Gaslighting is a form of emotional and psychological abuse that can be used to make people question their own mental wellbeing in various settings — personal and political, medically and in the media. However it is employed, gaslighting is defined as manipulating someone into thinking they’re wrong even when they’re right.
The term gaslighting derives from the 1938 play and 1944 film “Gaslight,” in which a husband manipulates his wife into thinking she is mentally ill by dimming their gas-fueled lights and telling her she is hallucinating.
Gaslighting is also used as a form of racism. Racial gaslighting “is a way of maintaining a pro-white/anti-Black balance in society by labeling those that challenge acts of racism as psychologically abnormal,” BBC reported.
Some, however, feel that the term gaslighting is being overused.
Black Lives Still Matter @thatonequeen tweeted that it’s time to stop overusing the term gaslighting. “If someone doesn’t like your song or outfit that doesn’t make it gaslighting. If someone disagrees with you that doesn’t make it gaslighting. This is getting wild.”
Has someone ever made you doubt your own memories? Here are five things to know about what gaslighting is and how it’s done.
Racial gaslighting happens when people apply gaslighting techniques to a group of people based on race or ethnicity, according to “Racial gaslighting, Politics, Group, and Identities” by Angelique M. Davis & Rose Ernst (2019).
One example of racial gaslighting would be a person denying that a specific group experiences discrimination despite solid evidence that says otherwise, or claiming that civil rights activists are being too emotional in an effort to undermine their work, Medical News Today reported.
In general, women are more likely to be victims of gaslighting both in professional and personal environments due to these inequalities, said Paige Sweet, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, in a BBC interview.
“The assumption and stereotype that women are overly emotional, sensitive, irrational, or fly off the handle easily are used to excuse the dismissal of their feelings and experiences,” Sweet said.
Black women are often victims of this form of abuse.
“For Black women around the globe, the push back to Prince Harry (and) Meghan’s claims of racism were painfully familiar. Some say it is yet another example of a Black woman’s experiences with racism being disregarded through denials and gaslighting,” The Associated Press tweeted.
One technique is trivializing.
“This occurs when a person belittles or disregards the other person’s feelings. They may accuse them of being too sensitive or of overreacting when they have valid concerns and feelings,” Medical News Today reported.
There’s also denial. A person pretends to forget events or how they occurred or may even deny them.
Stereotyping is a third technique. A person may intentionally use negative stereotypes of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, or age to manipulate another, according to the American Sociological Review.
Racial gaslighting can happen when someone discusses racism in general or points out a specific racist act and they’re either accused of overthinking it or criticized for how they approach the issue. A person may even be characterized as “violent, stupid, or mentally unstable for calling out racism at all,” said Angelique Davis, a political science professor at Seattle University, in a Mashable report. Racial gaslighting can also happen when a group of people is blamed for a problem rather than the underlying societal cause of the problem.
“It’s a way of flipping things on them… someone has every reason to be mad about racist structures, yet they’re portrayed as this angry Black woman or an angry person of color,” said Davis who, along with her colleague Rose Ernst, researched and defined the term racial gaslighting.
For example, the flip happens when media outlets blame Black people for their own deaths at the hands of police and repeat the police’s side of events while ignoring police brutality. The outlets “are complicit in creating narratives that only tell one side of the story,” Davis said.
Racial trauma can occur as the result of severe gaslighting, according to a report in Psychology Today.
Racial trauma is unique in that those who experience it “suffer the ‘triple wounds’ of past historical trauma (i.e., legacies of slavery, colonization, forced resettlement, and assimilation, internment camps, racist government policies, and laws, racist killings, etc.), past personal trauma (i.e., childhood experiences of racism), as well as present, ongoing trauma (i.e., incidents at work or in personal life, news coverage of racism, social media racist rants),” Psychology Today reported.
“Gaslighting is making Juneteenth a federal holiday while banning critical race theory in schools, destabilizing COVID mutual aid efforts, refusing to defund and abolish police, and blocking reparations legislation,” tweeted Preorder Gumbo Ya Ya, Out Sept. 21st! @YesAurielle.
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