A Nation Hides its Shame

Masks hide a person's shame in two directions–his own shame about himself and of being shamed by others.

On April 23, 2026 in Philadelphia, PA, City Council voted to approve one of the most far-reaching legislative mandates in the country to limit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in their city. One of the bill’s key measures is a ban prohibiting Philadelphia law enforcement agents–both federal and local– from hiding their faces behind masks. 

Let’s take a look at this issue. ICE officials argue for the use of masks because agents are “operating in a hyper-partisan political environment,” and because agents have had “private information published online, leading to death threats against them and their families.” Look again. These these arguments are the same ones Philadelphia City Council is using to fight against ICE! 

·       Philadelphia is concerned that its residents are being targeted in a hyper-partisan atmosphere and that their private information is routinely accessed for illegal purposes. 

·       Many online and in-person surveillance methods are used by ICE. 

·       ICE has access to information from license plate readers that track your movements. 

·       Data brokers regularly cull and sell personal information used to generate profiles of individuals.

·       Facial recognition software is frequently used by law enforcement. 

·       ICE has established partnerships with other federal agencies that hold access to people’s private data.

One way to explain how an oppressive force (ICE) can take up the same argument as those it oppresses (private, law-abiding individuals) is by understanding the dynamics of shame. Shame is a common reaction to behavior we don’t want to acknowledge in ourselves, or that we don’t want others to recognize in us. To avoid feeling shame, we assign behavior we don’t like in ourselves to someone else (called psychological “projection"). For instance, if Patty doesn’t like being an angry person, she’ll see anger in others instead of herself. We often project shame onto others without realizing we’re doing it. This same move can be done deliberately, too, by purposely shifting responsibility away from ourselves onto someone else. When it’s done deliberately, it's not projection. It's malicious deceit.

Shame is our most frequent reason for blame-shifting. We both loathe feeling ashamed and loathe being accused of behaving shamefully. Much better to ditch that emotion entirely and claim that someone else is responsible for any shame that’s around.

The routine wearing of black face masks is a dead give-away about the prominent presence of shame in ICE’s activities. ICE agents wear masks to hide who they are as they break society’s norms. (See Chapter 8, How Shame Shapes Society.) Such masks work in two directions. They 1) relieve an agent from having to acknowledge that it’s he who’s harming another, and 2) prevent an agent from being identified by onlookers as the person responsible for harming another.

An ICE agent is highly unlikely to admit this dynamic of shame, or to admit feeling shame at all. That’s the nature of how we view shame, as the emotion we most want to deny and hide, from both ourselves and others. 

Look out for symbols that reveal through what they hide. Many different symbols expose our current, national shame. Nothing suggests shameful behavior quite like the routine, official donning of a black face mask.