture of victim-blaming in cases of rape and sexual assault, despite feminist efforts to change the conversation surrounding male-perpetrated assault on females from one that prepares women women to “prevent” rape to one about men’s responsibility to not rape. The shame that is attached to survivors of sexual violence often makes women hesitant to report their abuse which leads to a culture of silence surrounding violence against women (and men).

As I have demonstrated with Americanah, Sister Citizen, and At the Dark End of the Street, shame has proven to be effective in demonizing groups of people and keeping them from feeling able to participate in politics. Because of this, it is possible that shame could be used to create positive strides toward social justice. Ifemelu managed to lose her sense of shame about her hair by turning shame on its head and directing it at its source. If Ifemelu’s tactics could be replicated on a national scale, the possibility to eliminate stigmatizing shame of the oppressed could materialize. The point of shaming actions is often to make the actor stop doing what is considered shameful. The same goes, I believe, for people and institutions that use shame to mark a group in power as defective. There must be a cultural shift that recognizes the injustice in shaming entire groups of people. For example, rape culture can begin to deteriorate if we begin shaming rapists rather than survivors. If our culture moves towards one that finds rape and sexual assault absolutely unacceptable, we will begin to move towards preventing sexual violence. Similarly, if abstinence-only sexual education received shaming for their often-decisive lessons and shaming of sexually active youth (so in essence, a shaming of shaming), we may begin to see fewer STDs, fewer pregnancies, and more consensual, safe sex among teens and young adults. This “constructive” shaming of sorts puts the power into the hands of the oppressed who, in numbers with those in solidarity with them, can begin to shift perceptions about what is and isn’t shameful, therefore giving women, and specifically women of color, space to participate in feminist politics.

References:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah: A Novel. Random House, 2013. Print.

Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. Print.

McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

Sheridan, Mary Beth, and Mary Beth Hastings. "Why Are We Still Funding Abstinence-Only Programming?" Truthout.com. Truthout, 25 July 2010. Web. 19 May 2014.

"U.S. Department of Education Releases List of Higher Education Institutions with Open Title IX Sexual Violence Investigations." U.S. Department of Education. 1 May 2014. Web. 20 May 2014.


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