For historical reasons having to do with colonialism, both Americans and Western Europeans strongly associate race with skin color and other associated phenotypic traits, but the recurring nightmare of the dominant group in every racist regime is that members of the subordinate group will slip through the cracks in the wall of oppression and pass as members of their ostensibly superior kind. The term “passing” was already in use during the early nineteenth century. It appears in Richard Hildreth’s 1836 novel The Slave: or Memoir of Archie Moore (the first American abolitionist novel) and is a central theme of many subsequent literary works.1 The idea of racial passing is predicated on the essence / appearance distinction. If it is possible for a person not to appear to be of their race, then a person’s race is fixed by their ancestry rather than their appearance. And race is regarded as being fixed by ancestry because of false, essentialist beliefs about the transmission of essences from one generation to the next.
Think back to the distinction that I made in Chapter 1 between having a cold and having the symptoms of a cold. Having a cold is not just having a bundle of cold symptoms. The cold is what causes the cold symptoms of stuffy nose, sore throat, and so on, but it is possible to have these symptoms without having a cold (you might have hay fever), and it is also possible to have a cold without having any of these symptoms (when you are first infected with a rhinovirus—which we can think of as something like the “essence” of a cold—you have a cold but the symptoms have not appeared yet). The relationship between having a cold and having cold symptoms is analogous to the relationship between having a race and appearing to be a member of that race. Physical characteristics that are associated with racial categories such as skin color, eye shape, and nose shape are taken to be generally reliable indicators of that person’s race, but they are not diagnostically foolproof.
Changing one’s race is ruled out by the logic of racial essentialism. If your race is essential to the person that you are, then it is impossible to change your race while remaining the person that you are. According to the folk theory, then, race is immutable and racial passing is a form of pretense or disguise. When a person passes as a member of another race they are falsely regarded as belonging to that race (they might even falsely regard themselves as belonging to that race). Their appearance contradicts their essence.
Because the idea of changing race flies in the face of essentialist assumptions, thought experiments with this theme are a rich source of insights into everyday beliefs about race. One such is Oskar Panizza’s story “The Operated Jew,” published in 1893. It has been described both as “one of the most repulsive and insightful narratives ever written about German anti-Semitism” and as a scathing parody of anti-Semitic beliefs.2
The narrative revolves around a medical student named Itzig Faitel Stern. He is an anti-Semitic caricature: physically grotesque, behaviorally eccentric, and speaks a mishmash dialect of Palatinate German and Yiddish. That Faitel is racially Jewish—rather than just culturally Jewish—is explicit in the narrator’s description: “Now I no longer want to keep the reader in the dark as to how I became associated with this remarkable figure. There was certainly a great deal of medical or rather anthropological curiosity in this case. I was attracted to him in the same way I might be to a Negro whose goggle eyes, yellow connective optical membranes, crushed nose, mollusk lips and ivory teeth and smell one perceives altogether in wonderment and whose feelings and most secret anthropological actions one wants to get to know as well!”3
The narrator also remarks on Faitel’s forlorn attempts to transcend his race. Faitel is a “monster” and an object of fascination, not just because of his own inherent grotesqueness, but importantly because of his efforts to ape the characteristics of superior Germans. “I observed with astonishment how this monster took terrible pains to adapt to our circumstances, our way of walking, thinking, our gesticulations, the expressions of our intellectual tradition, our manner of speech.… Consequently, he was beheld with ridicule and astonishment.”4
Frustrated by his failure to assimilate, Faitel appeals to the distinguished surgeon Dr. Klotz, who agrees to perform a series of radical medical interventions to reconfigure his Jewish body into an imitation of an Aryan one. His bones are broken and reset to give him a Teutonic bearing, he wears a spiked belt (“as they do with dogs”5) to correct his Jewish slouch, his skin color is chemically lightened, his hair is straightened and made blond. And there are behavioral interventions too. His Yiddish patois is replaced by rasping Hanoverian High German, his Jewish blood is replaced by a transfusion of pure German Christian blood, and he changes his name to Siegfried Freudenstern. Finally, Faitel achieves the pinnacle of racial success. He becomes engaged to marry a blond, quintessentially Aryan woman.
But it is just at the point that Faitel’s transmutation seems complete, and he has become a perfect counterfeit of a gentile German, that things go terribly wrong. He gets drunk at his wedding feast, and his sham Aryanness catastrophically unravels.
