Who is it okay to punch?

A popular contemporary meme involves the social acceptability of “punching Nazis.” This phenomenon raises the question: what characteristics make a group or member of a group more or less “punch-able”? More broadly, what group attributes yield support for physical violence against them? In this study, we build on the extant psychology literature on intergroup processes to look at what leads individuals to find physical violence against a group acceptable, and if the factors that lead to such acceptance differ from those that lead to sheer affective intolerance. We use two experimental tasks to test expectations built on prominent theories. In a “real-world rating task,” participants evaluated a series of real-world groups and individuals with varying characteristics such as race, ideology, intelligence, warmth, and tendency toward violence. Also, in a conjoint experiment, participants chose between two groups in terms of which they would support being punched, as various attributes were manipulated such as race, expressed ideological values, partisanship, income, tendency toward violence, and being described as disgusting or threatening. We find consistent support for effects of political alignment (particularly, expressed ideological values related to dominance) and perceived tendency toward violence, as well as mixed findings for race and several other factors. These findings synthesize theories on intergroup conflict with contemporary findings on affective polarization.

Transmedia Storytelling in Advertising

Otherization has been executed in both Orientalism and Occidentalism for a long time. People have always been expected to choose either side in a binary opposition such as “mother or father,” “male or female,” “destiny or coincidence,” “pasta or pizza,” “Fenerbahce or Galatasaray,” etc. However, the human itself is the balance of those binary oppositions such as “good and bad,” “normal and abnormal,” “optimistic and pessimistic,” etc. In this respect, this chapter offered a new term, “medientalism,” indicating advertizing as a possible alternative medium to mediate between otherized opposites such as gender, race, ideology, lifestyle, religion within the fame of the opposition between Orientalism and Occidentalism. As a result, transmedia storytelling, a persuasive multiplatform strategy to reach the audience by telling stories, was suggested as a functional tool to employ in spreading the idea of mediation between otherized opposites.

Experiment Human – On early concentration camp testimony

The atrocities that the prisoners in the concentration and extermination camps actually suffered in the 20th century can hardly be understood by outsiders like us today, especially if one takes a closer look at the experiences of the survivors, who offer cruel testimony on the human beast. This is also the case with the concentration camp testimonies in Daniel Krochmalnik’s contribution, which tell of the deadly experiments of the so-called ›Overman‹ and how he, inspired by the National Socialist master-race ideology, assumed an almost divine mission to exterminate everything human in his victims, so that death often seemed to be the only salvation. In view of such descriptions, which pervade the entire concentration camp literature, one inevitably has to ask oneself, as the author does, about the human condition and whether one can still place hope in people after all this – because the shocking experiences of the homo carceris in the concentration camps and gulags of the last century fundamentally shake the self-understanding of the human as a moral being, who can in fact transform into an angry beast at any time, especially under the influence of totalitarian systems of thought and rule as that Chapter »Homo homini lupus« shows. Nevertheless, in the end the author does not want to give up all hope in ›humanistic moral resources‹, even if the very existence of the »camp man« seems to contradict this.

Racism’s Back Door: A Mixed-Methods Content Analysis of Transformative Sketch Comedy in the US from 1960-2000

Comedy that challenges race ideology is transformative, widely available, and has the potential to affect processes of identity formation and weaken hegemonic continuity and dominance. Outside of the rules and constraints of serious discourse and cultural production, these comedic corrections thrive on discursive and semiotic ambiguity and temporality. Comedic corrections offer alternate interpretations overlooked or silenced by hegemonic structures and operating modes of cultural common sense. The view that their effects are ephemeral and insignificant is an incomplete and misguided evaluation. Since this paper adopts Hegel’s understanding of comedy as the spirit (Geist) made material, its very constitution, and thus its power, resides in exposing the internal thought processes often left unexamined, bringing them into the foreground, dissecting them, and exposing them for ridicule and transformation. In essence, the work of comedy is to consider all points of human processing and related structuration as fair game. The phenomenological nature of comedy calls for a micro-level examination. Select examples from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968), The Richard Pryor Show (1977), Saturday Night Live (1990), and Chappelle’s Show (2003) will demonstrate representative ways that comedy attacks and transforms racial hegemony.

Exorcising “Racecraft”: Toward the RaceSyllabus

This paper, based on my experiences teaching Africana Studies at a Northeastern public university, argues that anti-racist pedagogy must include a RaceSyllabus which reveals to diverse students the artificiality of race as a man-made ideology, neither biologically rooted nor divinely-inspired. Barbara Jean Fields and Karen Fields use the term racecraft to describe how race ideology persists as a subterranean, almost occult force in American institutions and minds. In my teaching I have developed a syllabus which propels students into a novel mental terrain where the racial categories we inherit and inhabit are neither inevitable or natural, but instead are created and re-created by our national economic, political, social, and cultural choices. The RaceSyllabus includes two interrelated learning objectives which, together, propel students to see outside our society’s race-tinted lenses. 1. Students should consider that racial identities in the United States are historically specific. 2. Students should consider that racial identities are geographically specific. These two insights, when taught together, are remarkably effective in exposing the artificiality of our national racial myths.

‘It Gives Us a Power and Strength which We Do Not Possess’: Martiality, manliness, and India's Great War enlistment drive

This article studies the extraordinarily broad advocacy of military enlistment by India's political and intellectual elites during the First World War. Though often interpreted as politically motivated, it shows above all a preoccupation with the enlivening effects of military experience—in particular its development of courage and manliness. In this it followed an established pattern of Indian elite concern with martiality. It also reflected anxieties of Indian weakness and effeminacy—something elites indicted themselves for, but which, importantly, they assumed to be more generally prevalent. Sampling calls for enlistment in the public space throughout the war, the article focuses on Bombay Presidency—a region that gave rise to such prominent Indian voices for enlistment as M. K. Gandhi, B. G. Tilak, and M. A. Jinnah. Bombay's recent experience of relative exclusion from military recruitment, and from membership of the ‘martial races’, was representative of much of India. This article enables us to view the effects of such ‘demartialization’ away from the classic case of Bengal. It suggests that it helped to inspire the call to enlist, especially as public spokesmen for the ‘martial race’ ideology explicitly linked martiality with manliness. The concern for enlistment ultimately superseded political calculation even for so hard-nosed a politician as Tilak. And though elites were most obviously concerned for their own martial vigour and leadership, they were also concerned with the manliness of the bulk of India's population, especially in Gandhi's conception of war as a preparation forsatyagraha.