Theorizing cumulative dehumanization: An embodied praxis of “becoming” and resisting state‐sanctioned violence

Abstract

This paper introduces a new conceptual framework referred to as “cumulative dehumanization” to better understand the ways in which dehumanization penetrates individual and collective bodies and minds, cutting across policy and ideology and accumulating materially and affectively over time and space. Cumulative dehumanization illuminates a web of vertical and horizontal, synthetic, and dynamic processes that result in an ongoing racialized, state‐sanctioned dehumanization that is fundamentally cumulative—both temporally and spatially—with a profusion of consequences attached. Within the landscape of aggressive surveillance and policing, we illuminate how cumulative dehumanization can be conceptualized as (i) an active condition of becoming, experienced as an accumulation of dehumanizing moments, structurally imposed on racialized communities under siege; (ii) a wearing down of the racialized and affective body, creating circuits of dispossession for entire communities; (iii) a product and (re)producer of the material and ideological modes undergirding racial capitalism; and (iv) a force met with individual and collective resistance. Linking literature on racial capitalism and affect, to the embodied social psychological phenomenon of dehumanization, cumulative dehumanization serves as a useful conceptual tool to examine the historical legacy of, processes embedded within, and entirety of collective consequences including resistance as inextricably linked. In doing so, we reveal the indivisibility of cognitive, embodied, psychological, social, material, ideological, and political circuits.

The Role of the Physical and Social Environment in Observed and Self-Reported Park Use in Low-Income Neighborhoods in New York City

“…Therefore, in neighborhoods with high stop-and-frisk rates, the sociopolitical access to parks may be limited and should be further explored in prospectively designed studies. The significant stopand-frisk finding can also be supported by studies in procedural and social justice: police harassment hinders low-income people of color's social access to public spaces (39,40). The literature warns that the consequences of such policing practices on a neighborhood's social fabric go well beyond constraining use of public spaces; such practices can make communities of color feel dehumanized and excluded socially and spatially (39,40,64).…”

“…Elsewhere, limited research has shown that collective efficacy may be positively associated with park use (38). Lastly, order maintenance policing measures such as Terry stops or stop-and-frisk (stops on grounds of "reasonable suspicion, " at the discretion of police officers) are known to impact the use of public spaces in low-income neighborhoods (39,40) but have not been examined in relation to park use.…”

The Story of Aya: Penaealogy, Black Women's Kinship, and the Carceral State

“…Conceptually it grows from Black feminist criminological traditions, what Hillary Potter frames as "intersectional criminology" (2015). It echoes the somatic geographies of embodied carcerality, liminal sites of diffuse connectedness (Moran 2013) and the potential "cumulative dehumanization" that happens from embodied violence (Bustamante, Jashnani, and Stoudt 2019). It engages with the overlay of kinship and prison, which Manuela da Cunha (2008) argues creates hypertotal institutions.…”

The Social Construction of the Misdemeanor Profile: Racialized Policing and Institutional Court Practices

“…It is no secret that welfare reform tightened labor markets in poor neighborhoods. Even the section on the sociological work on dehumanization in Misdemeanorland , which I applaud, could acknowledge the deeply rooted structural and institutional nature of dehumanization in policing practices, specifically broken windows policing (see Bustamante, Jashnani, and Stoudt ). Last, I would also suggest that the sociological analysis ought to provide a more forceful critique of white supremacy as a core driver of the overarrest and criminalization of black and brown bodies.…”