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Journal of Psychosocial Studies • vol XX • no XX • 1–7 • © Author 2024
Online ISSN 1478-6737 • https://doi.org/10.1332/14786737Y2024D000000017
Accepted for publication 05 June 2024 • First published online 15 July 2024
open space
From tragedy to tyranny: a response to ‘Stoking
hate configuring loss in explanations of racially
aggravated crime’ by David Gadd
Stephen Blumenthal, stephenblumenthal@queenannestreetpractice.com
Queen Anne Street Practice, UK
To cite this article: Blumenthal, S. (2024) From tragedy to tyranny: a response to ‘Stoking
hate configuring loss in explanations of racially aggravated crime’ by David Gadd, Journal of
Psychosocial Studies, XX(XX): 1–7, DOI: 10.1332/14786737Y2024D000000017
Racism is an uncomfortable subject. Researching hate crime takes courage, and perhaps
consequently it is a neglected area of study. Yet addressing it requires understanding
the underlying causes. Talking to perpetrators is a delicate task requiring sensitivity
wrapped in a thick skin. Making sense of the motivations to cause suering to others
implicitly entails a recognition of victimhood. Therein lies the challenge, recognising
both the victim and the perpetrator simultaneously.
In their thought-provoking study of racism, based on research they did in the
early 2000s, which led to Losing the Race in 2011, David Gadd and his colleagues
do this with just the right balance of sympathy and incisiveness. Twenty years after
he conducted his research, the issues it highlights are as alive as ever. Condemning,
demonising, is the easier path rather than trying to understand, but ‘when we turn
racists into monsters, we allow ourselves to be deceived into believing that the problem
of violent racism has nothing to do with us’, say Gadd and his collaborators (2005;
Gadd and Dixon, 2011).
Pleas of ‘not guilty’ are twice as likely in the case of racially motivated crimes
than other oences (Gadd and Dixon, 2011). Shame is almost always a feature of
violent crime (for example, Gilligan, 1997). This makes it dicult to study, because
often perpetrators do not readily admit the thoughts and feelings that motivate their
actions (for example, Blumenthal et al, 2018). In the case of hate crime, this feature
is doubly so, as reected in this statistic. It is thus dicult enough to study violence,
but the greater degree of shame connected with hate crime means that perpetrators
are more determined to conceal their motivation.
This makes it all the more important to have the courage to stare into the abyss
of hatred, to expose oneself to the toxic forces that surround us, and of which the
crimes themselves are but the symptom. Turning away from the ugliness of racism
does not help to understand the forces that take humanity down this path. Odysseus
was determined to hear the songs of the Sirens as he passed the island of Ithaca, but
wished to avoid the fate of the sailors who threw themselves into the sea when they
heard their alluring voices. Consequently, he plugged the ears of his sailors with
beeswax and strapped himself to the mast of the ship. Try as he might, he could not
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Stephen Blumenthal
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follow the destiny of those unfortunate men who drowned themselves before him.
Listening to the testimonies of hate crime and racism is a Dark Mirror version of
Odysseus’ self-imposed ordeal. To do so with authenticity means opening our ears to
the disturbed underbelly of our community in order to diagnose the illness at its heart.
There has been substantial change in cultural attitudes in the last 20 years since
Gadd and colleagues conducted their research. Despite greater intolerance for racism,
xenophobia bubbles away beneath the surface, raising its ugly head with regularity. A
more empowered minority community draw attention to despicable attitudes openly
expressed. Each month that passes there are fresh revelations about the expression
of thoughts and feelings openly within our institutions, such as the police. Barely
concealed sinister attitudes permeate our society, given voice in microaggressions
as well as more overt expressions. In this volume, Ward (2024) draws attention to
the psychic constellations that can lead to the disappearance and consequently the
dehumanisation of the ‘other’, an essential step in the psychosocial construction of
virulent racism. One wonders what changes in attitude followed the Macpherson
Inquiry into the failed investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s death in 1999, which has
continued to plague the family, even now.
In our post-globalised world, there is greater division rather than less. Boundaries
between nations are stronger, protectionism is more signicant, the ‘other’ is more of
a threat than ever. Discord leads to war, conict displaces people, fuelling increased
friction and greater negative judgement on the basis of creed, culture, religious
identity and colour. These ruptures are not followed by repair, they are the stimulant
for ever more toxic ssures.
