I begin with a “what” question. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about dehumanization? The answer to this seemingly simple question is not straightforward.
Scholars use “dehumanization” to denote a motley ragbag of loosely connected phenomena, and the situation is not any better outside the ivory tower. “Dehumanization” and “dehumanize” are used to describe a spectrum of situations, institutions, behaviors, and attitudes extending all the way from the tedium of the assembly line to the horrors of Auschwitz. In this foggy semantic atmosphere, it is easy for those who are interested in figuring out what dehumanization is, how it works, and what its functions are, to talk past one another. Given this, it is important to be clear about what one means by the word “dehumanization” right from the start. There is no point in asking what “dehumanization” really means, because it really means a lot of different things. Instead, we should be asking whether some conceptions of dehumanization are preferable to others, and why they are preferable, and for what purposes. My goal in this chapter is to begin to articulate a particular approach to understanding dehumanization, and to explain why I prefer it to some of the alternatives that are currently on the table.
I begin by describing two examples of dehumanization—the lynchings of Henry Smith and Sam Hose in late nineteenth-century Texas and Georgia, respectively—and then use these examples to sort through and evaluate conceptions of dehumanization. I have chosen these examples rather than others because they are unambiguous (it is difficult to imagine that there are many people who would deny that they are examples of dehumanization) and also because, given their abominable cruelty and brutality, they graphically convey why the phenomenon of dehumanization is worthy of careful and sustained attention.
On February 1, 1893, a twenty-seven-year-old mentally disabled man named Henry Smith was tortured and burned to death. Smith, a Black farm worker in Paris, Texas, was accused of raping, mutilating, and murdering a White policeman’s four-year-old daughter.1 He had been apprehended a little over a hundred miles to the east in Arkansas and taken back to Paris in handcuffs to be lynched before the eyes of ten thousand spectators.2
The crime for which Smith was arrested, and the gruesome spectacle that followed it, was covered widely by the national media. The Saint Paul Daily Globe reported “the city was wild with joy over the apprehension of the brute” and the citizens were determined that “the punishment of the fiend should fit the crime.”3 Schools, businesses, and even saloons were closed in honor of the festivities, and the reporter noted that “everything was done in a businesslike manner.” A specially commissioned excursion train brought onlookers from as far away as Dallas to watch the macabre spectacle. First, Smith was paraded around the city on a carnival float, where he was displayed as a king on his throne, holding a makeshift scepter. Then,
his clothes were torn off piecemeal and scattered in the crowd, people catching the shreds and putting them away as mementos. The child’s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. It was horrible—the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons—plenty of fresh ones being at hand—were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.4
Then the crowd placed Smith on a mound of cottonseed hulls doused with kerosene and burned him alive. Such public burnings of Black men soon came to be known as “barbecues.”5 The Globe continued, “The Negro rolled and tossed out of the mass, only to be pushed back by the people nearest him. He tossed out again, and was roped and pulled back. Hundreds of people turned away, but the vast crowd still looked calmly on.”6 Finally, when the burning was over, and only the charred remains of a corpse remained, trophy hunters picked through the ashes for pieces of bone, buttons, teeth or even pieces of charcoal to take home with them as souvenirs.
The question of Smith’s guilt is irrelevant to this discussion (bearing in mind that, as the heroic anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells observed, all such allegations should be regarded as suspect).7 What is most important for the purposes of this book is the language that Smith’s tormentors and their sympathizers so frequently used to describe him, and the relationship between that discourse and his ghastly execution.
In the report in the Saint Paul Daily Globe, Smith was described as a “fiend” and a “brute,” terms that appeared very often in newspaper coverage of the incident. He was described in other media outlets as a “Black beast” (San Antonio Gazette),8 a “bestial negro” (St. Louis Republic),9 an “incarnate monster” (New Orleans State),10 an “unnatural monster” (Texarkana News).11 The Globe went so far as to call Smith “the most inhuman monster known in current history,”12 and in his own account of the burning, eyewitness Junius M. Early described Smith as “a being in human shape.”13 Reverend Atticus Haygood, a Methodist bishop and former president of Emory University, informed his readers that the murdered child was “torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity.”14 And Henry Vance, the murdered girl’s father, described Smith as having a “brawny muscular body surmounted by a small head, developed wholly in the direction of the animal passions and appetites; devoid of any humanizing sensibilities … a fiend incarnate.”15
These characterizations of African Americans were not unusual. The Black people—especially Black men16—who were victims of mob violence in retribution for their real or imagined crimes were routinely described as subhuman animals, predatory apes, or demons in human form. Lacking paradigmatically human sensibilities, and endowed with superhuman strength and insatiable sexual appetites, they were imagined as rampaging monsters terrorizing White society—monsters that needed to be kept in their proper place, ideally in chains.
