Adelaide Gleason is a member of the Liminality and Contemporary Issues seminar in the Honors College of the University of Missouri.
We live our lives in boxes, constantly in opposition of the Other. The boxes tell us who we are, what we can be, and what groups we belong to. They help us make sense of our world and ourselves, but they also pit us against one another. We put each other in boxes with labels, and then those boxes are used to form a hierarchy, to tell Others that they are lesser-than. This happens throughout almost every part of life: the “popular” kids and the “losers,” those with degrees and those without, upper-class and lower-class, and most prominently, minorities versus non-minorities.
This is the case of race in the United States. Historically, white people have formed the boxes, labeled Black people as beneath them, then used those socially-constructed boxes as an excuse to commit atrocious crimes against an entire race. This wasn’t by chance, by “luck-of-the-draw” birth circumstances; it was a systemic, ongoing, and calculated effort to place one race at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Black people were enslaved, worked to death, and brutally murdered all because white people saw them as “lesser.” It is power which brings out the
evil of humanity.
How can one person do this to another? How can a person go on living, unfazed,
knowing the vicious, barbaric things they have committed against others? In truth, it comes back to the boxes; so long as one person truly believes that they are better than the other, that they are doing humankind a favor by eliminating the Other, they, presumably, can live with the unspeakable things they have done. This is the basis for mass genocide, mass killings, mass death. There’s a degree of horror in realizing that the people who commit terrible crimes often don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong at all.
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