A Nazi SS officer gazes at a Jewish man being herded toward the gas chamber. What does he see? He sees what looks like a human being: a being with two legs, two arms, and hands equipped with opposable thumbs. He sees a being that wears clothes and speaks German; a being with hopes, aspirations, secrets, memories, and fears; a being that is terrified of his impending fate. In short, he sees a being who is very much like himself, his friends, and the members of his family. And yet, the SS officer does not see the Jewish man as a human being. He sees him as a human-looking subhuman.
It’s hard to accept that one human being can gaze upon another and see that person as less than human—not in some fuzzy metaphorical sense, but as literally subhuman. It seems so incredible that it’s tempting to grasp at some other explanation for the all too common descriptions of others as subhuman creatures. Couldn’t it be that when Nazis claimed that Jews are subhumans, they meant it figuratively as a weapon for degrading and humiliating the Jewish enemy? Yes, of course, it could be that when the Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen, and when White lynch mobs described Black men as predatory beasts, they were speaking figuratively. But this sort of skepticism comes cheap, and it’s motivated by incredulity rather than evidence. True, dehumanization is remote from many people’s everyday experience, especially those who are insulated from the most savage forms of racist abuse. But that doesn’t have any bearing on the question of whether dehumanization, as I’ve described it, is real.
I think that in this case, as well as many others, our default position should be to take dehumanizers at their word. The fact that most of us think that dehumanization is something far removed from how we see others is irrelevant. Schizophrenic hallucinations are far removed from our everyday experience too, but that’s no cause to doubt that they are frighteningly real. When a perpetrator of genocide says, in all seriousness, that he could not have butchered his neighbors if he had recognized them as human beings, we should listen to his testimony respectfully, and treat it with deadly seriousness.
The fact that people sometimes believe that other people who appear human are really less than human illustrates something important about how the human mind works. It shows that we don’t think that merely looking human is what makes a being human. Instead think of humanness as something deeper that’s “inside” of them—something more than the portions of the physical body that meet the eye.
Although this pattern of thinking might seem strange, it’s actually quite familiar and comes to us very naturally. Our understanding of pretense and disguise is based on our ability to distinguish between what something seems to be on the surface and what it really is beneath surface appearances. This is a vital cognitive skill that often serves us well—for example, when we use it to recognize that others are deceiving us (or when we project a false impression in an attempt to deceive others). Think of salesmanship and politics. Think of hype. Think of attractive packaging that conceals defective goods or a dangerous product.
The distinction between how things seem and what they are also underpins the idea of racial passing. Recall that Janie was outwardly indistinguishable from a White girl, even though, according to the rules of the American racial taxonomy, she was definitely Black.
The notion that a person’s appearance may give a false impression of their race is a problem for every racist regime. In such societies, members of the dominant group fear being infiltrated by those members of the oppressed group who look just like them. That such a fear exists implicitly challenges the whole idea of a racially stratified society, because it shows that the racial categorization doesn’t correspond to real differences between people. This racial paranoia is most acute in situations where there aren’t reliable-enough bodily markers of race. In the United States, the default assumption is that Black people have a distinctive appearance that makes them easily identifiable, even though very many people who are classified as Black, according to the norms used in the United States, are visually indistinguishable from those classified as White. In Nazi Germany, matters were less clear cut. Nazi functionaries who were charged with the task of segregating and later on exterminating Jews were confronted with the problem of distinguishing Jews from Aryans. Of course, there were many Semitic-looking Jews, but there were very many Jews who looked like Aryans—including tall, blond, blue-eyed ones like me. Even worse, there were olive-skinned, dark-haired Germans who could easily be mistaken for Jews.1
This explains why German citizens were required to document that they didn’t have Jewish ancestors, why Hitler’s government supported biomedical research aimed at finding something special about Jewish blood, and why Jews were marked out as racially alien by being forced to wear the yellow star. And it also explains the long-standing anti-Semitic belief that Jews are, by their very nature, masters of deception and disguise. The idea is clearly expressed in the infamous 1941 anti-Semitic documentary film The Eternal Jew, which was filmed in the Lodz ghetto in occupied Poland. At one point in the film the narrator intones (with ominous music playing in the background):
The Jews alter their outward appearance. They leave their Polish haunts for the rich world. The hair, beard, skull-cap, and kaftan make the Eastern Jew recognizable to everyone. Should he remove them, only sharp-eyed people are able to recognize his racial origins. The essential trait of the Jew is that he always tries to hide his origin when among non-Jews.