Now everyone’s attention in the room was immediately drawn to him. Even the waiters carrying large piles of dishes came to a stop and stared at the middle of the rows of tables where a bloodthirsty, swelling, crimson visage spewed saliva from flabby, drooping lips, and gushing eyes stared at them. Even Klotz lost his composure and looked with horror at the Jew next to him.… At this moment Faitel jumped from the chair, began clicking his tongue, gurgling, and tottering back and forth while making disgusting, lascivious, and bestial movements with his rear end.… He jumped around the room. “I dun bought for me Chreesten blud! Waitererá vere iss mine copulated Chreesten bride? Mine briderá! Geeve me mine briderá! I vant you shood know dat I am jost a Chreesten human being like you all. Not von drop of Jewish blud!”6
Faitel’s subhumanity is hinted at throughout the tale. As literary scholar Joela Jacobs observes, “By likening Faitel’s appearance and behavior to that of animals, the text calls into question whether its alien protagonist is fully human.… Unrecognizable to his old acquaintances, the blond, tall, and upright Siegfried Freudenstern is now able to lead a different life … of someone who matches the normative description of a German man and a human being.”7 That Faitel was a human being in name only gets hammered home in the final sentence of the story: “Klotz’s work of art lay before him crumpled and quivering, a convoluted Asiatic image in wedding dress, a counterfeit of human flesh, Itzig Faital Stern.”8 Even Faitel’s straight faux-blond hair darkens and curls, reverting to its original Semitic condition.
“The Operated Jew” can be read either as blatantly racist propaganda or as a parody of racial essentialism. In either case, the explicit motif is obvious: transracialism is impossible. No matter what cosmetic changes are made, no matter how assiduously one masters the appearance, speech, and mannerisms of another race, no matter how effectively one passes for a member of that race, one’s racial essence will win out in the end, precisely because although essences can be covered up, they cannot be changed.
In 1922, the German-Jewish philosopher and writer Salomo Friedlaender, using the pen name “Mynona,” wrote a response to Panizza’s fable. He named it “The Operated Goy.” Friedlaender’s story, which was written under the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany, is an inversion of Panizza’s. And it exposes the madness of racial thinking. Friedlaender turned “The Operated Jew” on its head. Instead of a story about a grotesque Jew trying desperately and impossibly to change his race, we are treated to an account of an über-German man, Count Kreutzwendedich Rehsok, transforming himself into a Jew.9 Rehsok (“kosher” spelled backward) belongs to a family that “was accustomed to boasting about the indisputable purity of a racial bloodline that had been documented for centuries.” We are told that for the last two millennia every count in the Rehsok line had joined the “struggle against the Jewish plague,” especially the struggle against those Jews who married noble Prussians and had thereby “poisoned the milieu of the king with the pestilential stench of their misbegotten blood.”10 Given this immaculate pedigree, it is not surprising that when Kreutzwendedich left home to visit his noble relatives in Bonn, “his parents, siblings, aunts and uncles … kept warning him: ‘Keep your blood pure! There are now enormously rich Semitic daughters who are keen on our kind.’ ”11
On the face of it, this man was unlikely to fall for the seductive wiles of a Jewess. His anti-Semitic credentials were impeccable. An early supporter of the National Socialist movement, he strictly avoided purchasing any products produced by Jewish manufacturers, and he deleted all of the Jewish names from his copy of the Bible, replacing them with proper German ones (for example, “King Solomon” became “King Friedrich”). He cut a striking figure on his daily walks through Bonn, adorned with a bright red swastika armband and accompanied by a Great Dane, a pair of pet ravens, and his huge servant, who was responsible for choosing a route for him that steered clear of Jewish schools and synagogues. The count “strutted through the streets with the customary White student cap on his blond parted hair, his monocle on his eye, followed by his livery servant in a set distance.” As soon as this entourage encountered anything or anyone Jewish, the manservant alerted them with a shrill blast on a silver whistle. The count’s Great Dane was carefully trained to savage any Jew that came too close, and one of the ravens was trained to chirp the anti-Semitic “Borkumlied” (“Borkum Hymn”).12
Kreutzwendedich’s conspicuously anti-Semitic behavior delighted the gentile families of Bonn, but it aroused the ire of the beautiful Rebecka Gold-Isaac, a Jewess who vowed to bring this racist to his knees. “I am going to buy me this pompous turkey,” she vowed, “even if I have to marry him out of revenge.”