In the spring of 1899, just six years after Henry Smith was tortured and incinerated, Sam Hose, a twenty-one-year-old Georgia man, was accused of murdering his employer, raping his employer’s wife, and injuring their children. Descriptions of Hose were virtually indistinguishable from those that had been used to characterize Smith six years previously. He was a “fiend incarnate,” a “monster in human form,” a “black brute whose carnival of blood and lust has brought death and desolation,” and a “fiendish beast,” and his punishment was every bit as horrific.17 Fresh from Sunday morning church services, the God-fearing citizens of Palmetto, Newnan, and Griffin—small, rural communities that are now parts of Metropolitan Atlanta—as well as four thousand spectators who arrived on packed excursion trains, dragged this young man to the center of town, chained him to a tree, and began to mutilate his body. According to civil rights historian Phillip Dray, “The torture of the victim lasted almost half an hour.18 It began when a man stepped forward and very matter-of-factly sliced off Hose’s ears. Then several men grabbed Hose’s arms and held them forward so his fingers could be severed one by one and shown to the crowd. Finally, a blade was passed between his thighs, Hose cried out in agony, and a moment later his genitals were held aloft.”19
Hose was then set alight. He was burned to death very slowly in order to prolong his agony. At one point, as the flames gradually consumed his living body, he somehow managed to break free of his chains, but was thrust back into the flames by members of the surrounding crowd. After the flames died down, men removed the heart and liver from his incinerated corpse, cut them into small pieces, and broke his bones into fragments, all to sell to trophy hunters who paid top dollar and fought over the souvenirs. “Those unable to obtain the ghastly relics direct,” one journalist wrote, “paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them.” The report elaborated, “Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of the liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents. As soon as the negro was seen to be dead there was a tremendous struggle among the crowd, which had witnessed his tragic end, to secure the souvenirs. A rush was made for the stake, and those near the body were forced against it and had to fight for their freedom. Knives were quickly produced and soon the body was dismembered.”20 Hose’s ears, nose, and penis, which were cut off before the fire started, were especially prized items. A set of his knuckles was displayed for sale in the window of an Atlanta grocery store.21
The atrocities committed against these two men, as well as thousands more like them, seemed to fit with their status as subhuman beings. It is common for people to slaughter and barbecue nonhuman animals, to display their body parts in butcher shops, and to preserve pieces of their bodies—a boar’s head, a deer’s antlers, a rabbit’s foot—as trophies or good luck charms.22 Black life, like animal life, was cheap in the American South, and killing Black people was considered to be morally inconsequential. “Back in those days,” recalled one White southerner, “to kill a Negro wasn’t nothing. It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The Whites would say, ‘Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway—so jest go on an’ kill ’em.’ ”23 And another remarked, in a letter to the editor of The Crisis, that according to the Bible, “The negro originated from an animal. And we Southern people do not care to equal ourselves with animals.” Consequently, “The people of the South do not think any more of killing the black fellows than you would think of killing a flea.”24
Black men were not just seen as animals. The extremes of rage and contempt, the efforts to degrade and humiliate the victims, and the pleasure that the White mob took in causing them the maximum amount of suffering in the name of “justice” before letting death free them from their torment are not typical of how human beings treat the animals that they hunt and eat. Smith and Hose were demonized as what would be called a century later “superpredators”—fiends who are devoid of conscience and intent on satisfying their insatiable appetites for rape, murder, and mayhem. This vision of Black brutality is clearly expressed (to give one among very many examples) in an article about Smith’s lynching that appeared in the Memphis Commercial:
Their [the lynch mob’s] deed was not provoked by one crime alone. The growing frequency and fiendishness of these crimes by negroes keep the people of every southern community in a perpetual condition of suppressed terror and rage. The lust of the negro spares no victim. The little innocent so brutally murdered and mangled at Paris is but one of many such who have died to gratify the beastly lusts of the negro. The awful fact stares nearly every southern community in the face that it is infested with a race of ravishers whom no law can check and no punishment appall.25
According to South Carolina congressman Benjamin Tillman, “the poor African” whose savage instincts had previously been held in check by the firm but benign influence of his White overlord now “became a fiend, a wild beast seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails, lurking around to see if some helpless White woman can be murdered or brutalized.”26 The Black man, it was said, is “the most horrible creature upon the earth, the most brutal and merciless,” “a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal.”27 These men’s alleged depredations on White women were “indescribably beastly and loathsome … marked … by a diabolical persistence and a malignant atrocity of detail that have no reflection in the whole extent of the natural history of the most bestial and ferocious animals.”28
One of the most influential and notorious of these representations was the description of the character named Gus in Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the book that inspired the twentieth-century revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and from which the notorious 1915 motion picture The Birth of a Nation was adapted. Gus, a former slave who brutally rapes a fifteen-year-old White girl, is described as having “gleaming apelike” eyes, and his “thin spindle-shanks supported an oblong, protruding stomach, resembling an elderly monkey’s, which seemed so heavy it swayed his back to carry it. The animal vivacity of his small eyes and the flexibility of his eyebrows, which he worked up and down rapidly with every change of countenance, expressed his eager desires.”29 As Gus stalked his female prey, his “thick lips were drawn upward in an ugly leer and his sinister bead eyes gleamed like a gorilla’s. A single fierce leap and the black claws clutched the air slowly as if sinking into the soft White throat.”30
It is important to understand that even those Black men who were not accused of committing violent crimes—those who were seen as peaceful, or prudent, or merely subservient—were suspect. It was regarded as a truism that even if Black people did not behave violently, they all “had it in them” to do so, because criminality was assumed to be a permanent and unalterable condition of their nature. Thus, one contributor to the Paris News, commenting on the Smith affair, insisted that it is false to claim that the Negro “is intellectually and morally degraded as the result of slavery” and asserted what was then (as now) the widely accepted view among Whites that “the negro is what he is physically, intellectually and morally by the unalterable law of heredity. He was designed by the great Creator to form a link in the long chain of created beings.”31
In invoking the “long chain of created beings,” this author had in mind the ancient and pervasive idea of the “Great Chain of Being”—the idea that the entire cosmos is ordered as a vast hierarchy, in which every kind of being, whether mineral, plant, animal, or human, is ranked.32 I will have much more to say about the centrality of the concept of the Great Chain of Being in Chapter 6. For now, what is important is that this way of thinking introduces the notion that there are “higher” and “lower” kinds of beings, that the higher beings count for more, in a moral sense, than the lower ones do.
White people ranked Black people lower than themselves on the hierarchy; so low, in fact, that they often considered them as an alien species—a kind of humanoid ape—or at best as primitive, simian-like human being. In either case, Whites commonly believed that Black people’s proper place in the natural order was beneath themselves. Supposedly, although the irredeemably animal nature of Black people could be tamed and trained, it could never be extinguished, and Black people would always slide back into primal savagery as soon as the reins on their behavior were relaxed.33
As I have already mentioned, the word “dehumanization” has come to mean very many different things to many different people, both in the vernacular and in the writings of scholars and researchers. To impose some order this explanatory chaos, I make a distinction between conceptions of dehumanization and theories of dehumanization. Conceptions of dehumanization are ideas about what dehumanization is—ideas about what sorts of phenomena the term “dehumanization” names. Theories of dehumanization are ideas about how dehumanization works—its psychological, political, and social dynamics. I will start with conceptions because conceptions are more basic than theories, insofar as they pin down what it is, exactly, that theories of dehumanization are theories of. Once we have settled on a conception of what dehumanization is, we will be in a position to theorize it.