Within national boundaries, divisions are more intense than ever, as in the case
of our own Disunited Kingdom. According to the Home Oce, race and religious
hate crime increased by 41 per cent in the month following the vote to leave the
European Union (Home Oce, 2016).
I recently heard the spine-chilling story of an Asian taxi driver in Eltham, South
London, where Stephen Lawrence was murdered, who drove three young intoxicated
White men on a Friday night. About halfway through their journey, they asked him
to stop. They all got out of the car and, a few minutes later, they returned to continue
their journey. Asked what they were doing, they replied that they urinated in the bus
stop where Stephen died in a pool of blood over 30 years ago. Apparently, this is a
thing people do – to gloat, to mock his death. As hard as it is to comprehend, this is
said to be a known ritual in the area, the site a macabre shrine to White supremacy,
to hatred of the other.
There is horror which exists barely beneath the surface. What motivates such
extraordinary hatefulness? Gadd (2024) and the deeply personal accounts of Aiyegbusi
(2024), Keval (2024) and Ward (2024) in this volume are a signicant attempt to
answer this, and attest to the consequences of race hate.
Understanding hatred
In trying to comprehend such hatred, I nd Paul Gilbert’s biopsychosocial model
compelling. Broadly, human motivation can be oriented to competition, threat,
hierarchy, and up-ranking and downranking. In that world, you are either greater
than or less than. We also have a care motivation, an orientation to seek out loving,
safe attachments (Gilbert and Simos, 2022). We have an extraordinary capacity for
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From tragedy to tyranny
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evil and equally a hardwired motivation for care. Compassion is the antidote to the
inherent destructive potential of the threatened, survivalist mindset.
Competition and hierarchy are not negative in themselves, in fact it is vital to
recognise that they are an inevitable aspect of who we are. There is a vertical or
hierarchical dimension to human relations, and a horizontal one. But the origin of
human distress is exclusively derived from the competitive mindset. It is rooted in
social comparison. For Gilbert, hatred is always directed up the social hierarchy, never
downwards. Those higher in social status may express contempt for those lower down,
but they do not hate them. Hatred is based upon experiencing the self as less than,
and thus upon envy.
Race hatred is thus always from a position of weakness, of shame, and ultimately
of loss, as in all the cases David Gadd presents in his paper. Nigel, Stan and Frank are
impotence incarnate. Gadd (2024) outlines the need for a discourse that allows us
to engage with racism as connected to feelings of loss. How the loss of loved ones,
of social status, of opportunity, are the impetus for race hate. Freud’s (1917) paper,
‘Mourning and melancholia’, represents a milestone in recognising the problems that
arise as a result of the failure to mourn. A melancholic reaction is but one of a panoply
of responses which signify the obstacles to mourning. His insight that the symptom
in the present is a reminiscence of a traumatic event that has not been succumbed
was described eloquently in his Clark Lectures. The symptom, Freud (1910) said, is a
memory symbol representing a traumatic event that continues to linger. He described
a person suering with a neurotic illness as being like a busy Londoner who passes the
monument to the 1666 Great Fire of London and falls down weeping before its plinth,
unable to continue their journey. The memory from the distant past is ‘remembered’,
though not as an autobiographical memory, and they are strongly aected by it. Their
solution is an impractical one, as they are caught up in a past conict.
Acts of race hatred are similar to this. They signify a failure to mourn the trauma
of the past. As Keval (2024) describes in his accompanying paper, the aim of racist
ideology is ‘to obstruct mourning by its stubborn insistence on creating an atmosphere
of moral panic, arrogance, bullying and a hysterical quality in the reaction that can
easily provoke a wish to shut down our own capacity to think and interrogate its
hidden meanings’.
Racism thus replaces mourning. Instead of recalling their maltreatment and their
deprivation, the idiom of expression is action. Gadd’s (2024) description of Stan is
a case in point. He witnessed severe domestic violence by his mother’s boyfriend
on his mother, sexual violence by his father on his mother, and sexual abuse by his
babysitter. These memories were ‘buried’ but return in his violence on a Kosovan
man. The symptom, in this case his violence, signies the ‘return of the repressed’. It
is the terrible outcome when there is an obstacle to mourning.