Donning a blond wig and assuming an aristocratic German name, Rebecka arranges to encounter Rehsok on one of his walks, and he immediately falls in love with her. Rebecka’s first ploy is to arrange for the Count to travel to Vienna for an appointment with Sigmund Freud. Freud gets him to face the fact he is sexually attracted to Jewish women, and to admit to himself that the woman whom he desires is Jewish. Rebecka then tells him that she will not marry unless he transforms himself a Jew, one that is “completely Jewish, a Jew to the point of excess … You do not love me with all your heart unless you become Jewish deep in the marrow of your Aryan bones, a Jew and nothing but a Jew.” Rehsok agrees, and he submits to a sequence of painful medical procedures at the hands of a physician named Dr. Friedlaender, who circumcises him, darkens his skin, flattens his feet, and performs cosmetic surgery to morph his nose into a Jewish-looking one. Rehsok’s blond hair is removed and his bones are broken and reset so that his upright aristocratic posture morphs into a Jewish slouch. Finally, he is packed off to Romania to study Torah and learn to speak perfect Yiddish and Hebrew, with all of the right inflections and gesticulations. The formerly ultragentile count emerges from this regimen as a fully-fledged Jew, changes his name to Moishe Kosher, becomes a Zionist, and emigrates to Palestine with his spouse. Friedlaender concludes,
Certain orthopedists are feared and resisted by people who are still proud of the purity of their race. Nevertheless, Professor Friedlaender has enjoyed an enormous increase in clientele. He has an institute that rents out masks, but it does not rent out mere costumes. Rather it produces skin and hair, bone and muscle as disguises. A former emperor from the West recently had himself transformed into a Negro in order to escape the Bolshevist rabble. Czar Nicholas, who had disappeared, is living today as a harmless Rabbi in Moishe Kosher’s vicinity, and they are on familiar footing with each other. One no longer bases everything dogmatically on racial differences. Racial blood has stopped being considered a special kind of vital juice. Meanwhile, Professor Friedlaender gathers it in bottles and continues to transfer it undauntedly from one vessel to another.13
Panizza and Friedlaender present us with opposed views of the possibility of changing one’s race, each of which is grounded in a different conception of what race is. For Panizza, a person’s race is part of their essence, and cannot be eliminated or exchanged for a different racial identity. Changes of appearance that make one resemble and therefore pass as a member of a different race are merely cosmetic, and one’s true racial essence—no matter how radical and thorough the outward transformation is—will always reassert itself and subvert the transracial pretense. Panizza’s perspective thus accords with the popular, essentialist view of race as a permanent biological feature. Friedlaender presents us with an entirely different conception. He denies that racial metamorphosis is possible, not because race is fixed, but rather because it is an insubstantial social contrivance. Joela Jacobs sums this up nicely: “In a world where one’s skin color can be changed like one’s hair color, categories such as race lose their power. Kreutzwendedich’s total transformation results in a radical change in the way humankind conceives of identity. It is no longer understood as an unchangeable result of one’s blood or physical properties, rather, it becomes mutable and mobile.”14
Friedlaender presents us with a vision of a world in which the very notion of race has disappeared and been replaced by a humanistic perspective. As he wrote from Paris, where he had fled in 1933 to escape the Nazi menace, and where he died in poverty, “I shall defend the sublime, beautiful, good, pious, intelligent human being, that is just as much in the German as it is in the Negro and the Jew.”15
George Schuyler’s 1931 satirical novel Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, 1933–1940 is yet another literary treatment of the same thought experiment, this one in a distinctively American key. The plot revolves around the invention by a Black scientist named Junius Crookman of a process called “Black-No-More” that makes Black people visually indistinguishable from Whites. The novel’s protagonist, Max Disher, decides to undergo the Black-No-More process after being rebuffed by a beautiful White woman in a Harlem nightclub who told him when he invited her to dance, “I never dance with niggers!” After his transformation, Disher changes his name to Fisher and moves to Atlanta, where, posing as an anthropologist, he becomes a senior member of the Knights of Nordica, a White supremacist order headed up by the father of the woman who had previously spurned him. Meanwhile, African Americans flock to Black-No-More sanitaria, and the nation is socially, politically, and economically convulsed by the evaporation of its racial underclass.