My conception of dehumanization is simple. We dehumanize others when we conceive of them as subhuman creatures. These creatures might be nonhuman animals such as lice, rats, snakes, or wolves, or they might be fictional or supernatural beings such as demons and monsters. But in all cases, they are, in a sense that I will explain later on, “beneath” the human, even if, as is often the case, they are thought to possess greater-than-human powers. On my account, then, dehumanization is a kind of attitude. It is something that happens inside people’s heads. Of course, dehumanizing attitudes often give rise to derogatory speech and cruel or callous actions. But these forms of speech and these kinds of actions do not constitute dehumanization. Rather, they are results of dehumanizing attitudes. There is a lot that needs to be unpacked in order to make this short definition maximally clear, and it will take many pages to do so anywhere near fully, but for now, stating it baldly is a good enough start.
There are reasons why I have settled on this conception of dehumanization, rather than any of the others that are available. I prefer it to the others because it satisfies four conditions that I think any serviceable conception of dehumanization ought to fulfill.
First, I want a conception of dehumanization that specifies the social and psychological forces that produce and sustain certain forms of cruelty and injustice, one that addresses the most hideous things that human beings do to one another—paradigmatically, genocidal violence, but also war, racial oppression, and other atrocities. That does not mean that my conception of dehumanization only pertains to the extremes of human violence. It can also address more subtle, everyday kinds of bias. But it minimally should encompass the worst that human beings have inflicted on one another.
Second, I want a conception of dehumanization that picks out a slice of reality that is not adequately covered by other terms and concepts—one with specific content and utility. There is no point in developing a theory of dehumanization that could just as well be described as a theory of racism, or a theory of sexual objectification, or a theory of “othering,” or any number of other things. To my mind, an account of dehumanization ought to open a conceptual door that has hitherto remained closed, or left only slightly ajar. It ought to tell us something new about our world and ourselves, or connect the dots between what we already know to reveal an unsuspected pattern.
Third, I want a conception of dehumanization that lends itself to scientific explanation, broadly construed. One that allows us to infer the causal processes and mechanisms that underpin it, that is at least in principle amenable to testing, and that draws on theoretical and observational research. This is vital because, no matter how elegant, or enthralling, or prima facie plausible a theory is, it also needs to provide a true account of what is going on when people dehumanize one another. There are pragmatic reasons for this as well as explanatory ones. If you want to dismantle something, it is often essential to know how that thing is put together. If we want to put an end to dehumanization, as we all should, we need to have an accurate understanding of its structure, its inner workings, and the forces that perpetuate it. This means that, at the very least, a good account of dehumanization should be consistent with our best current science, and ideally it should draw upon and extend well-established scientific accounts of human behavior.
Fourth and finally, I want a conception of dehumanization that accords with at least some of the most important vernacular uses of the term, and that does not exclude paradigmatic cases. The treatment of prisoners at Auschwitz and the lynching of African Americans are two such cases. A theory of dehumanization that does not apply to these does not deserve to be taken seriously.
Having explained, albeit briefly, what I think dehumanization is, I want to sharpen this by explaining what I think it is not. I want give you a sense of the conceptual landscape—the various, competing conceptions of dehumanization that are found in the scholarly literature, and give my reasons for thinking that my view of dehumanization is preferable to any and all of them. That is not to say that the alternatives are incorrect. People use the word “dehumanization” as a label for a range of different phenomena. Rather, my objective is to show why my account best comports with the four desiderata discussed above.
Some people think that dehumanizing people is nothing more than thinking of them as substandard human beings. On this view, people can be thought of as human and yet be dehumanized. The philosopher Robin Jeshion adopts a version of this approach. She distinguishes between what she calls “weak” and “strong” psychological notions of dehumanization: “On the weak psychological notion, dehumanizing thought involves regarding others as having lesser standing along a moral dimension, as being unworthy of equal standing or full respect as persons. On the strong psychological notion, the dehumanizing form of thinking involves conceiving of others as creatures that are not human at all, often as creatures that are evil or a contaminating threat, and that need to be wiped out.”34
When we dehumanize others in the first, weak sense we consider them to be defective human beings, but when we dehumanize them in the second, strong sense we exclude them from the human family altogether. Jeshion sees the weak and strong forms of dehumanization as lying along a continuum and adopts the term “dehumanization” for both to emphasize their continuity. “At the psychological level,” she writes, “I think there is no really hard and fast demarcation between the two. Thinking of others as lesser humans slides far too naturally into thinking of them as subhuman.”35 In contrast, I reserve the term “dehumanization” for the strong, psychological sense. Jeshion also uses “dehumanization” in a derivative sense to refer to the actions that are prompted by dehumanizing forms of thought.
My conception of dehumanization is more fine-grained than Jeshion’s, which sets it apart from other forms of derogation. Put differently, on my view dehumanization is a special form of derogation, and one that is especially toxic. I also hesitate to endorse Jeshion’s notion of dehumanizing actions, because this does not differentiate dehumanizing attitudes from their effects (acts of violence or the use of animalistic slurs). Of course, I agree that there are close connections between dehumanization and other kinds of derogatory attitudes. As will become clear in the chapters to follow, I think that there is a close and important relationship between regarding others as lesser human beings and regarding them as less-than-human beings. However, I also hold that we should be careful not to obscure or minimize the difference between these two kinds of attitudes.
Descriptions of the lynchings of Smith and Hose suggest that something more than merely derogatory attitudes toward Black people (dehumanization in Jeshion’s weak sense) was involved. Although it is possible to perform such hideous acts without believing that the victims are not truly human, it is harder—at least for most of us—to do so. Conceiving of people as belonging to a different and inferior species liberates deadly aggression far more effectively than does merely regarding them as inferior human beings. And this, in my view, justifies setting dehumanization, as I conceive of it, apart from other, less radically derogatory attitudes.
