In 2015, a young White man named Dylann Roof walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and gunned down nine Black Americans. In a powerful article about this massacre published in The New Republic, Rebecca Traister got to the heart of the matter when she stated that Roof “provided the United States with the latest installment of a history lesson we adamantly refuse to learn: that our racist past is not past.” She continued:
It is present. It is unending. It is, in many ways that we seem congenitally unable to acknowledge, fundamentally unchanged. . . . It is a terrible reality. The cold reality of our country right now. We are not post–civil rights. We are not post-race. We are not better than we were. We do not inhabit a world in which stray instances of violence might recall a distant and shameful history. This shame is a flood that has never abated.1
Racism will be with us as long as the notion of race remains intact. And as long as racism persists, dehumanization is just around the corner. I’m aware that this is likely to sound strange or even incredible to you, because it’s commonly believed that ideas about race can be detached from racist attitudes, and that we can accept that there are races without buying into racism. I don’t agree with this. I think it’s worse than wrong, because it prevents us from coming to grips with the continuing problem of racism.
The first thing that we need to look into is exactly what racism is. “Racism” is a problematic word because, like “dehumanization,” it has come to mean so many different things. One view of racism, one that’s probably the most common among the general public, is that racism is race-based hatred. That’s why in the mass media racism is often described as “hate,” and racist speech is often called “hate speech.” This concept doesn’t sit well with what we want the concept of racism to do. Someone who isn’t hostile to others because of their race, but who believes that they are inferior to his own kind is surely a racist. And what about someone who views others through the prism of racial stereotypes, even if those are positive (for example, someone who assumes that Asians are naturally good at math, or Blacks have a talent for basketball in their blood)? Shouldn’t this person be considered a racist too?
Another idea is that racism is just indifference to the well-being of those who are deemed to be racially “other.” This is obviously incompatible with hating people because of their race (you can’t hate someone and also be indifferent to them). And it’s not the same thing as looking down on them or believing that they are inherently inferior (you can simply not care about someone without thinking of them as lesser beings). Other approaches to racism don’t emphasize what goes on in people’s heads, but focus instead on what people actually do out in the world. On this view, if you behave in ways that selectively harm or disadvantage people of a certain race, then you are a racist, irrespective of your feelings, attitudes, or intentions. And then there’s structural racism—the idea that institutions and organizations are structured in ways that empower certain racialized groups and disempower others.
As you can see, the meaning of “racism” is all over the map. And this broad range of meanings makes it all too easy for people who are accused of racism to reject the charge, sometimes in good faith and sometimes in bad. Because of this ambiguity surrounding the word, it would be far more useful just to spell out what we mean—for example, to say of a person that they hate members of other races, or have contempt for them, or fear them, or have disparaging beliefs about them.
If I had my way, I’d get rid of the word “racism” and replace it with more precise and explicit language. But the word “racism” isn’t going to go away any time soon, so we should at least be explicit about what we mean by it. So here’s what I mean by it. Racism is the belief that races exist and that some races are intrinsically superior to others. A person can be a racist, in this sense, even if they don’t feel any hostility toward those whom they regard as their racial inferiors. American slaveowners were certainly racists, but they didn’t hate their slaves, just as they didn’t hate their livestock or their farming equipment. And on the flip side, it’s also possible to hate the members of another race because they are members of that race without thereby being racist, because it’s possible to hate other people without believing that you’re superior to them.
Having put this definition of racism on the table, it’s important to unpack it. The first question that needs to be addressed is what’s meant by racial superiority. The answer isn’t obvious, because there are lots of different ways that we can think of some people as superior to others. They might be superior in height, in strength, in beauty, in musical talent, in intelligence, and in many, many other ways. But none of these notions of superiority correspond to what racists have in mind when they judge themselves to be racially superior. To see why, consider intelligence. There no doubting that the Nazis regarded Jews as their racial inferiors. But they didn’t see any contradiction between the view of Jews as their racial inferiors and the idea that Jews are diabolically intelligent. In fact, Adolf Eichmann, the man who managed the logistics of the Holocaust and who was a fanatical anti-Semite, believed that Jews were more intelligent than Aryans. He ranked Jews as superior to Germans intellectually, but ranked them as inferior to Germans with respect to their humanity.
