ABSTRACT
The purpose of this essay is to take consequence of intersectional paradigms and to reflect on what this can mean for racism research. Drawing from interpretative ambiguities of an everyday offensive interaction involving race, gender, and age, the question is posed: can there be an effective frame of critical thinking inclusive of but also beyond racism? Thus follows an exploration of concepts inherent to the reproduction of all forms of oppression: humiliation and dehumanization. These are applied to the contemporary problem of entitlement racism, where actors claim to the right to offend others racially in the name of freedom of expression. Subsequent redefining of racism in terms of humiliations and the universal creation of hierarchies of (human) worthiness allows for the notion of dignity hurt to emerge as shared experience across multiple manifestations of oppression/domination. If dignity is truly a universal need and desire, people can potentially unite across traditional divides in the pursuit of cultures of dignity as a mode of thinking about sustainable communities and worlds.