Dehumanization is not a way of speaking to or about others. To dehumanize someone is not the same as using animalistic slurs against them. Of course, people often express their dehumanizing attitudes by referring to others as animals, but, as I remarked in the previous section, it is important not to confuse the verbal expression of an attitude with the attitude itself.
The idea that dehumanization is a rhetorical practice is quite common. It is the idea that we dehumanize others by referring to them as less-than-human creatures. For example, the social psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal writes that dehumanization is “labeling a group as inhuman, either by using references to subhuman categories, for example, ‘inferior’ races and animals, or by referring to negatively valued superhuman creatures such as demons, monsters, and satans. In both cases, members of the delegitimized group are depicted as possessing inhuman traits.”36
Common though it is, there are good reasons to reject this way of understanding dehumanization. If dehumanization is equated with certain kinds of speech—if dehumanization is nothing more than speaking to or about a person or group in a certain way—then although members of the White mobs that lynched Henry Smith and Sam Hose presumably thought of them as less than human, it was only by hurling slurs at these men that they dehumanized them. And if dehumanizing people is nothing more than calling them subhuman creatures, then the men who tortured Smith did not dehumanize him unless they also slurred him in a certain way. Further, if dehumanization is just a form of derogatory speech, then the man who hacked off Hose’s penis and held it aloft to the cheering crowd did not at that moment dehumanize his victim if he did not also (at that very moment) speak of him in a derogatory manner.
Consider also the thousands of White spectators who did not soil their hands with blood but who looked on approvingly as these events were taking place, the women and men who delighted at the victims’ screams and who inhaled the aroma of their burning flesh, the grocer who proudly displayed Hose’s knuckles in his Atlanta shop, and the many, many others who experienced vicarious pleasure reading eyewitness accounts of the lynchings in newspapers or who listened excitedly to the gramophone recording of Smith’s dying agonies. Should we say that these people did not dehumanize Smith and Hose unless they also called them animals? It seems obvious that if anything exemplifies dehumanization, these things do.
I have made the point that it is possible to dehumanize others without ever expressing this verbally. It is also true (and in fact, it is very common) to use animalistic slurs to characterize others without dehumanizing them. We are all familiar with insults like “pig” or “bitch,” spoken in anger or contempt. People who use words like these to characterize others rarely believe that their targets are really less than human. They use these words to express their feelings about the person, or to hurt them, rather than to describe the other person as a subhuman entity. As Jeshion says, and I agree, slurs are dehumanizing only insofar as they encode dehumanizing thought.37
Sometimes animalistic language gets used strategically to induce dehumanizing attitudes in others. Consider dehumanizing political propaganda, a topic that I discuss in Chapters 9 and 10. Propagandists who paint verbal pictures of others as dangerous animals, or who represent them in graphic media as animals, do not have to believe that these people are really subhuman beings. Sometimes, even though they are aware that the members of some hated, feared, or despised group are as fully human as they themselves are, they try to get the consumers of their propaganda to think of these others as subhuman. For example, sometimes animalistic language is used to induce dehumanizing attitudes in soldiers, for the purpose of legitimating the act of killing. As one US veteran who confessed to committing wartime atrocities during the Vietnam War described it: “When you go into basic training you are taught that the Vietnamese are not people. You are taught they are gooks, and all you hear is ‘gook, gook, gook, gook’ … and once the military has got the idea implanted in your mind that these people are not humans, they are subhuman, it makes it a little bit easier to kill ’em.… All of them are considered to be subhuman.”38
There are also examples of prosecuting attorneys characterizing defendants as animals to nudge juries toward a guilty verdict in death penalty cases. Prosecutor Michael Thompson told the jury during the sentencing phase of State of Texas v. Kerry Max Cook that what “separates us from … lower portions of [the] animal kingdom … is totally absent from the mind of Kerry Max Cook,” and then went on to compare capital punishment in this case with the act of euthanizing an animal. “[I] have hunting dogs myself,” he remarked, “occasionally something happens to that animal that you have no alternative but to put them to sleep. That is a situation in this case.” The defendant, Cook, was convicted but ultimately exonerated after being incarcerated for forty years, twenty of which were spent on death row.39 For reasons that will soon become clear, this prosecutorial strategy is probably most effective when there is also a racial element at work.
These considerations show that you cannot just “read off” dehumanizing attitudes from the words that people use. If you think that this can be done, then you misunderstand the relation between dehumanization and derogatory language by committing a category mistake. The term “category mistake” was coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle for the error of attributing a characteristic to a thing that things of that kind cannot have. For example, I would be committing a category mistake if I were to say that Thursdays are fuchsia, or that the number 37 paid me a visit last night, because days of the week are not the kinds of things that can be colored and numbers are not the kinds of things that can occupy spatiotemporal locations.40 These are very obvious examples, but many category mistakes are more subtle. When people assume too tight a connection between dehumanization and slurs, they commit the category mistake of confusing a cause with its effects. Suppose you were to mistake the symptoms of a cold—runny nose, sore throat, headache, and so on—for the cold itself. You would be wrong if you thought of a cold as nothing but a bundle of symptoms. Cold symptoms do not constitute a cold. They do not make it the case that one has a cold. What makes that case is being infected with a rhinovirus, and the unpleasant symptoms—the sore throat, stuffy nose, and so on—are consequences of the illness rather than the illness itself. Anyone who thought that having a cold is nothing but having a bundle of cold symptoms would be making the same kind mistake as a person who thinks that using animalistic slurs makes it the case that one dehumanizes people. The use of animalistic slurs is often a “symptom” or consequence of dehumanization, but it is not dehumanization itself. And just as a cold can be asymptomatic (one can be infected with a rhinovirus without experiencing any of the common cold symptoms), it is possible to have dehumanizing beliefs about others without ever saying that they are subhuman animals.
