Confederate Monuments and Self-Image

Confederate statue pedestal, red paint

Source: Baltimore Heritage/used with permission

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), more than 2,000 Confederate memorials still stand in public spaces across the United States. The controversies around monument removal are not only a political and social issue but also a mental health concern for several reasons.

Internalized Oppression

According to Jalaya Liles-Dunn, director of Learning for Justice at the SPLC, “Internalized oppression is triggered when images and monuments and names represent generations of community hurt and pain.” What whites glorify in the Confederacy is racism and Black suffering in the eyes of many African-Americans. It's important for whites to try to imagine how these symbols affect people of color from within their experience and point of view.

When a minority group is the target of prejudice, individuals within that group internalize disparaging perceptions of themselves. They take in derogatory images and make them part of their self-image. For example, a person of color may internalize the idea—from a Hollywood movie or a Confederate statue—that they are only fit for menial jobs or servitude and are intrinsically worth less than others.

Psychoanalyst Dorothy Holmes reminds us, “Blacks have been socially constructed to be of little worth from the time of slavery, through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow practices, and now the mass incarceration of Blacks and Police brutality.” These monuments undermine Black self-esteem and reinforce white supremacy.

Internalized oppression can create division in a minority community also, decreasing collective power and action. This is so, for example, when a light-skinned African-American looks down on darker-skinned Black people. Victims of oppression tend to identify with the oppressor, internalizing their values, ideals, and worldviews—often without knowing it, says Wei-Chin Hwang, professor of psychological science.

Internalized oppression affects many groups including Native Americans, women, the poor and working-class, immigrants, and people who identify as LGBTQ. Yet, the descendants of slaves constitute the largest minority of our country and the one most widely discriminated against. Internalized oppression is one way that both the majority and the minority contribute to racial inequality and the suffering that ensues.

Scotomization

Some people argue that Confederate statues represent history and not hate. Yet, how can we consider our country’s history without reflecting on the institution of slavery and its legacy of racism in various forms—internalized, interpersonal, and structural? A main source of a minority’s suffering lies in such distortions of perception.

The word "scotoma" is usually associated with vision referring to a blind spot in the eye. Yet there is a psychological equivalent: a mental blind spot in the way one sees reality. When information provides a painful truth, one turns a "blind eye" to it as a strategy of self-protection—to defend against an unpleasant reality, such as guilt or despair, that is threatening to one’s sense of self. What results is a kind of negative hallucination or the nonperception of an aspect of external reality.

Most large groups are divided into minority and majority factions, whether this is obviously manifest (as in South African apartheid) or is more hidden. The majority often refuses to “see” the experience of minority people. Salman Akhtar claims, “In terms of being perceived by the majority, the minority feels both the anguish of invisibility and the torment of hyper-visibility.” Blacks feel invisible in certain parts of their existence, as in their shared history, and hypervisible in others, as in racial profiling.

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Stereotyping

Prejudicial beliefs about a group of people are perpetuated through stereotypes. Stereotypes are generalized beliefs about a category and their members. They are often automatic, unexamined, and unconscious. Stereotypes reinforce and contribute to internalized oppression and its harmful effects.

Such biased beliefs have contributed to police violence against African-Americans when police officers misidentify benign objects as weapons in connection to Blacks. Incorrect perceptions may lead an officer to mistake a wallet or toy for a gun. Decisions to shoot are often rooted in the unconscious activation of stereotypes that link Black men to danger. No wonder that safety is the most basic requirement for normal psychic functioning of a minority person. Holmes describes how common it is for Blacks to live in a constant state of wariness, a vigilance necessary for self-protection.

A stereotyped understanding of another person mobilizes psychological defenses against complexity of thought. The individuality of a person is erased, and they are seen only as part of a group. When societies regress, stereotyping of minorities is the first phase in the dehumanization process. A regressive spiral blurs reality in gradual stages: The "other" is perceived as a stereotype containing a reservoir of negative character traits; perceptually, they become a lower class of human, and finally a creature altogether subhuman. The Hutu demonized the Tutsi by transforming them into vermin through the disturbing invective "cafar" or "cockroach."

Confederate monuments have been central to downtown squares, cemeteries, and university campuses. At age 15, Charlottesville native Zyahna Bryant drafted a petition for the removal of the equestrian statue of General Robert E. Lee in former Lee Park, because when she contemplated the statue she felt unwelcome in that public space. It sent a clear signal about who the space was for, and who is an exile.

It is easy to develop a psychological equivalent of geographic restrictions: limitations on how ambitious one should be, for instance, and anxiety about expressing aspirations. One internalizes the injunction: Only aim so high. As Holmes describes it, “The effects of racism and classism on the human psyche are akin to those of trauma in that they cause interferences to ego functioning, including strivings for and maintenance of success.” She describes "success neurosis," a condition in which one limits one’s own ambitions and self-actualization out of fear and guilt.

Confederate monuments help us see certain psychodynamics in a racist society. Other changes surely need to be made: Protect the Black vote, reform health care and public safety, and close the wealth gap. Yet symbols matter. These artifacts shape cultural narratives and habits of thought. In the words of historian Jemar Tisby, “They craft the contours of the social imagination.”