When Moral Bells Don’t Ring: Dehumanization, Disgust, and Spectacle Lynching

I investigate the lynching of African Americans (particularly the most spectacular and repulsive examples, involving prolonged torture, cheering crowds, etc.) and argue that both structural and psychological approaches are needed to understand the savage behavior involved. While distal (economic, cultural) causes may lead to political and social competition and/or racist ideologies (as sociologists and historians have maintained), demeaning associations (especially bestial hypersexuality) routinely attached to African Americans elicited the emotion of disgust at the proximate, psychological level. While other groups suffered prejudice, segregation, and lynching, the almost exclusive victims of the extreme “spectacle” lynchings described above were African American men. Demeaning associations and disgust are not limited to this example, and need to be considered in other cases of violence toward out-groups and hate crimes generally. This approach reflects recent attempts to take emotions more seriously within social scientific explanations of behavior. It should also expand existing attempts at intervention, as dealing with individual emotions elicited by dehumanizing associations need to be part of the plan.