All that being said, the way that people speak about others is a very important indicator of their beliefs about them. We attribute beliefs, desires, and other mental states to people on the basis of what they say, on the assumption that what people say more often than not expresses what is going on in their minds. That is why the way that people talk about others—specifically, their implicit or explicit characterization of those others as subhuman creatures—can reveal dehumanizing attitudes. In other words, we “diagnose” dehumanization by interpreting their verbal “symptoms,” just as we infer that someone has a rhinovirus infection when we find that they have a sore throat and runny nose. These symptoms are not diagnostically foolproof, but they are diagnostically important, and this is no less true of the use of animalistic slurs to diagnose the presence of dehumanization. The signs and symptoms of dehumanization, which include both the words that people utter and their nonverbal behavior, help us make inferences about dehumanizing attitudes, even though (as when diagnosing an illness) these inferences are fallible. In both cases, the more information one has at one’s disposal, the more securely one’s conclusions will be grounded.
The gap between dehumanizing attitudes and their verbal expression—the fact that either can be present in the absence of the other—has very important methodological ramifications for a theory of dehumanization. It implies that a good theory of dehumanization should enable one to distinguish between cases in which a person’s speech truly indicates that they think of others as less than human and cases where their speech does not really express an underlying dehumanizing attitude. And a good theory of dehumanization should also have the resources to detect “asymptomatic” forms of dehumanization—that is, cases where dehumanizing attitudes are betrayed by subtle and indirect cues rather than being explicitly embodied in speech or action. I know that this sounds like a very tall, and perhaps unrealistic, order. But as this book proceeds, I am going to do my best to show that it is attainable.
Sometimes we think of people figuratively as nonhuman animals. For instance, if you think of someone who disgusts you as a pig, you are probably not thinking that they are literally a pig. Instead, you are probably thinking that this person has despicable characteristics that are conventionally associated with pigs, such as gluttony, dirtiness, or selfishness. The use of animal imagery to represent human characteristics is deeply ingrained in our artistic and literary traditions, and in ordinary habits of mind.
Because we are accustomed to thinking of people as animals metaphorically, it is easy to assume that dehumanizing attitudes are metaphorical too. Put differently, when people dehumanize others, they do not really think of them as subhuman animals. Instead, they think of them as fully human beings with subhuman-like characteristics.
I reject this view. I believe that that when people dehumanize others, they really do conceive of them as subhumans, and that when these dehumanizing attitudes are expressed in speech, they are meant to be literally descriptive. When Nazis conceived of Jews as vermin, and when White supremacists thought of Africans as apes, they really meant that Jews and Africans are less than human.
I am aware that this may sound crazy to you. Nazis and White supremacists were and are, for the most part, sane human beings. How could any sane person mistake a human being for a rat or an ape? Rats are small, furry, four-legged rodents with bare tails, whereas Homo sapiens are much larger, furless, two-legged, tailless primates. So the notion that a cognitively intact human being could believe that Jewish humans are really creatures like rats or that Black humans are really creatures like apes seems to make no sense at all.
If you think that this is crazy, you have my sympathies. The whole idea does seem very strange. In the chapters to follow, I will do my best to dispel the aura of implausibility surrounding the seemingly outrageous idea that human beings can conceive of other human beings as creatures that are less than human.
Some writers on dehumanization think of it as a way of treating others rather than, as I do, something that goes on inside the dehumanizer’s head. On this view, to dehumanize someone is to treat them in a degrading way. Degrading treatment includes targeting them with slurs, but also a lot more. Broadly speaking, degrading—and thus, dehumanizing—treatment has the aim of harming other human beings. But this cannot include just any harm, because that would make dehumanization include too much, and make “dehumanization” just a synonym for bad behavior. Advocates of this conception of dehumanization hold that only some harmful behaviors are dehumanizing ones, and they try to spell out the ways in which specifically dehumanizing behavior can be distinguished from harmful behavior in general.
The most common strategy for doing this is to equate dehumanization with what is called “objectification.” The roots of the idea of objectification are in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant asserted that there is something about human beings that sets them apart, morally, from all nonhuman entities. He claimed that nonhuman things have value only as “means,” by which he meant that their value lies solely in the uses to which they can be put. In contrast, he believed that we humans have intrinsic value. We are special because have value in and of ourselves. Our value is built into the kind of beings that we are, rather than in the uses to which we can be put.
With these assumptions under his belt, Kant argued that treating human beings in purely instrumental ways—that is, valuing them only insofar as they can provide things for us—amounts to treating them in an object-like way, and thus “objectifying” them.
Although the term “objectification,” as used in contemporary philosophy, dates from long after Kant’s death, it is clear that he had something very much like it in mind.41 For example, he claimed in his 1797 Doctrine of Right that when a person has sex for pleasure he “makes himself into a thing, which conflicts with the right of humanity in his own person.”42 To Kant recreational sex was deeply degrading and immoral, because it involves using one’s partner merely as a means for erotic enjoyment.
To properly understand the Kantian notion of objectification, it is important to understand his notion of what an “object” is. In the Kantian framework, the category of objects includes both inanimate things and nonhuman animals. Most of us would balk at the idea that a beloved dog falls into the same moral category as, say, an ironing board. Not so Kant, who claimed that human beings are special because they are capable of reflecting on themselves, a feature of the human mind that “raises him [that is, the human being] infinitely above all the other beings on earth,” and this makes human beings “altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion.”43
In the late twentieth century, feminist thinkers adopted the notion of objectification to cast light on women’s sexual exploitation at the hands of men, which they often refer to as “sexual objectification.” “To be sexually objectified,” wrote Catherine MacKinnon, “means having a social meaning imposed on your being that defines you as to be sexually used … and then using you that way.” When they are sexually objectified, women are, in the words of the philosopher Rae Langton, “treated as merely bodies, as merely sensory appearances, as not free, as items that can be possessed, as items whose value is merely instrumental.”44
Objectification is not just a psychological attitude. It is not just a way of thinking about others, because when we objectify others, we use them. Objectification is right out there in the world, embodied in behaviors, institutions, norms, and representations in the mass media. As MacKinnon pointedly observes, “Objectification is different from stereotyping, which acts as though it is all in the head.… The problem goes a great deal deeper than illusion or delusion. Masks become personas become people, socially, especially when they are enforced.”