Self-preservative versus sadistic violence
Violence starts life from a place of defensive self-preservation. It is mainly reactive to
a sense of threat, including social threat. Race crime is relational; it is communicative.
Gadd and his collaborators (2005; Gadd and Dixon, 2011; Gadd, 2024) consider how
this sense of weakness in the perpetrator is projected into the victims of race hate.
The unstable psychological state of the perpetrator is governed by primitive defences,
such as splitting and projective identication. These atavistic modes of defending the
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fragile, yet-to-be-formed psyche are associated with the paranoid-schizoid position,
as described by Melanie Klein (1975), which she distinguished from the depressive
position, which represents a later stage of psychological development, a stage when
mourning has successfully taken place. In the depressive position, there is an integration
of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements, such as the (depressive) realisation that the person who
gives is also the person who withholds.
In this disturbed, paranoid-schizoid state of mind, which is impulsively driven and
highly reactive, the victim of race hatred must experience via projective identication
the sense of un-safety, of threat, disowned by the perpetrator. In this regard, Anna
Freud (1936) coined the term identication with the aggressor. The perpetrator, who
was once a victim, needs to rid themselves of all feelings of vulnerability associated
with victimhood by identifying with the perpetrator and thereby disowning their
experience of being on the receiving end of abuse, neglect and maltreatment.
The most basic human need is to feel safe, and this is what is denied to the victim
of race hate. From the microaggression to the outright attack, the message is that you
are hated for the most impersonal of reasons; because of the colour of your skin, your
identity, the group to which you belong. You are not hated and attacked because of
your own self; you are violated because you are part of a category of things. This aspect
is so prevalent in a world of identity politics, which has made our group identity so
prominent. We are increasingly considered a collection of labels.
But violence begets violence. The violence threat manifests has a habit of spiralling
beyond self-preservation towards a more gratuitous form of aggression. The actions of
those three young men in the taxi is not just an act of othering, it is vindictive. Pleasure
is obtained through the humiliation of the other and it is endemic in our culture.
We like to think of ourselves as being dierent to the person who turns a blind
eye to such heinous actions, as standing up for what is right. We convince ourselves
that if we lived in Nazi Germany, we would have been a Schindler. But the incidence
of people who stood against tyranny are the tiniest, most minuscule proportion of
the population.
The Milgram experiment (Milgram, 1963) shows the careless cruelty that arises
when we don’t stand up to tyranny. The vast majority of the participants in that study
administered lethal shocks to a confederate in the research when instructed to do so
by an authority in a white coat who indicated to the participant that he would take
responsibility for any adverse outcomes. Milgram has been criticised for exaggerating his
results, but most replications of the experiment have established similar ndings. The world
we inhabit attests to the validity of the experiment – hostile othering statements by those
in power assume responsibility for the consequences and have far-reaching implications
in legitimating xenophobia, as highlighted by Keval (2024) in his accompanying paper.
The Stanford prison experiment (Haney et al, 1973) is a further illustration of the
dangerous infectiousness of tyranny. The researchers had to stop the study because of
the cruelty of the people assigned to be prison guards and the passive acquiescence
of those assigned to be inmates.
Gadd’s proposal to try to understand the processes at work in racially motivated
crime begins with recognising the sense of threat experienced by disenfranchised
communities. Culture, politics, economics, shape the mindset and consequently the
actions of the perpetrators.
The problem of violence goes deeper than this, to the gratuitous ‘enjoyment’ of
hatred. Mervyn Glasser (1996) distinguishes between self-preservative and sadistic
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From tragedy to tyranny
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violence. Violence is potentially more than eliminating a threat. Neuroscience nds
that if you electrically stimulate that neural pathway associated with self-preservative
aggression, the animal will attack whatever is in front of it and will experience the
stimulation as unpleasant and wish to escape (Panksepp and Biven, 2012).
However, there is another circuit connected with predation, predatory aggression.
In this case, the animal appears to enjoy the stimulation, evidenced by the fact that
they will self-stimulate by pressing the lever to elicit electrical stimulation entirely
voluntarily (Panksepp and Biven, 2012).
