It Be Your Own People Sometimes

Humiliation Culture Within the Black Community

“It be your own people.”

A phrase we throw around when we witness something disheartening, something that cuts just a little deeper because of who it came from. We may say it half-jokingly, half-jadedly or maybe we even say it to deflect. But what if it wasn’t just a passing joke? What if it was alluding to a truth that we’re too afraid to confront?

What if we are sometimes our own biggest problem?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how humiliation functions within Black communities, not just as occasional pettiness or shade, but as an embedded cultural pattern, a ritual. There is an alarming tendency within our community for us to mock and humiliate one another. Whether through "naming and shaming", ridicule masked as commentary, or social media dogpiling, the question isn’t just why this keeps happening, but more so what it says about us, our pain, and the systems we’ve internalised to be the ones perpetuating such hate against our own.

For many of us the humiliation starts at home. Many of us grew up in environments where ridicule was normalised. Older cousins, aunties, and even our parents would call us names, mock our features, and shame our bodies, and when we pushed back, we were told we were “too sensitive” or “couldn’t take a joke”. Humiliated by our own family, people who claimed to love us but loved to shame us just a little bit more. And I hate to say it, but some of you are slowly becoming the aunties you claim to hate and swore you’d never be. Attacking and commenting on other people's appearances all while forgetting the wounds you’re still carrying from when it happened to you.

Now, we don’t just take part in this culture of humiliation; we sustain it and we reward it. And perhaps most troubling of all, we rarely question it. It's not just common; it's habitual.

The rituals of ridicule have become too routine, too accepted, and it's time we start asking why.

Modern Day Rituals of Shame

Let’s look at some recent examples that illustrate this culture in real time. One involves Jonelle Awomoyi, a journalist whose TikTok video posted by the BBC went viral, not for the content of her reporting, but because of her hair. Comment after comment poured in, largely from other Black users, Black women in fact, mocking her appearance and blaming either her or the BBC for allowing her to go on screen "looking like that”. A collective ritual of shaming, dressed up as fake concern. Jonelle responded with elegance, posting a series of pictures captioned “the leave out” with the hashtag “#badhairday”. She even made a video calmly calling out those who ridiculed her to silence the trolls. But my question is why did she even have to?

Across the Atlantic, a similar situation occurred with Cordilia James, a Wall Street Journal reporting assistant. People attacked her online, again, over her hair. Her wig, to be exact. And again, the backlash wasn’t just from strangers; it was from her own. Vicious, unnecessary, and again, rooted in humiliation. It was another public humiliation ritual, one rooted in respectability politics, misogynoir, and internalised hate.

Not convinced yet?

Turn on any reality show and and you’ll see it. From Love & Hip Hop, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Baddies, to those YouTube dating shows (Smash or Pass or Pop the Balloon), it’s always the same setup. Black people, especially Black women, are pitted against each other. Loud arguments. Public breakdowns. Deep betrayals. Body shaming. Colourist comments. Misogyny dressed as banter. Black women are cast to play out roles that feed into centuries-old tropes: loud, angry, hypersexual, and violent. Conflict is curated, and humiliation has become a currency of performance. It’s not just encouraged; it’s incentivised. These shows don’t just reflect stereotypes; they magnify and monetise them, willingly engaging in these rituals for clout, likes, and engagement, but often at the cost of each other’s dignity. All wrapped up and sold as “entertainment”.

And let’s not pretend that we’re passive consumers; we eat it up. We watch the deliberate dismantling of the Black community for entertainment. To me, all these forms of “entertainment” are just televised humiliation rituals that we are too blind to see, and yet we publicly, gleefully, and repeatedly choose to engage with it.

Everything Goes Back To Slavery

We can’t talk about this without naming where it comes from. Humiliation as a control tactic has been used on Black bodies for centuries, through slavery, colonisation, and segregation. Humiliation rituals have always been used to police, control, and punish Black people. During slavery, they were designed to strip us of dignity and identity. Public whippings, being paraded, verbally degraded, and separated from families, all of it was about domination. That trauma didn’t just disappear. It mutated. And now we pass it down to each other in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Black communities across the diaspora are deeply shaped by historical trauma, colonial violence, and systemic racism. But one of the most damaging inheritances from these systems is how we begin to replicate their behaviours amongst ourselves.

As Dr Joy DeGruy explains in her work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), the trauma inflicted on enslaved peoples didn’t end with emancipation. The need to survive often meant adopting behaviours that aligned with the dominant culture, including the regulation of one another through shame. The sociocultural and psychological wounds of slavery have been passed down generationally and we see it in our parenting, our relationships, our humour, our defence mechanisms. And we’ve turned it inward, onto each other, our inherited pain now weaponised in our everyday lives.

When this humiliation becomes normalised, it leaks into real life. Humiliation then becomes a tool not just of control from the outside world but of social policing within, to shame and ridicule one another. And when we’re mocked by our own, it just gives the rest of society the green light to do the same, without consequence.

We Can’t Heal What We Keep Harming

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute.

If a white TikToker made a video mocking a Black woman’s hair, would we laugh the same way?

So why are we so silent when the harm comes from inside the community but vocal when it comes from outside? Especially when the harm from within our communities seems to be doing more damage than good.

We as Black people keep getting in the way of our progress, and we will continue to do so if we keep on taking one step forward and three steps back. Reenacting the harm that was never ours to begin with and viewing each other through the lens of the oppressor.

We have to unlearn this and take responsibility for how we’ve contributed to it.

We have to call it out in our homes, in our friendship groups, and on our timelines.

We need to stop and ask: who is this really for, and why are we more comfortable humiliating each other rather than healing each other?

So, sometimes it really is your own people, but it doesn't have to be but we can’t heal what we keep on harming.