The connection between objectification and dehumanization is mostly implicit in feminist writings, and when dehumanization is mentioned explicitly it is usually only in passing. There are, however, some exceptions. One of these is MacKinnon’s essay “Are Women Human?,” in which she alludes to social practices that she believes underpin a socially constructed subhuman status of women:
If women were human, would we be a cash crop shipped from Thailand in containers into New York’s brothels? Would we be sexual and reproductive slaves? Would we be bred, worked without pay our whole lives, burned when our dowry money wasn’t enough or when men tired of us, starved as widows when our husbands died (if we survived his funeral pyre), sold for sex because we are not valued for anything else? Would we be sold into marriage to priests to atone for our family’s sins or to improve our family’s earthly prospects? Would we, when allowed to work for pay, be made to work at the most menial jobs and exploited at barely starvation level? Would our genitals be sliced out to “cleanse” us (our body parts are dirt?), to control us, to mark us and define our cultures? Would we be trafficked as things for sexual use and entertainment worldwide in whatever form current technology makes possible? Would we be kept from learning to read and write?45
Clearly, the scope of the concept of sexual objectification is a lot narrower than the scope of concept of dehumanization. But what can we say about the relation between dehumanization and objectification per se? Sexual objectification is a special case of objectification, so if objectification is a kind of dehumanization, sexual objectification is a more circumscribed variety of dehumanization.
Because I regard dehumanization as a state of mind rather than as a way of treating people, I do not think that objectification—be it either sexual or nonsexual—should be identified with dehumanization. It is possible to dehumanize a person without treating them as an object, and it is also possible to treat a person as an object without dehumanizing them. In fact, there are putative examples of objectification that are remote from anything that could reasonably be characterized as dehumanization. One of these is the treatment of the human body in medical contexts, especially surgery.46 Surgeons treat their patients as flesh-and-blood machines that need fixing, but this is far removed from thinking of them as dangerous or despicable animals. If you think that Henry Smith and Sam Hose were dehumanized, it is quite a stretch to include a patient undergoing open heart surgery under the same conceptual umbrella. And as Martha Nussbaum observes, we can even affectionately objectify our loved ones: “If I am lying around with my lover on the bed and use his stomach as a pillow there seems to be nothing at all baneful about this, provided that I do so with his consent (or, if he is asleep, with a reasonable belief that he would not mind), and without causing him pain, provided as well, that I do so in the context of a relationship in which he is generally treated as more than a pillow.”47
The idea of affectionately dehumanizing someone is incomprehensible, so objectification and dehumanization cannot be the same thing.48 And even if this were not the case, equating dehumanization with treating others as objects makes nonsense of the claim that Henry Smith and Same Hose were dehumanized. They were not treated as objects. Smith was, ironically enough, tortured and executed on a platform emblazoned with the word “Justice”—but notions of justice, however misappropriated, are simply irrelevant to the treatment of objects. You cannot punish a stone or wreak vengeance on a tree.
Treating others like objects is not the only way to treat them badly. Smith and Hose were subjected to the most horrific abuse imaginable, but they were not treated as objects. Some scholars think of dehumanization as bad or “inhumane” treatment that is not restricted to objectification. Using the term “bestialization” rather than “dehumanization,” legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron sets out this idea as follows:
The “higher than the animals” sense of human dignity gives us a natural sense of “degrading treatment’: it is treatment that is more fit for an animal than for a human, treatment of a person as though he were an animal, as though he were reduced from the high equal status of human to mere animality. It can be treatment that is insufficiently sensitive to the differences between humans and animals, the differences in virtue of which humans are supposed to have special status. So for example a human is degraded by being bred like an animal, used as a beast of burden, beaten like an animal, herded like an animal, treated as though he did not have language, reason or understanding, or any power of self-control. Or it could include treating a person as though he did not have any religious life or sense of religious obligation, or as though the human (or this human) were one of those animals who are indifferent to separation from offspring or mate. It might also include cases of post-mortem ill-treatment: eating human flesh, for example, or failing to properly bury a human, or dragging a corpse.49
Leaving aside the dubious implicit claim that these are appropriate ways to treat nonhuman animals, this notion of dehumanization is problematic. It is certainly possible to engage in violent, harmful, or degrading behavior toward others without denying their humanity, and the most skilled torturers are effective because they are exquisitely sensitive to what causes human beings the greatest agony.50
It is also possible to think of others as less than human without ever treating them cruelly. It is beyond dispute that people who are abused or brutally oppressed are very often dehumanized, but it is important to correctly understand the relationship between the dehumanization and the abuse. The act of dehumanizing others facilitates atrocities. It stands to these atrocities as cause stands to effect and, because causes are by definition distinct from their effects, dehumanization cannot be identified with the atrocities themselves and their harmful effects.
If dehumanization is solely a matter of how people are treated, then this rules out the principle that one can have dehumanizing beliefs that do not translate into action. But think again of the thousands of people who observed Henry Smith being lynched and who thought of him as less than human, as well as the countless others who saw him as a black beast and who relished reading horrific newspaper reports of the lynching. These people did not treat Smith in any way at all, as they had no contact with him, and yet it is more than reasonable to say that they dehumanized him.
One of Australian psychologist Nick Haslam’s notions of dehumanization bears some relation to feminist conceptions of objectification. Haslam proposes that there are two kinds of dehumanization. One of them is the act of thinking of others as lacking those characteristics that distinguish human beings from other animals. Haslam calls this “animalistic dehumanization.” The other is thinking of others as lacking characteristics that distinguish human beings from inanimate objects. He calls this “mechanistic dehumanization.” When people are mechanistically dehumanized, Haslam argues, they are seen as inert, cold, rigid, fungible, and lacking in agency, and therefore as object- or robot-like.51
Although there is clearly some connection between this idea of dehumanization and the notion of sexual objectification, there are also some striking differences. Mechanistic dehumanization is all about how we conceive of others, whereas sexual objectification pertains to how we treat others. Also, the idea of an “object” is quite different in the two cases. In Haslam’s theory, the mechanistically dehumanized person lacks characteristics associated with animacy. But the sexually objectified person is not supposed to lack animacy. Rather, she is seen as being a nonsubject (even sex robots are supposed to simulate animacy). The sexually objectified person may be seen as lacking agency, as Haslam’s mechanistically dehumanized people are, and perhaps as inert, but certainly not as cold or rigid.
