CHAPTER TWO

Dehumanization Is Real

You who are reading these words right now may not have any difficulty accepting that psychologically intact human beings (as contrasted with those who suffer from psychotic delusions or those described as “sociopaths”) are able to think of other human beings as subhuman. But there are many people who have a hard time accepting that this is a fact. It sounds so strange to them, so inconsistent with their commonsense assumptions of how human minds work, that they are apt to dismiss it as impossible. Perhaps you are such a disbeliever. This would be understandable. So far, I have only explained to you what I take dehumanization to be; I have not given you compelling reasons to accept that it ever occurs.

In this chapter I aim to explain why any reasonable person should accept that dehumanization, in the precise sense that I have specified, at least sometimes occurs. That it sometimes occurs shows that dehumanization cannot be ruled out on the grounds of its impossibility, because if something is impossible, it cannot occur even once. Of course, showing that dehumanization sometimes occurs says nothing about how frequently it occurs. It might be very rare, or very common, or something in between. However, if dehumanization at least sometimes occurs, it follows that we should open our minds to the possibility that anything that looks like a case of dehumanization (for example, the characterizations of Black men as beasts that I described in Chapter 1) may really be a case of dehumanization.

Passing Strange

In her book Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, art historian Debra Higgs Strickland looks at how medieval European Christians represented those whom they feared or despised as monsters: Jews, Muslims, Tatars, and Black Africans. She shows that European artists represented the monstrousness of these people by endowing them with physical deformities or observable animalistic or demonic traits. Strickland discusses a late thirteenth-century bestiary’s depiction of the archetypal Jew as a monster:

The creature in question is a manticore, described in the text as a ferocious, blood-red, high-jumping, man-eating creature with the face of a man, the body of a lion, and a hissing voice. What is notable about the manticore, however, is his pointed Phrygian hat,1 grotesque Jewish profile, and long beard. The figure is shown with the remains of a human leg clenched tightly in its three rows of teeth, forming a menacing grimace not unlike those of Christ-torturing Jews in passion imagery. The image is otherwise rich in contemporary associations: not only does it suggest a conflation of monstrosity and barbarity as in other “Jewish monster” images, it capitalizes on the association already established in medieval art between the Jews and the red color of infamy. Furthermore, the manticore’s cannibalism easily translates into a reference to contemporary ritual murder accusations.2

Christians were well aware that Jews did not possess the physical characteristics of manticores. They did not have lions’ bodies or multiple rows of teeth (although they were sometimes supposed to possess various animalistic attributes, such as horns and a tail, and were thought to exude a foul odor).3 This is why scholars most often interpret representations of Jews as monsters or demons in medieval art as symbols of sinfulness and evil. However, Strickland argues that their monstrous characteristics were meant to represent not merely their degenerate and sinful character, but also their inner subhumanity.

Why think that? We know that the Jewish infidel was, for many Christians, “considered to be the highest of animals but nevertheless subhuman.”4 Jews were thought to be demonic—in a literal rather than merely a figurative sense. “That is,” observes Strickland, “not only do the Jews and demons physically resemble each other. they are cut from the same cloth,” by which she presumably means they are the same kind of subhuman entity.5 We see this idea expressed in the writing of Peter the Venerable, an influential thirteenth-century bishop, whose tract Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews seethes with dehumanizing, anti-Semitic rhetoric. The bishop opined in this text, “Really I doubt whether a Jew can be human.”6

