Abstract
Living in a multicultural society like the United States leads to sampling a range of experiences that vary from being extremely delightful to excessively stressful, with many types of experiences in between. I present cases of positive experiences of immigrants that provide positive feelings of freedom, equality, fairness and due process. I also discuss negative experiences of minorities that vary from having their names mispronounced and their accent criticized to outright racial discrimination and hate crimes. How should the individuals navigate through this minefield of humiliating experiences? I present four theoretically meaningful strategies — Learning to Make Isomorphic Attributions, Learning to Extract Help from the System, Developing a Shared Network, and Using the Acculturating Strategy of Integration — that are derived from cross-cultural research that may help a society’s minority members to maintain human dignity in a multicultural society without feeling excessively cynical. I conclude the paper with a suggestion that, perhaps, we need to use our spiritual strength in dealing with humiliating situations and that forgiveness is the ultimate ointment, which allows us to heal from the wounds of humiliation.
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Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Meeting on Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, September 16–18, 2004, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, France. I would like to thank Smriti Anand and Manoj Chatlani with their help with this research. I would like to thank Randolph Sykes, Vijayan P. Munusamy, Keith Sakuda, Harry Triandis, Dan Landis, Evelin Lindner, Linda Hartling, Susan Mrazek and Ken Cushner for their constructive comments and help. I would like to express my gratitude to my brother Om P. Sharma and Professor David Bess for standing by me in good and bad times, giving me the strength, and showing me the way to deal with many life issues that are presented in this paper. I would also like to thank Merritt Sakata, Roger Epstein, Elizabeth Reveley, the Hawai’i Forgiveness Project, and Sei-Cho-No-Ie community in Hawai’i for being my support group on the path of forgiveness. I owe special gratitude to my spiritual mentor, Mrs. Hanako Kume, for teaching me the art of forgiveness through her own example of living a life of gratefulness everyday. I dedicate this paper to her.
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Bhawuk, D.P.S. Humiliation and human rights in diverse societies: Forgiveness and other solutions from cross-cultural research. Psychol Stud 55, 35–45 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-010-0004-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-010-0004-7