66 Banal dehumanisation recognised as a citizen anywhere. He describes struggling to demonstrate that he was still a ‘gentleman’, even to himself, and the recognition that with his citizenship he had lost something that he had unknowingly assumed necessary for being ‘in good standing’.25 Zweig describes how he had become an object of suspicion even to himself. This is because States and citizenships currently hold sway over how we construct our world. In his case we can see how the perception one has of noncitizenship and its role in the political construction of reality can change depending on one’s own experience of it, but it can also affect how we see our own position in the world. Zweig discovered himself to believe citizenship and good standing to be intertwined at the same time as he found himself stateless. As a result, he describes his personal struggle to maintain his own sense of himself as a ‘gentleman’. The dehumanisation of (hyphenated) non-citizens, then, also affected Zweig’s own sense of his place in the world and his entitlement to be there. This did not only happen in Zweig’s extreme experience of statelessness. Consider Wei Ming Kam’s reflection on being a child of Chinese immigrants in the UK.26 She recalls her mother’s excitement whenever she saw someone with a Chinese face on the television. Ming Kam explains that while she used to ridicule this behaviour, she later realised that her mother was exhibiting a sense of belonging. She describes it as ‘a rare acknowledgement of our existence in the UK. Look, my mum was saying. We���re here’27 (emphasis in the original). While this was not something that Ming Kam felt she needed herself, she realised that it was necessary for her mother. Ming Kam reflects that her mother sought affirmation of her rightful place in the State where she lived, through the banal means of seeing people that looked like her featured in popular media. So, seeing Chinese faces on television might be part of a banal recognition of such individuals as insiders amongst majority culture, Ming Kam suggests that it was also important for those who saw themselves reflected in those faces. This leads to a further conclusion. The same tools that could support banal dehumanisation could also be used banally to humanise. The banal dehumanisation, then, is a pervasive force that affects how all sorts of relationships can be developed and envisaged across society. While for the most part the focus here is on the obligations that develop for the State, it is important also to recognise the obligations of individuals, including insiders to that State system. By virtue of the structure of exclusion, individuals who bear the brunt of banal dehumanisation cannot be the only ones to change the structure that dehumanises them. Audre Lorde writes as a formal citizen of the US who also experiences overlapping minority memberships, which can be seen as activating her noncitizenship in some dimensions: ‘[t]here is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic 25 Zweig 1964 ibid. 26 Wei Ming Kam (2016) ‘Beyond “Good” Immigrants’, pp. 84–95 in Nikesh Shukla (ed.) (2016) The Good Immigrant, Unbound. 27 Ming Kam 2016 ibid. at p. 84.