Black No More relentlessly undermines the concept of race. Schuyler skillfully plays on the essence / appearance distinction to make his point. Crookman denies that races are constituted either by their behavior or their appearance. When, early on in the novel, one of his associates worries that people who have undergone the treatment will retain “that darky dialect,” Crookman replies, “There is no such thing as Negro dialect, except in literature and drama. It is a well-known fact among informed persons that a Negro from a given section speaks the same dialect as his White neighbors.” And with regard to differences in facial appearance, Crookman delivers a mini-lecture on phenotypic variation that is worth quoting in full:
Well, there are plenty of Caucasians who have lips quite as thick and noses quite as broad as any of us. As a matter of fact, there has been considerable exaggeration about the contrast between Caucasian and Negro features. The cartoonists and minstrel men have been responsible for it very largely. Some Negros like the Somalis, Filanis, Egyptians, Hausas and Abyssinians have very thin lips and nostrils. So have the Malagasys of Madagascar. Only in certain small sections of Africa do the Negros possess extremely pendulous lips and very broad nostrils. On the other hand, many so-called Caucasians, particularly the Latins, Jews and South Irish, and frequently the most Nordic peoples like the Swedes, show almost negroid lips and noses. Black up some White folks and they could deceive a resident of Benin.16
Crookman’s understanding of the biologically insubstantial character of race—which is neither in the face nor in the blood—is effectively juxtaposed with the ignorance displayed by the White racists who, given the phenotypic changes wrought by Crookman’s procedure, “couldn’t tell who was who!”—that is, couldn’t tell the difference between those who were really White and those who were merely indistinguishable from Whites. Schuyler’s narrator repeatedly describes the Black-No-More process as “turning Negroes into Caucasians” while emphasizing that all that has changed about these people is their appearance. But he describes racists, whose world has been destabilized by racial ambiguity, as “always asking each other embarrassing questions about birth and blood” and worrying that the transformations wrought by Crookman will lead to ostensibly White couples producing phenotypically Black babies.17 In a final ironic twist, it is discovered that the beneficiaries of Black-No-More—the “new Caucasians”18—are actually a lighter shade of pale than the old Caucasians are.
To a society that had been taught to venerate Whiteness for over three hundred years, this announcement was rather staggering. What was the world coming to, if blacks were Whiter than Whites? Many people in the upper class began to look askance at their very pale complexions. If it were true that extreme Whiteness were evidence of the possession of Negro blood, of having once been a member of a pariah class, then surely it were well not to be so White! The upper class began to look around for ways to get darker. It became the fashion for them to spend hours at the seashore basking naked in the sunshine and then to dash back, heavily bronzed, to their homes, and, preening themselves in their dusky skins, lord it over their paler, and thus less fortunate, associates.19
In exploring the contours of racial thinking, Panizza, Friedlaender, and Schuyler all present a picture of folk racial thinking as essentialistic, as situating race “in the blood,” and contrast this conception of race with the notion of race as appearance. In Panizza’s story, transracialism is impossible, because one’s race is fixed by one’s biological essence. But it is also impossible for Friedlaender and Schuyler, not because race is essentialized, but rather because race is a tissue of illusion.
Panizza and Schuyler beautifully portray the essentialist presumptions of vernacular notions of race. In both works, a person’s appearance belies what others regard as their true racial essence. And in both, the merely cosmetic racial transformation is disrupted by the racial essence reasserting itself—in the former by Faitel’s unraveling at the wedding feast and in the latter by the birth of (phenotypically) Black babies to phenotypically White couples. However, unlike Schuyler and Friedlaender, who both express skepticism about the reality of race, Panizza vividly conveys the idea that a racialized person who pretends to be other—who does not know his social and metaphysical place—is grotesque.
