Humiliation Day

What the day is

Humiliation Day is observed on January 3. It is not a day for humiliating anybody. It exists to mark how damaging the act is, and the origin of this particular date is not documented.

Origin and background

A separate and far better documented Humiliation Day belongs to July 1. Canada's Chinese Immigration Act took effect on that date in 1923 and effectively barred Chinese immigration for the next twenty-four years. Chinese Canadians refused to take part in Dominion Day celebrations and marked the date as Humiliation Day instead, a practice that continued until the act was repealed in 1947. The two observances are unrelated, and the July one carries the real historical weight.

On the word itself, humility and humiliation share a root meaning low, from the Latin for ground. They have moved a long way apart. Humility is something a person adopts. Humiliation is something done to them.

That distinction is exactly what the research turns on. Psychologists separate humiliation from shame and embarrassment along one decisive line: the person being humiliated believes the treatment is undeserved. Shame involves accepting a judgment about yourself, which is why it can prompt people to change. Humiliation involves rejecting the judgment while being unable to escape it, and the result is a combination of intense anger and powerlessness that motivates withdrawal or retaliation rather than reflection.

This is why humiliation is such a poor instrument. Used on children as discipline or in a workplace as correction, it reliably produces resentment and concealment instead of improvement. The same dynamic has been studied at larger scale, where the sense of a group having been collectively humiliated is a well-attested driver of prolonged conflict.

How to take part

• Correct people privately. Almost all humiliation is a matter of audience.
• Criticize the work rather than the person, which is the distinction that keeps it survivable.
• Notice teasing that has stopped being funny for one of the people involved.
• Apologize for an old one. The people on the receiving end tend to remember far longer than the people who did it.
• Read about the 1923 act and what July 1 meant to Chinese Canadians for a generation.