It is easy to convey the idea of Jewish subhumanity in words. It took Peter the Venerable only nine of them. But how do you convey the idea that Jews are less than human using painted or sculpted images, which were the main media of anti-Semitic propaganda for the illiterate medieval? Images capture only the outward appearances of things, so the idea of inner subhumanity must be portrayed as outer subhumanity—hence the medieval depictions of Jews and other racialized infidels as having monstrous, demonic, or deformed bodies. The same applies to visual propaganda produced in recent times, which encourages the dehumanization national, racial, or ethnic groups by endowing them with animalistic or demonic physical characteristics.7 However, some medieval artists used a technique that allowed them to get around this constraint, and to hint at the idea that although the infidels might look like real human beings, this appearance is deceptive. They represented dehumanized others as visually indistinguishable from ordinary human beings, while including subtle hints, the medieval equivalent of dog whistles, indicating that, despite appearances, these infidel others are really subhuman monsters. Strickland calls these “crypto-monsters.” A crypto-monster is, in her words, “a monster that does not look like one, who visually passes for an ordinary human being.”8 For example, in an eleventh-century text entitled Marvels of the East, which is concerned with the “monstrous races” (subhuman beings that were reputed to live in the most far-flung and inhospitable regions of the earth), there is an illustration of two Ethiopians engaged in conversation. They are pictured as having light-colored skin and normal human proportions, all of which Europeans would have found congenial. Dark skin and physical deformity were, during the Middle Ages, cliché visual markers of monstrosity. But here, as elsewhere, we have an image of beings that are clearly supposed to be subhuman (they are members of a “monstrous race”) but who do not display stereotypical subhuman characteristics. Only their loincloths and the wild landscape behind them hint their monstrous status.9 The lesson to be learned from this illustration, and others like it, is that to the medieval mind (and, I will argue, the modern mind as well) one can be a monster without looking like one. One can be inwardly subhuman while appearing outwardly human.

The idea of Jewish subhumanity goes back at least to the thirteenth century, and it has persisted across the centuries up to the present (I will discuss this in detail in Chapter 10). The idea that Jews are members of an alien species was a repetitive theme in the burgeoning anti-Semitic literature of the late nineteenth century. Theodor Fritsch, a prominent and virulently Judeophobic journalist and publisher of the day, wrote in 1884 that he could see “no trace of any real human trait” in the Jew, and that there is “a clear distinction between human beings and the Jew.”10 Likewise, the philosopher Ludwig Klages described his “discovery” that “the Jew is not a human being at all.”11 The view of the Jew as fundamentally other ruled out the possibility of Jews assimilating into Christian civilization. Short of divine intervention, Jews could not be transubstantiated into human beings, any more than Black people could choose to become White.12

The impression that there was a “Jewish problem” that could not be solved by ordinary means was already well established by the 1920s, when the National Socialist Party coalesced out of various racist and nationalist elements in German society. The Nazis greatly amplified this simmering attitude, with Hitler taking the lead. “As early as May, 1923,” writes German historian Joachim Fest, “during a speech in the Krone Circus, Hitler had cried out, ‘The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human.’ But when he began organizing his many scraps of ideas and feelings into something resembling a coherent system, they took on a different cast. Henceforth, when he denied that the Jews were human, it was not just the ranting of a demagogue but deadly earnest and fanatical belief.”13

Jews were often seen as counterfeit humans. This idea was concisely expressed in the German proverb “Yes the Jew has the form of the human / However it lacks the human’s inner being,” which was transformed by the distinguished and influential jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt in 1933 into the Nazi slogan “Not every being with a human face is human” and repeated endlessly in Nazi propaganda thereafter.14 Schmitt and his ilk characterized Jews as cosmetically human. On the inside, where it really matters, they were something other.

Black Beasts

We discover a very similar pattern of thinking when examining the history of White people’s attitudes toward Black people. I showed in Chapter 1, using the examples of two nineteenth-century lynchings, how some White Americans characterized Black people as subhuman animals. But the question remains: Did these people really think that Black people were subhuman animals—livestock or pets when enslaved, predatory beasts when freed—or was their use of animalistic slurs just a degrading way of speaking about them? This question does not only pertain to White people’s denigration of Black people. It concerns every case of ostensible dehumanization.

There is extensive historical documentation, accumulated over centuries, of people describing other people as less than human. Despite this, some historians find it difficult to believe that these descriptions were intended literally. In part, this skeptical attitude has to do with an inconsistency. Those who describe others as subhuman also often treat them in ways that are relevant only to human beings. For example, dehumanized people are often held to be morally responsible for their actions. They are punished, often very cruelly, for moral infractions that they are accused of committing. But we don’t regard nonhuman animals as moral agents. Only human beings are regarded as moral agents. That status is reserved for human beings. And dehumanizers often take pains to humiliate their targets, whom they also describe as vermin. But lice and rats are not the sorts of beings that can be humiliated. So (the reasoning goes), if people seem to believe that others are less than human but treat them in ways that are appropriate only to human beings, this must show that they do not really believe that these others are subhuman.