The stories by these three authors might seem to be fables far removed from reality. But they are not. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews in Germany dyed and straightened their hair, and even resorted to rhinoplastic surgery to help them conceal their Jewishness. Intellectual historian Sander Gilman states these procedures “were actually meant to ‘cure’ the disease of Jewishness, the anxiety of being seen as a Jew.”20 Likewise, Schuyler was influenced by early twentieth-century experiments in skin dyeing. For example, Major R. F. Shufeldt, MD, of the US Army wrote in his 1907 book The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization,
The Negro is not responsible for his animal nature any more than for the opportunities he takes to gratify the normal impulses which are a part of him. It is not a changing of the spots on the leopard, although some, indeed many, think this to be the case. For example, a writer in The New York Evening Telegram on January 28, 1904, claims to have discovered a treatment for the Negro which will have the effect of turning his skin White! Just as though all savagery, cannibalistic tendencies, thievish propensities, mendacity, and the rest were in the skin of the animal! Such an expedient might, if effective, prove to be of value politically; but it would be worse than useless biologically, for the danger sign—his color—would be removed, and the opportunity would be greater for this semimetamorphosed race to mix its cannibalistic blood with that of the unsuspecting Anglo-Saxon in the United States.21
I have been claiming that beliefs about race are often rooted in essentialist thinking: that thinking of someone as belonging to a certain race is often the same as thinking of them as a member of a discrete natural human kind, and that the person belongs to that kind by virtue of possessing an essence that is causally responsible for the surface characteristics that are taken to be typical of their race. But is it really true that whenever people use racial labels, they have some notion like this explicitly or implicitly in mind?
Sometimes, what seems like racial speech is nothing more than a way of using a person’s appearance to distinguish them from others. For example, referring to a person as “Asian” is just a handy way of picking them out in a crowd. When I lived in an area with a large Afro-Caribbean population in London, England, I was sometimes the only beige-skinned person on the bus that took me home from work. One way I might have described this is that “I was the only White guy on the bus.” In cases like this, the ostensibly racial term is more or less functionally equivalent to expressions like “I was the tallest guy on the bus today” or “I was the oldest guy on the bus today.” I do not think that this way of talking should be considered as genuinely racial speech, because being a member of one or another race is not supposed to be a contingent matter like height and age are.
Anyone who wants to investigate folk theories of race has several strategies available to them.22 One is to pour over the historical literature—to look into what ordinary people, as well as so-called race experts, have said about race in days past. Another method—beloved of philosophers—is to sit back in a comfortable armchair, reflect on how you are inclined to think about race, and then generalize this to others. Yet a third approach is to do empirical research using instruments such as surveys or focus groups to investigate people’s beliefs about race.23 The first two methods have obvious drawbacks. Why assume that the writings of purported race experts reflected prevalent everyday views of their era? And even if the historical sources allow us to build up a picture of how most people thought about race in the past, why assume that people think about race in the same way today? And with regard to the second, the justification for thinking that the reflections of philosophers from the solitary comfort of their armchairs are generalizable to the general public seems wobbly at best. Philosophers are, after all, notorious for departing from commonsense perspectives, sometimes in outrageous ways, so it seems on the face of it unlikely that consulting their own intuitions should give them access to other people’s views about race.
Ordinarily, if you want to find out what someone believes you ask them, so it might seem obvious that just asking people about their racial beliefs is the best way to discover the content of those beliefs. However, I think that this seemingly obvious conclusion is questionable, for several reasons. One is that people’s explicit responses to questions or vignettes about race, even if they are entirely sincere, may coexist with other, unarticulated attitudes. Whatever one makes of the research on implicit attitudes, it is silly to deny that we often harbor attitudes toward members of racialized groups—attitudes that are not conscious or only “sort of” conscious—that conflict with the ones that we explicitly endorse.24 Putting this worry in a nutshell: it seems reasonable to suppose that asking people about their beliefs about race may reveal their beliefs about their beliefs about race, rather than their actual beliefs about race. And these beliefs about their beliefs may fail to line up with reality.
Another cause for concern is that people’s folk theories about race might be unstable. It seems reasonable to think that because these beliefs tend to be emotionally charged, they vary in response to the ebb and flow of experience, and with the context in which one is asked about them. What a person writes down on a questionnaire or tells a social scientist who’s interviewing her might be very different from the way that she thinks about race when she is out on the street or chatting with a friend in a bar. Of course, there is also the problem of simple dishonesty. Because it is generally socially unacceptable to express derogatory attitudes about race, there is always the possibility that subjects will dissimulate, telling the researcher what they think they are supposed to believe rather than what they in fact do believe.