Even though Haslam and I both conceive of dehumanization as a kind of mental state, his notion of animalistic dehumanization is not the same as mine either. I have defined dehumanization as conceiving of others as subhuman creatures. This definition does not say anything about the manifest attributes of dehumanized people. It does not say that dehumanizing others is the same thing as seeing them as possessing traits that are associated with subhuman creatures, as Haslam’s definition of animalistic dehumanization does. My account is about how we categorize people, rather than about their observable characteristics—their deep nature rather than their observable phenotypes. This may sound like a trivial point—a distinction without a corresponding difference—but it is actually quite important. I will explain why in considerable detail later on in this book. For now, I will merely note that what we take a thing to really be does not necessarily correspond to how it appears to us. In other words, human psychology allows that the appearance of a thing does not have to correspond to what it really is. In Chapter 2, I will argue that dehumanization is not primarily a matter of attributing subhuman traits to a person, as Haslam believes. Instead, it is about attributing a subhuman essence to them.
Another idea is that we dehumanize others by subjecting them to treatment that harms them by damaging or obliterating their distinctively human characteristics. This perspective is prominent among feminist writers that equate dehumanization. They point out that sexual objectification / dehumanization usually injures the women who are its targets. For example, Andrea Dworkin, who implicitly links objectification with dehumanization, explains: “When objectification occurs, a person is depersonalized, so that no individuality or integrity is available socially or in what is an extremely circumscribed privacy. Objectification is an injury right at the heart of discrimination: those who can be used as if they are not fully human are no longer fully human in social terms; their humanity is hurt by being diminished.”52
Likewise, Linda LeMoncheck, whose book The Dehumanization of Women: Treating Persons as Sex Objects explicitly equates objectification with dehumanization, describes dehumanization as treating a person in ways that prevent the development of, diminish, or snuff out their paradigmatically human characteristics. She writes that the dehumanized person “is effectively reduced to realizing only those capacities that things, bodies, or animals have. Thus, one can beat others to the point of irrationality, or drug or hypnotize persons so that they are no longer self-aware or self-determining.”53 On this view, dehumanization is a kind of harm, and acts that bring about these kinds of injuries are dehumanizing acts.54 This is distinct from the more commonplace idea view that dehumanization is often harmful. To say that dehumanization is harmful is to say that it causes harm (that is, that harm is one of its effects). But as I have underscored several times already, causes and their effects are, by definition, distinct from one another, so saying that dehumanization causes harm is implicitly saying that it is not the same thing as the harm that it causes. But rather than claiming that dehumanization causes harm, LeMoncheck has it that dehumanization is a kind of harm. Dehumanization is, so to speak, made out of harm.
Mari Mikkola is the philosopher who has most thoroughly developed the notion of dehumanization as harm. She argues, “An act or a treatment is dehumanizing if and only if it is an indefensible setback to some of our legitimate human interests, where this setback constitutes a moral injury.”55 For Mikkola, “human interests” are those factors that contribute to the well-being of members of our species. Not all such setbacks are indefensible. Imprisoning a serial rapist is certainly a setback to his legitimate human interests (because freedom from imprisonment is important for human well-being), but it is a justified setback. To be morally injurious, a setback has got to “damage the realization and acknowledgment of the person’s value.” Unlike many other feminist philosophers, Mikkola does not equate dehumanization with objectification. She argues that it is an open question whether objectification is always a bad thing (see my remarks in the section on objectification above), but dehumanization is by definition morally impermissible.
Mikkola’s analysis of dehumanization differs from my account in two key respects. First—and very importantly—Mikkola approaches dehumanization from an ethical rather than an empirical perspective. Her account turns on evaluative terms such as “indefensible setbacks,” “legitimate human interests,” and “moral injury,” whereas my approach is psychological and mainly descriptive. A wide range of processes, not just the psychological ones that I describe as “dehumanization,” might underwrite the sorts of phenomena that count as dehumanization in Mikkola’s framework. So, for her, the psychological specifics are irrelevant to whether or not an act counts as dehumanization, whereas for me, whether or not something counts as an instance of dehumanization is entirely a matter of its psychological specifics.
Second, as I have already discussed, I prefer a view that distinguishes dehumanizing attitudes from dehumanizing actions. Consequently, I do not see dehumanization as requiring the commission of injurious acts. There is no doubt that dehumanization, in my sense, very often facilitates acts that bring about dehumanization in Mikkola’s sense (for example, some White Americans’ dehumanizing belief that Black men are predatory beasts contributed to the lynching of Henry Smith and Sam Hose, which was dehumanizing in Mikkola’s sense). But conceiving of Black men as dangerous animals was not a necessary condition for terrorizing, torturing, and murdering them, and these behaviors could occur in the absence of this belief. The belief was not sufficient for the practice either. There must have been very many White people (then as now) who harbored dehumanizing beliefs about Black people without ever doing violence to them.
Psychologists Nicholas Epley and Adam Waytz describe dehumanization as a deformation of “mind perception” (a term borrowed from the psychologist Daniel Wegner).56 Epley and Waytz write, “The central feature of all existing psychological accounts is a failure to attribute a mind to other humans, treating others as if they lacked the capacity for higher order reasoning or conscious awareness and experience.… Dehumanized others lack the capacity to think—like animals—or to feel—like objects.”57 As they see it, we dehumanize others to the extent that we regard them as possessing “lesser minds.”58 It is easy to conflate this take on the nature of dehumanization with the notion of objectification. After all, inanimate objects are mindless, and it is no doubt true that some people think of objectification as a kind of attitude. But in the canonical feminist literature, objectification is described as a social and political phenomenon rather than as a psychological one. Objectification is cemented into social institutions, norms, and practices. That is not to say that these theorists deny psychology any role in the objectifying process, only that they insist that objectification is not something mental. The fact that Epley and Waytz think of dehumanization as something that is in the head rather than out there in the world sets them apart from these objectification theorists.