This line of reasoning is often found in the literature on the enslavement and oppression of Black people. For example, Winthrop D. Jordan devotes a section of his important book White over Black to a discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European colonists’ descriptions of Africans as soulless, subhuman brutes. But after laying this out, he goes on to assert, seemingly in stark contradiction to the evidence that he presents, that:

American colonials no more thought Negroes were beasts than did European scientists and missionaries; if they had really thought so they would have sternly punished miscegenation for what it would have been—buggery. Yet the charge that White men treated Negroes as beasts was entirely justified if not taken literally. Egalitarian defenders of the Negro were laying bare an inherent tendency of slavery with the only terms they knew how to employ. It was recognition of this tendency which moved Samuel Sewall to try (unsuccessfully) “to prevent Indians and Negros being Rated with horses and hogs” by the Massachusetts legislature.15

In Jordan’s view, references to Africans as mere animals must have been intended metaphorically rather than literally. It couldn’t have been true that colonists thought of slaves as subhuman because “even in the plantations, the Negro walked and hoed and talked and propagated like other men. No matter how much slavery degraded the Negro, every daily event in the lives and relationships of Negros and White men indicated undeniably that the Negro was a human being. White men feared their slaves’ desires for freedom, they talked with their Negroes, and they slept with them. These were human relationships continually driving home the common humanity of all.”16

The historian C. L. R. James seems to be making a similar point in his book on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins:

The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings. To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it is this that explains the unusual spectacle of property-owners apparently careless of preserving their property: they had first to ensure their own safety.17

Jordan found it so difficult to accept that White colonists really did consider enslaved people to be subhuman that he did not give other, contrary, information enough evidential weight. Just a few pages after the passage just quoted, James mentions an eighteenth-century memoir that characterized Black slaves as only half-human.18 And although it is certainly true that, as Jordan says, opponents of slavery held that Africans were human beings who were treated as livestock, this is irrelevant to the question of whether the slaveholders, as well as other Whites who were friendly to that institution, considered Black people to be soulless beasts. The historical evidence that many of them thought this is overwhelming—so overwhelming that Jordan has difficulty maintaining his own skeptical position, which leads him to contradict his own thesis when he states,

The discouragingly expensive mortality among the Negroes, especially in the West Indies and also in the rice swamps in South Carolina, tended to make Negroes seem almost non-human. Even in an age thoroughly accustomed to the hovering omnipresence of early death, the enormous toll of Negro life must have caused many White men to withdraw in silent horror, to refuse to admit identity with a people that they were methodically slaughtering year after year. The cruelties of slavery inevitably produced a sense of disassociation. To the horrified witness of a scene of torture, the victim becomes a “poor devil,” a “mangled creature.” He is no longer a man. He can no longer be human because to credit him with one’s own human attributes would be too horrible.19

The tension between humanity and subhumanity is plentifully evident in racist writings about Black people. Often, White supremacist writings refer to Blacks both as men and as beasts, sometimes in the space of a single sentence. For example, Hegel characterized the African as an “animal man,” a man who exists “in a state of animality.”20 We also find nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers describing Black people as “men” but also claiming that they are not descendants of Adam and Eve, and therefore not human beings (in the religious version)21 or that they belong to a different, and inferior, biological species than Whites do (in the scientific version).

Those who claim that White colonists did not really think of Black people as beasts are refuted by an ocean of explicit, unambiguous historical documentation showing that White people often did not accord Black people human status.22 For example, when the German traveler Johan Christian Hoffman visited what is now South Africa in 1691 and wrote down his impressions of the indigenous inhabitants, he described them as “more as monstrous apes than as righteous humans,” adding that “because of their brutishness they have almost nothing that resembles a human.”23 From at least the late seventeenth century, and right through the nineteenth century, it was not unusual for White colonists to deny that Africans possessed souls, and thereby to deny their standing as human beings. This is why Lydia Maria Child began chapter 6 of her 1833 abolitionist book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans with the words “In order to decide what is our duty concerning the Africans and their descendants, we must first clearly make up our minds whether they are, or are not, human beings.”24