Finally, and I think very importantly, it is quite difficult to get the language right when designing research instruments for probing beliefs about race. One of the most interesting and sophisticated attempts to survey beliefs about race is a survey designed and implemented by the philosopher Joshua Glasgow, in collaboration with Julie Shulman and Enrique Covarrubias. Their method was to use racially themed vignettes, each of which was followed by a multiple-choice question.25 For instance, question 5 (based on the plot of Black No More) begins with the following vignette: “George ‘looks Black’ to the average person, he has all Black ancestry, he identifies himself as Black, and he is accepted as Black by his local community. But George tires of being Black, so he invents a machine that can transform his entire physical appearance so that he ‘looks White.’ After using this machine, he steeps himself in White culture and moves to a new community where everyone identifies him as White.”26 Respondents are then asked whether, after George used his machine, he is (a) White, (b) Black, (c) Mixed, (d) Sometimes White and sometimes Black, or (e) None of the above. Answers to these questions were taken to reveal respondents’ beliefs about how the concept of race works. The authors report that only “51% of respondents determined that George was still Black after using the machine” and therefore that racial essentialism may be less common than many of the people who study race assume it to be.27
This percentage is certainly interesting, but there is a problem that may be skewing the result. As we have seen, words like “black” and “white” have more than one meaning. They can be used as names for colors (a black limousine, a white Christmas), or they can be used as names for races. When George, a racially Black man, emerges from the machine he “looks White.” But what does this mean? It might mean that he looks like a typical racially White person, or that he is literally colored white, or that his skin is colored in way that is typical of people who are classified as racially White. So, the multiple-choice question can be interpreted in at least three distinct ways. A sophisticated reader might take the capitalization of “White” in the vignette to suggest that racial Whiteness is what is being talked about. But then again, she might not—or she might interpret the candidate answers as color terms. I emphasize this to show how difficult it is to design such studies in ways that are likely to yield reliably informative results.
Given all of the problems that plague attempts to use empirical methods to study racial concepts, we should be appropriately cautious about accepting their results. As Ann Morning, a sociologist who studies attitudes toward race, observes, claims about the pervasiveness or nonpervasiveness of racial essentialism “are based on a very thin layer of empirical research—often no more than one study, possibly conducted decades ago—and are often contradicted by another study’s findings.”28
We are not yet in a position to resolve questions about the folk metaphysics of race by turning to empirical, social-scientific studies. The best that we can do at the moment and perhaps at any future moment is to triangulate: cautiously drawing on multiple sources of information, including, but not in principle limited to, historical research, philosophical reflection, naturalistic observation, and social science surveys, to discover areas of convergence and divergence. One thing that can be said with a high degree of confidence on the basis of this strategy is that although essentialism (as I have described it above) may not be a universal folk theory of race, it has been, and continues to be, a very pervasive one. And that is all that is necessary to take the next step of connecting the dots between racializing people and dehumanizing them.
There are two reasons why understanding how we think about race is vital for understanding the phenomenon of dehumanization. One is that they are tied together causally. The dehumanization of a group of people is typically preceded and facilitated by their racialization. The examples that I have stressed in this chapter and in Chapter 4—the dehumanization of African Americans and Jews—illustrate this principle, and there are many more like these. The racialization and dehumanization by Europeans of indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and Asia; the dehumanization of sub-Saharan Africans by Arabs; the dehumanization of the Japanese by allied forces during World War II (and vice versa); the dehumanization of Romani people; and the dehumanization of the Chinese by the Japanese during the 1930s are just a few examples. Most of the apparent exceptions—for example, the dehumanization of the Rwandan Tutsi by Hutus, the dehumanization of Armenians by Turks, and the dehumanization of the marginalized people of Sudan by the Khartoum regime and those loyal to it—are not really exceptions after all if one bears in mind the definition of race that I have delineated earlier in this chapter. When we racialize people, we conceive of them as belonging to a separate and inferior natural human kind, transmitted by descent. The three seeming exceptions mentioned above, as well as very many others, all satisfy this general description.
The other reason why understanding the psychology of racial thinking is crucial to understanding dehumanization is because the two processes are structurally similar. Racialized people are seen as being categorically “other” while retaining their membership in the more encompassing category of the human. They may pass as members of the dominant group by virtue of having an appearance that departs from their supposed racial essence. However, when racialized people are dehumanized, they are seen as categorically “other” in a more extreme fashion. Even though they have a human appearance that leads the unwary to mistake them for human beings, they have a subhuman essence. The structural similarity between dehumanization and racialization—the conformance of these cognitive attitudes to the same pattern—is explained, in large measure, by the fact that both are rooted in psychological essentialism.
So far, I have been taking the notion of subhumanity for granted. But the time has come to unpack it. What exactly is meant by subhumanity? Where does the idea that some human beings are less than human come from? What role does this idea play in human life? An adequate theory of dehumanization has got to be able to answer questions such as these. I will address them next.