Eichmann and other Nazis believed that Jews were inferior to Germans because they have less intrinsic value than Germans do. “Intrinsic value” is a philosophical term for the value that a thing has in and of itself, in contrast with its “instrumental value,” which is the value that it has because of what it can get for you. If you marry someone for money, they have instrumental value for you, but if you marry them for love, you value them intrinsically. And money itself doesn’t have any intrinsic value—its value lies entirely in what you can use it to get. It might get you something of intrinsic value (for instance, a great book, a trip abroad, a wonderful work of art).
Racists believe that each race has an intrinsic value. They think that the members of one race are objectively inferior or superior to the members of another just because of their racial identity, and therefore that each race can be assigned a rank on a hierarchy of value. Of course, it’s possible for racists to think of some group as having little intrinsic value as well as being inferior in other ways. In fact, this is usually the case. But devaluing others on the basis of their race is what makes people racists.
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that there are two kinds of racism, which he calls “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” racism. Intrinsic racism is exactly what I call “racism”—the belief that others are inferior solely because they are members of a certain race. In contrast, the extrinsic racist thinks that members of a certain race are inferior because they have undesirable characteristics. A racist might look down on Black people just because they are Black (intrinsic racism) or she might regard Black people as inferior because she believes that they are inherently violent (extrinsic racism).
I don’t think that this distinction goes to the root of the matter. That’s because so-called extrinsic racism seems to always boil down to intrinsic racism in the final analysis. Consider the person who believes that Black people are inferior because they are violent. Suppose she’s confronted with incontrovertible evidence that most Black people never commit a violent crime? She might just deny the facts, but the facts don’t really matter, because her basic attitude is that although not every Black person actually behaves violently they all have it in them to be violent. She believes that violence is built into the Black racial essence, so Black people are inevitably, naturally, irredeemably violent, irrespective of whether that violence ever gets expressed in action. The propensity for savagery is always there, simmering away in the depths of their being, just waiting for an opportunity to burst out. Black people’s crime is, in the words of historian Michael Berkowitz, the crime of their very existence.
There are many examples of this way of thinking in the history of racism. It’s quite clearly expressed, for instance, in a speech by Heinrich Himmler to an assembly of SS officers in the Polish town of Posen. A recording of the speech has been preserved, so we can hear his inflection, as well as the laughter of members of his audience.
I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.”
And then he continues, his voice dripping with ridicule, “And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.”2 On the tape, you can hear members of the audience laugh at this bon mot. Why did it strike them as funny? I think it’s because Himmler was heaping scorn on the idea that some of these Jewish “subhumans” (a term that he actually uses elsewhere in the speech) could be exceptions. Within the Nazi ideological framework, depravity was thought to be built into the Jewish nature, so the claim that there are “first-class” Jews would have struck his listeners as every bit as absurd as the claim that there are round squares.
The same attitude was expressed by the slogan “Nits make lice,” which was used to justify the murder of Native American children, as well as by an old American proverb, “The Indian always returns to his blanket,” which expressed the idea that Indians cannot be civilized, and will always revert to the savagery that’s inherent to their nature. And it’s the view expressed by many White Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War that, once liberated from slavery, Black men would yield to their darkest, most bestial urges.