There is also testimony from Black Americans who were well aware that many Whites considered them to be lower animals. For example, in an 1853 speech to the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, Sojourner Truth informed her audience that during her childhood “I thought I was a brute, for I heard people say that we were a species of monkeys or baboons; and as I hadn’t seen any of those animals, I did not know but they were right.” If it were not the case that the humanity of Black people was often called into question, then Frederick Douglass’s remarks on the subject in his 1854 speech on “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered” would be bizarre. “The first general claim that may here be set up,” Douglass asserted, “respects the manhood of the Negro,” which, he maintained, “is fiercely opposed.” He goes on to discuss, as an illustration of this view, an article from the Richmond Examiner that argued that although even poor Whites possess the inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, “the Negro has no such right—BECAUSE HE IS NOT A MAN!”25

The distinction between what Douglass called “the man admitted and the man disputed” is upheld in much of the scientific and religious literature of the day. An 1860 article by the distinguished Louisiana physician and apologist for slavery Samuel Cartwright proposed that the serpent of Eden was not a reptile but was instead “an animal formed like man,” namely, “a negro gardener” who was not a descendant of the first human couple, created in God’s image, but rather a member of the so-called pre-Adamic races, as are all of his Black descendants. Although Cartwright was not entirely clear about whether Black people are human beings, some of his intellectual heirs were more outspoken. A Nashville clergyman named Buckner H. Payne, writing under the pseudonym “Ariel,” was quite explicit that the gardener in the Garden was a subhuman beast. Black people exist today only because one of their ancestors “entered the ark only as a beast.” So, “the negro is not a human being—not of Adam’s race.” Not too long after, a Pennsylvania Lutheran minister named Gottlieb Hasskarl authored a book that was intended to establish (among other things) that the Black person is “inevitably a beast.”26

Finally, in this particular exegetical lineage, we come to the writings of Charles Carroll. Carroll wrote a book entitled The Negro: A Beast and another entitled The Tempter of Eve, published in 1900 and 1902, respectively, by the American Book and Bible Society, in which he defended Payne’s theory that Black people are not human beings.27 In the first of these, Carroll argued on both religious and scientific grounds that Black people are not members of the species Homo sapiens but are instead a kind of ape, and in the second he argued that the serpent of Eden was in fact a Black man, and that Black people are not human beings. Carroll expressed the view that had been circulating in North America since the seventeenth century, that Negroes did not possess souls, and therefore were excluded from the universe of moral obligation. According to at least two early twentieth-century reviewers, Carroll’s claims were avidly taken up by large numbers of poor southern Whites, and his two books have been described as “enormously influential.”28

These views did not remain unchallenged, but the more mainstream positions weren’t always clear about the human status of Black people either, and most of them were equally unpalatable. A number of scholars embraced polygenesis—the view that each of the races evolved separately from the others (usually with the addendum and that Whites are morally, intellectually, or aesthetically superior to all the others). The notion that Black and White people were distinct species—in a strict biological sense—was apparently first explicitly advanced by Edward Long, a virulently racist British colonial administrator in Jamaica, and was taken up by various others after that.

One of the best sources of information about views on race that were current among American scientists in the mid-nineteenth century is a massive (nearly eight hundred pages long) collection of essays entitled Types of Mankind or Ethnological Researches, which contains contributions from leading intellectual figures of the day, including the biologist Louis Agassiz, the physician Josiah Nott, and the Egyptologist George Glidden. This influential tome went through eight editions in three years, and was even mentioned by Charles Darwin, who was critical of it.

It is clear from many passages that the distinguished contributors to Types of Mankind were convinced that human races are separate species. For example: “It will be seen that we recognize no substantial difference between the terms types and species—permanence of characteristics belonging equally to both. The horse, the ass, the zebra, and the quagga, are distinct species and distinct types: and so with the Jew, the Teuton, the Sclavonian, the Mongol, the Australian, the coast Negro, the Hottentot, &c.; and no physical causes known to have existed during our geological epoch could have transformed one of these types or species into another.”29