Although I also conceive of dehumanization as a kind of psychological state, I do not accept the view of dehumanization as mind denial. One reason is that does not fit with paradigmatic cases of dehumanization. Consider the Nazi dehumanization of Jewish people. During the Third Reich, German ideologues clearly and explicitly characterized Jews as monstrous, subhuman beings. But the Nazis did not think of Jews as in any way mentally handicapped. Quite the opposite: they considered them to be diabolically intelligent. Adolf Eichmann, one of the prime architects of the Holocaust, claimed that Jews possess “the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects alive today” and are “intellectually superior to us.”59
Another reason why I cannot accept the mind-denial account is that it involves the idea that when we dehumanize others we think of them as being less human than ourselves rather than as beings that are less than human. This might seem like a trivial difference, but in fact it is a crucial one. There is qualitative difference between placing others categorically outside the realm of the human and regarding them as inferior human beings. Thinking of someone as less human than oneself requires a conception of humanness as something that one can have more or less of, rather than something that one either has or does not have, completely, with no middle ground in between.
Nicholas Haslam—the psychologist mentioned earlier who has written most extensively about dehumanization—and Jacques-Philip Leyens, who pioneered the study of “infrahumanization” (roughly, implicit dehumanization), both believe that we naturally think of humanness as something that a being can have more or less of. In fact, the idea that there are degrees of humanness is ubiquitous and goes virtually unquestioned in the psychological literature on dehumanization. As the psychologist Susan Fiske puts it, “Recognizing or denying another’s humanity varies by degrees, along simple, predictable, and apparently universal dimensions” (emphasis added).60 In contrast, I do not think that we conceive of humanness in this way. Instead, I think that we tend to conceive of others as either fully human or as not human at all. I will unpack and justify this claim later on, once I have laid down some crucial conceptual and theoretical foundations.
Thinking of others as subhuman does not entail thinking of them as inferior in every respect. In fact, dehumanizers often believe that those whom they dehumanize have physical or mental powers that are superior to their own, as we saw in the case of Adolf Eichmann. A glance at the stereotypes that were historically imposed on oppressed groups leaves no room for doubt that members of dehumanized populations are often considered to be stronger, faster, less sensitive to pain, more sexually voracious, more violent, more ambitious, or more intelligent than their oppressors. They may be seen as “superpredators” (African Americans), “bloodthirsty savages” (Native Americans), or members of a powerful conspiracy intent on destroying the Aryan race (Jews). Even today, Black patients are often given less pain medication than their White counterparts for the same complaints, perhaps because of the entrenched stereotype that Black people are relatively insensitive to pain. Whites often see and treat Black children as older than they actually are, and imagine that Black men are larger and more physically formidable than they actually are.61 Sometimes dehumanized people are even thought to possess supernatural powers. We see this in medieval Christian beliefs about Jews, who supposedly consorted with the devil and were practitioners of the black arts. The general idea was mentioned in one of the earliest references to dehumanization as a psychological phenomenon. The philosopher David Hume remarked in his 1739 Treatise of Human Nature: “If the general of our enemies be successful, ’tis with difficulty we allow him the figure and character of a man. He is a sorcerer: He has a communication with daemons; as is reported of Oliver Cromwell, and the Duke of Luxembourg: He is bloody-minded, and takes a pleasure in death and destruction.”62
Adam Waytz and his colleagues Kelly Marie Hoffman and Sophie Trawalter coined the term “superhumanization bias” for the tendency for dehumanizers to attribute superpowers to the people they dehumanize. They define superhumanization as “the representation of others as possessing mental and physical qualities that are supernatural (transcending the laws of nature), extrasensory (transcending the bounds of normal human perception), and magical (influencing or manipulating the natural world through symbolic or ritualistic means).”63 Others, such as the political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, reserve the term “demonization” for a pattern of dehumanization in which the feared and hated others are “deemed inhuman creatures, willfully malevolent, a Christian secular incarnation of the devil or his minions.”64
The most important reason why we need to understand how dehumanization works is its role in facilitating violence and its contribution to indifference to the suffering of the victims of violence. There is a plethora of examples speaking to the relationship between dehumanization and violence. For example, the seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman Morgan Godwyn wrote that colonial slaveholders ranked their African slaves as subhuman animals and treated them accordingly—by which he meant the slaveholders treated their slaves in ways that would be morally impermissible for the treatment of human beings but permissible for the treatment of livestock. Much the same idea was expressed more than two centuries later by William J. Northen, governor of Georgia between 1890 and 1894, when he wrote that “During my recent canvass of the State, in the interest of law and order I was amazed to find scores, and hundreds of men, who believed the negro to be a brute … and his slaughter nothing more than the killing of a dog.”65
The claim that dehumanization fosters violence is sensible. But some people go further, and make a far stronger claim. They say that dehumanization has got to be in place in order for the most horrific forms of violence to occur, or that dehumanization is enough to spark horrific acts of violence. I do not agree with this. It is certainly possible for people to perform hideous acts of cruelty against others without dehumanizing them. And it is likewise possible for people to dehumanize others without doing violence to them. History supports both of these claims.
From the late twentieth century onward, psychologists such as Herbert Kelman and Albert Bandura explained the connection between dehumanization and violence by proposing that dehumanization fosters “moral disengagement,” which makes it permissible to commit acts of violence against those whom we regard as subhuman.66 However, unlike most dehumanization theorists who have addressed this topic, I do not believe that moral disengagement is the mechanism linking dehumanization with atrocity. In fact, I think that the precise opposite is true. Dehumanization fosters violence precisely because it fans the flames of an immensely destructive kind of moral engagement (I will have much more to say about this in Chapter 8).
Now, having surveyed the conceptual territory and contrasted my preferred conception of dehumanization with its main competitors, I am positioned to argue why we should accept that dehumanization, as I describe it, really does exist. That is the mission of Chapter 2.