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Like us, you may feel paralyzed in the face of the relentless images of violence we see every day. Suffering children, military occupations, the devastated neighborhoods, the cries of parents mourning their dead—these scenes haunt us. Whether it is happening in Palestine or Minneapolis, we are witnesses to suffering, and that witnessing takes a heavy toll.
Clearly, the devastating situations in the West Bank and Gaza and in Minneapolis differ on many grounds, not least of which is the absolute number of people killed and injured, and yet one can see psychological and systemic similarities between them. Though many Americans have participated in protests against both the genocide in Gaza and aggression by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis and other cities, perhaps a more common response is to helplessly look on in horror.
As scholars—one an anthropologist studying state-sanctioned violence, the other a political psychologist examining how blame shapes emotion—we understand why we collectively fail to respond to such extreme suffering. Those who commit atrocities need one thing above all: others’ paralysis. Research in our fields shows they don’t just hope for it—they manufacture it.
Normalization of Violence Toward Expendable Populations
Anthropological research has shown how our instinct to look away but also gawk at violent acts is often manipulated by political actors to render us both complicit and helpless. Whether it is looking at “bloody deeds” in the Guatemalan genocide, the ruins of Palestine, or Operation Metro Surge by ICE in Minnesota, anthropologists have traced the ways in which we come to accept violence as a “natural” fact. In his study of Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman showed how politically produced death, particularly in the form of dead bodies, can strengthen the power of those who commit violence while shaping the behavior of onlookers. The more we see violence, the more it becomes normalized, and the more it engages us in just looking.
A critical question for us is what makes us accept that certain lives are less worthy (or wholly unworthy) of safeguarding or that their deaths require no public outcry. Philosopher Achille Mbembe uses the concept of necropolitics to point to political situations where some lives are rendered expendable long before they are taken. Their deaths provoke no moral shock because they were already, in a sense, “dead” to us. Dead bodies, particularly when they pile up in large numbers, are no longer just bodies; they are political performance.
More than two years into Israel’s siege of Gaza, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 20,000 children. In spite of a ceasefire agreement, Palestinians are still being killed on a regular basis. We look away from civilians bombed or starved to death instead of being moved to oppose such acts. Worse, some find the deaths of Palestinian children a source of derision or even humor.
In contrast, the 32 individuals who died or were killed in ICE custody in 2025, along with at least 6 so far this year, represent violence on a smaller scale and with different victims and actors. While protests in cities where ICE is operating have been commonplace, public outrage significantly increased after a second white American citizen was killed. This aligns with work by scholar Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien, which has shown how the criminalization of undocumented immigrants created a category of expendable individuals for some Americans, one that does not generally include white citizens.
The Social Psychology of Dehumanization
Several decades ago, prominent social psychologist Herbert Kelman identified the conditions that enable what he termed “sanctioned massacres.” He defined such actions as “indiscriminate, ruthless, and often systematic mass violence, carried out by military or paramilitary personnel while engaged in officially sanctioned campaigns, and directed at defenseless and unresisting civilians, including old men, women, and children (p. 283).” Israel’s actions in Gaza arguably match this definition, unless one accepts the Israeli government’s position that “there are no innocent Palestinians.”
Importantly, Kelman maintained that dehumanization of the victims is a critical element of sanctioned massacres. When we cease to think of a particular category of people as human, we are free to attribute all blame to them. We can see a similar process of demonization play out in the U.S. today through the increased labeling of those who have been killed by ICE as “criminals,” “AWFUL,” “domestic terrorists,” or “assassins” without any accompanying evidence. The psychological impact of this framing is significant.
This process of dehumanization is not a theoretical construct but a lived reality. The more a group is targeted with violence and dispossession, the less human they appear to others. The worse they look from being brutalized, the less we feel compelled to stop the brutality. The combination of demonization and brutalization is liable to provoke disgust rather than sympathy in observers.
Blameworthy Victims
In the necropolitical play of making dead bodies acceptable, redeploying blame is necessary. Social psychology tells us that when people are blamed for their own suffering, we are less likely to sympathize with them and tend not to offer help. Studies show that dehumanized individuals are often seen as more responsible for their own suffering. This cultural shift in perception makes it easier for political leaders and their supporters to justify the atrocities committed against them.
When an act of aggression is portrayed as self-defense—as the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota were—the public has historically been more likely to blame the target of aggression rather than the aggressor. When victims are blamed, it is easier for perpetrators justify their actions and for bystanders to remain passive.
In the mechanics of colonial dehumanization, people are not killed for what they’ve done—they’re killed for who they are. This is the heart of necropolitics: the use of state-sanctioned violence to erase a people not only physically, but also politically and morally
This paralysis many of us feel, then, and our seeming inability to act in the face of mass death, should not be viewed as an accident but rather something that has been engineered through dehumanization, blame redistribution, and the normalization of violence. The atrocity depends on our remaining frozen, unable to move from witness to actor.
To break this paralysis, we must look directly at the violence and name it for what it is. Only then can we refuse the passive role that perpetrators designed for us and reclaim the capacity to respond with our full humanity intact.