These “race experts” claimed that the human races are so different from one another that “differences between distinct races are often greater than those distinguishing [nonhuman] species.”30 Today, we are mostly inclined think of the notion of the human as a species concept: all human beings, no matter how varied, are of the same fundamental kind. But for the nineteenth-century polygenecists, “human” denoted a genus, to which belonged various species—and mixed-race individuals were regarded as hybrids. Nott, who was perhaps the leading scientific expert on race during the mid-nineteenth century, opined in an influential article on race mixing that “at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro Races are, according to the common acceptation of the term, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a hybrid.31 In defiance of easily ascertainable facts, nineteenth-century scientific racists often claimed that the offspring of interracial unions produce only infertile offspring.32

It is worth noting in this connection that there was also a strand in Nazi race theory that conceived of Jews not as a pure albeit inferior race, but as an inchoate mixture of races, a “mongrel” race, which rendered them especially degenerate and depraved. As one article in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer put it, “The Jews are bastards. They show the racial characteristics of the white, yellow, and black peoples. Their revolting body odor also brands them as a foreign race. Their sneaky gait and posture suggest the apes. Many Jews have a small, receding forehead and a skull like a gorilla. As the poodledachshundpincher is a bastard among dogs, so the Jew is a bastard among peoples.”33

Those who regarded Black people as a distinct species did not merely regard them as other. They regarded them as inferior. They assigned each of the races a position on a natural hierarchy—the Great Chain of Being that I mentioned in Chapter 1 and will discuss extensively in Chapter 6—with Whites at the top, most perfect and closest to God, and Blacks at or near the bottom. South African Bushmen were “the lowest and most beastly specimens are but little removed, both in moral and physical character, from the orang-outan” and “are described as bearing a strong resemblance to the monkey tribe.”34 These differences between the races were considered to be static and immutable—fixed for all time by the Creator. Nott wrote baldly that “there is a genus, Man, comprising two or more species—that physical causes cannot change a White man into a Negro, and to say that this change has been effected by a direct act of providence is an assumption which is contrary to the Great Chain of Nature’s laws.35

On one hand, there is evidence that slaveholders accepted that Black people were human beings, and on the other there is evidence that the same people believed that Black people were subhuman. Faced with this inconsistency, it is easy to conclude that those men and women who described Black people as less than human must not have meant it to be taken literally. But this conclusion is too hasty. It is uncontroversial that many White people—including many who were committed to the abolitionist cause—believed that Black people were subhuman “savages.” And, as Gustav Jahoda commented in his classic book Images of Savages, “One might wonder whether these mid-twentieth century writers might not have been influenced by their feeling that no one could possibly have been unsure about the humanity of savages.”36

I think that it is a mistake to interpret the historical record through a binary lens. We do not have to assume that White slaveholders and their racist heirs either regarded enslaved Africans as fully human or regarded them as entirely subhuman. To do so is to make the mistake of insisting that their attitudes were logically coherent. It is instructive to compare the either / or perspective with the subtler position expounded by the preeminent historian of slavery David Brion Davis. Recounting Fredrick Law Olmstead’s description of an overseer who remarked after brutally beating an enslaved teenage girl, “I wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog,” Davis raises the question: “Does this mean that blacks who were treated like animals were literally seen as ‘only animals,’ or as an entirely different species of humans? The answer is clearly no, except perhaps in some extreme cases and for very brief periods of time—as for example in the post-emancipation lynching era, when many black men accused of raping White women were hanged or tortured, dismembered, and burned alive, occasionally before immense cheering crowds of Southern White men, women, and children.”37

Davis then suggests that when Whites dehumanized Blacks, they were in a contradictory state of mind, stating that

since the victims of this process are perceived as ‘animalized humans,’ this double consciousness would probably involve a contradictory shifting back and forth in the recognition of humanity. When Henry Smith was tortured and killed in 1893 before a Texas mob of some ten thousand Whites, many in the crowd no doubt saw him momentarily as “nothing but an animal” as they watched hot irons being pressed on his bare feet and tongue and then into his eyes, and heard him emit “a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal.”38

Davis’s insight that dehumanizers think of those whom they dehumanize as both human and subhuman is true to the historical record and the phenomenology of dehumanization. And it undermines the objection that dehumanization cannot be real because those who seem to regard others as subhuman animals also refer to them, implicitly or explicitly, as human beings.