The idea that some races are superior to others results in the idea of a racial hierarchy. In past centuries, mainstream European intellectuals—for example, the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant—set all this out explicitly in writing. Unsurprisingly, given the human propensity for self-serving bias, these Enlightenment thinkers regarded White Europeans as the highest form of human life, and regarded all the other racial groups—Blacks, Native Americans, “Hottentots” (the indigenous Khoikhoi people of southern Africa), as well as others—as their inferiors. Assumptions about higher and lower races persist to this day. They’re often explicitly stated by members of the alt-right and other extremist groups, and expressed less directly by ordinary citizens—or even those who consider themselves to be “woke.” How could it be otherwise? The idea of race has notions of inferiority baked into it, and the crushing weight of centuries behind it. It’s in the cultural air that we breathe and can’t be switched off by dint of good intentions. That’s not to say that beliefs about race are always destructive. In a racist society, the idea of race and racial pride can provide a sense of strength and solidarity for the oppressed. But this boon comes with a price—perpetuation of the circumstances that make such solidarity necessary. (And remember, the idea of race also provides a sense of strength and solidarity to the Nazis and White supremacists.)3
The ordinary concept of race is hierarchical because it’s a product of conflict and domination. Racializing a group of people has the function of setting them apart, and placing them in a subordinate position (with the racializers setting themselves apart in a superior position). Racialized others are considered to be defective human beings whose true destiny is to be enslaved, exploited, or exterminated by the master race. This idea is an old one. We can find it in the writings of Aristotle, composed over two thousand years ago. Aristotle believed that there are two kinds (that is, two natural kinds) of people in the world: Greeks and Barbarians. He characterized Barbarians as “slaves by nature” and located them somewhere in between livestock and fully human beings (that is, Greek men), because they were not fully capable of rational thought. Aristotle believed that enslaving these people was good for them, because once enslaved they could then benefit from their proximity to the superior rationality of their Greek masters.
It goes without saying that the people whom Aristotle called “Barbarians” didn’t consider themselves as Barbarians. They identified with the ethnic groups to which they belonged. They were Scythians, Persians, or Ethiopians, not “Barbarians.” In ascribing a common nature to these people, by subsuming them under a single label and homogenizing them into a single natural kind, Aristotle defined them as enslaveable. By the criteria that I’ve presented in this chapter, Aristotle thought of Barbarians as a race, or as something very much like a race.
Many centuries later, Spanish colonists revived Aristotle’s doctrine to justify enslaving the indigenous people of the New World. Aristotle’s ideas about slavery were so ingrained that when the king of Spain called for a debate between the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas and the theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda to settle the question, the conversation didn’t address the question of whether slavery is ever morally permissible. Instead, it focused on the question of whether the Indians should be counted as natural slaves. Sepúlveda said “yes,” and Las Casas said “no,” but both took it for granted that there’s nothing wrong about enslaving those who are slaves by nature.
Later on, English colonists took up the theory of natural slavery to justify enslaving Africans. There’s no reason to think that the people of West Africa considered themselves as belonging to a single, homogeneous group prior to the transatlantic slave trade. Then as now, this region of the world was home to many diverse groups with varied languages, cultures, and physical appearances. If asked, they would have identified themselves as Igbo, Akan, Wolof, Fulani, or any number of other ethnicities rather than as “Black.” It was Europeans who lumped them together as Black and negated their specific cultural identities. They subsumed these diverse people under racial labels in much the same way that Aristotle considered all non-Greeks to be Barbarians. And they did this because they had an investment in seeing all Black Africans as creatures of a similar sort—beings that they could enslave, abuse, and work to death on the plantations of the New World.
Like their ancient Greek predecessor, White slaveholders claimed to have done Africans a favor by enslaving them. In the United States, physicians gave this doctrine a medical twist. Physicians threw the weight of their scientific authority behind the claim that forcing Black people to perform hard physical labor was beneficial to them because it improved their frail cardiovascular system. And the doctors reasoned that because slavery is beneficial for Black people, any enslaved person who longed for freedom must be mentally ill. That’s why the longing for escape from bondage was considered a psychiatric disorder, and was even given an impressively scientific-sounding name: drapetomania. If being enslaved was the proper condition of black people—the only condition in which they could lead fulfilling lives that are suited to their true nature—then anyone who wanted to run away was obviously delusional and needed to be brought back to their senses. The treatment for this condition was administered by the whip.
It’s certainly racist to say, for example, that undocumented immigrants to the United States are freeloaders and criminals, but this derogatory way of talking stops short of dehumanizing them. As long as immigrants are characterized in this way, they’re still seen as members of the extended human family, albeit members of an inferior kind. But when people are dehumanized they’re extruded from the category of human altogether. They’re not inferior people. They’re not people at all. Racism ends and dehumanization begins at the boundary that separates human beings from the “lower” animals. Racism is the belief that some races consist of lesser human beings, but dehumanization is the belief that members of some races are less than human beings. Grasping this difference is crucial, because it throws light on why groups are almost always racialized before they’re dehumanized, and why it is that racist attitudes so readily morph into dehumanizing ones. Dehumanization is racism on steroids.