Using an implicit associative method, we studied dierent groups of men who had
committed violent oences and obtained parallel ndings (Blumenthal et al, 2018). The
implicit association method overcomes the problem of asking explicit questions as to
whether a particular individual ‘enjoys’ violence. Study participants typically answer in
a socially desirable manner to avoid negative evaluation. In a particular group of highly
antisocial violent perpetrators there was a strongly signicant correlation between implicit,
as opposed to explicit, violent thinking and enjoyment. The more antisocial a particular
individual, as measured by the number of oences for which they were convicted, the
more they associated violence with enjoyment, a result they could not ‘fake’.
Gratuitous race hate
The autobiographical book Out of the Depths, by Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, tells the story
of the extraordinary journey of the man who was to become chief rabbi of Israel. He
began life in an Eastern European village, where his father was a well-known rabbi.
When Lau was aged ve, the Nazis obliterated the Jewish population, along with
Lau’s family, with the exception of Lau and his brother. Upon separation his parents
instructed his older brother that he had to do everything in his power to ensure Lau’s
survival. They said he was destined to continue the legacy of there being a rabbi in
every generation of the family going back over 1,000 years.
By some miracle, Lau and his brother survived extermination. In one moving
passage he describes their arrival at Buchenwald:
They rushed us o the train car at the camp’s iron gate, which bore the
German words ‘Jedem das Seine’. To the Germans, this meant ‘Each man
to his fate’. This made a deep impression on me, and I continue to carry it
with me to this day. Sometimes I think about it, and about the cruelty and
cynicism contained within those three words. What a horrible destiny awaited
people in that accursed place, where others tried, however they could, to
rob the victims of their humanity. So much isolation lay in that sentence,
and so much irony, for not one person who entered the gate of Buchenwald
held his life in his own hands. The Nazis, the camp commandants, and their
soldiers had unlimited control over us. (Lau, 2005: 52)
Better known are the words ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (work will set you free), on the gates
of Auschwitz. It is not enough to kill the people you hate. It is necessary to laugh,
mock, shame and humiliate your victims.
The term ‘evil’ is passé in an age of science, consigned to religious language.
While it is necessary to explain things using a systematic methodology that leads to
understanding, I believe that there is need for a discourse to describe the extreme end
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of violence and hatred. Surely this is it, and it is everywhere around us, proliferating
more than ever in our world today. It is something that we are all capable of in
the perfect storm of conditions in which the tyrannical superego in the form of
an ideology, a culture and a corrupting leadership allows the worst excesses of our
instincts to destroy other people free, unmitigated reign.
Conclusions
At every level, what is needed is understanding, as David Gadd eloquently describes.
Robust democratic institutions to contain our baser instincts in a period of instability
and de-globalisation. We should heed the naivety of the democrats in Germany, who
failed to understand that extremists use democratic processes, but don’t play by the
same rules.
Ominously, this is happening presently. The proliferation of disinformation enables
the protectionist, fear-mongering building of walls. Populist leaders feast upon people’s
fears, just like disenfranchised, marginalised Nigel, who experiences Nick Grin as
his saviour. They provide the cover for the most ominous of bad actors to emerge,
which provide the fertile ground for hatred.
I think of identity as either being motivated by a siege mentality, or an armative
one (Blumenthal, 2022). When a group dene themselves through threat, this leads
to an anxious attachment to one another in which the bonds are precarious and
require the presence of an outside threat to sustain them. Equally, an attachment to a
common set of ideas, which is rooted in security, enables tolerance among members
of the group, more permeable boundaries and acceptance of outsiders.
Understanding requires a compassionate mindset. This requires the kind of careful,
open listening described by Gadd and his colleagues (2005; Gadd and Dixon, 2011;
Gadd, 2024). This stands apart from some of the criminal justice programmes one hears
about in prison and in the community, which attempt to alter the way perpetrators
think, as if by tinkering with their cognitive processes you can adjust a mindset.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1975) observed that with the decline
of marking the body in the criminal justice system, the focus shifted to marking the
mind and the will. With this change, he says, ‘psychologists and minor civil servants
of moral orthopaedics proliferated on the wound it left’.
Gadd encourages us to go well beyond being moral orthopods and into a dark,
awful, horric world inhabited by shame, hatred and sadism to really try to listen,
attend, be present to the motivations which drive the evil of the human impetus
towards inhumanity.
Funding
The author received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Conict of interest
The author declares that there is no conict of interest.
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