The scene then switches to a row of bearded Jewish men, in traditional garb, facing the camera, shown one by one, while the narrator states, “A bunch of Polish Jews, still wearing kaftans.” Next, the same men are shown clean-shaven, wearing suits and ties, while the voiceover explains, “And now in Western European clothes, prepared to infiltrate Western civilization.”
Obviously, the concept of passing rests on the idea that a person’s appearance isn’t what makes them a member of a certain race. If you take the notion of passing seriously, you’ve got to believe that race is grounded in something deeper—something that doesn’t meet the eye—a racial essence. The example of the relation between gold and fool’s gold is a helpful analogy. Fool’s good looks very much like gold, and is therefore very easy to mistake for gold. But gold and fool’s gold are entirely different substances. Gold is a chemical element (number 79 in the periodic table), but fool’s gold is a compound of iron and sulfur. Like a piece of gold and a piece of fool’s gold, this kind of racialized thinking has it that two people may look like they’re members of the same race, but they really belong to different races on the inside, where it matters. Dehumanization follows the same cognitive pattern that allows us to distinguish gold from fool’s gold, and to embrace the idea that people can pass as members of a race that’s not their own.
Both racial passing and dehumanization are grounded in what’s called psychological essentialism: our seemingly irrepressible tendency to group things into natural kinds—for example, races or biological species—and to think that what makes any individual belong to one of these kinds is their possession of the essence of that kind. Just as races are supposed to have racial essences, species are supposed to have species essences. It’s the species essence of an animal that’s supposed to produce those aspects of its appearance that are typical of its kind. Take the example of cats. According to the essentialist mindset, what makes a cat a cat is its possession of an inner cattiness—the cat essence. And it’s this cat essence that’s supposed to manifest in the cat’s body as typically catty traits, such as having retractable claws, tending to meow, being fond of milk, and so on. The cat essence shapes the cat’s appearance through a process of development and growth.
There’s also a “normative” dimension to essentialistic thinking. The essence of a thing is supposed to dictate the way that it’s supposed to be (the way of being that’s “natural” for it), and departures from this mark an individual out as deviant, pathological, or even monstrous. Returning to the feline example, the idea is that there’s a way that cats are supposed to be, even though there are deviant cats that don’t conform to type: cats with three rather than four legs, cats that don’t meow, cats that dislike milk, and so on. These cats are seen as abnormal or defective, because their essence isn’t fully realized in their appearance. In normal cases we can use the kind-typical characteristics to identify an animal as a cat, but in abnormal cases, the deviant appearance of an animal can lead us astray. A final and very important feature of essentialism is the idea that the essence of a thing is unchangeable and irrepressible. A cat tends toward cat-like behavior, which can be suppressed but can never be extinguished. Even though it might not be manifest, the inner cattiness is always poised to spring out. Once a cat, always a cat.
What I’ve just said about cats applies just as much to essentialist beliefs about races. Races are supposed to be natural human kinds with distinct racial essences. These essences are supposed to be located in our genes or blood, and are expressed in certain aspects of our bodily appearance, such as skin color, hair texture, and behavioral inclinations. Members of a race who look and act in a way that’s thought to be typical or “natural” for members of that race are regarded as “true to their kind.” But the ordinary conception allows that it’s possible to belong to a race without displaying the stereotypical characteristics of that race, and no matter how ruthlessly their racial characteristics are hidden or suppressed, they inevitably tend to manifest themselves. And it’s supposedly impossible for a person to change their race. The idea that race is ineradicable is captured in the title of Thomas Dixon’s virulently racist novel The Leopard’s Spots (the first book in his Ku Klux Klan trilogy),2 set in the Reconstruction period after the American Civil War. The title is a reference to a sentence from the Book of Jeremiah: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” and is meant to convey the idea that, having been freed from slavery, Black people would inevitably revert to savagery because that is an expression of their essential nature.
To a very great extent, the form of dehumanizing thinking has the same basic form as racial thinking does. When we dehumanize people, we think of them as apparently human on the outside, but essentially subhuman on the inside. From the dehumanizer’s perspective, dehumanized people are subhumans passing as humans, because their humanness is only skin deep. Furthermore, dehumanized people are thought to be irredeemably subhuman. It is their permanent condition. Although these subhumans may be very good at mimicking true human beings, this is merely a façade and they are always on the verge of reverting to type. So, thinking that they are like “us,” the real human beings, is a foolish and dangerous error.
We are all vulnerable to the dehumanizing impulse because we are equipped with a set of powerful psychological biases that make this possible. The tendency to essentialize kinds of living things helps us get along in the world, even though it’s scientifically misleading. But it also produces states of mind that are immensely dangerous and toxic. Acknowledging your own tendency to essentialize, and remaining vigilant about combatting it, is a crucial step toward resisting dehumanization.