When Malcolm X stood up to give his first address as the founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, less than a year before his assassination in 1965, one of the themes that he emphasized was the vicious dehumanization of Black people in the United States. Here’s a bit of what he said:
Why, the man knew that as long as you and I thought we were somebody, he could never treat us like we were nobody. So he had to invent a system that would strip us of everything about us that we could use to prove we were somebody. And once he had stripped us of all human characteristics, stripped us of our language, stripped us of our history, stripped us of all cultural knowledge, and brought us down to the level of an animal—he then began to treat us like an animal, selling us from one plantation to another, selling us from one owner to another, breeding us like you breed cattle.1
Malcolm got it right. When one group of people dehumanizes another, they first think of them as members of an alien and inferior race: a lesser kind of human being. Racist denigration morphs into dehumanization when people are imagined to be not merely inferior, but to have a subhuman essence, and this promotes and legitimates their oppression in the eyes of their oppressors. This isn’t the whole story of dehumanization. As you’ll soon see, there’s a lot more that needs to be said. But this is a good place to pause and consider a couple of examples. Although they’re separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, they’re uncannily similar, and they perfectly illustrate the intersection of hierarchy and essentialism that drives the dehumanizing process, often with catastrophic results.
Let’s start in the seventeenth century. In the year 1665, a twenty-five-year-old clergyman named Morgan Godwyn, fresh out of Oxford University (where he had been a student of the philosopher John Locke) set sail for the colony of Virginia. His aim was to spread the gospel to enslaved Africans and Native Americans, who had been actively excluded from the Anglican Church. Godwyn soon came into conflict with the Virginia vestrymen—the wealthy elites who controlled the churches—and after an embattled five years set sail for the English colony of Barbados. By 1670, Barbados had become an economic powerhouse for the ever-expanding sugar industry. It was controlled by a ruthless, elite planter class, and it was a place where enslaved Africans were routinely worked to death, tortured, and mutilated. Godwyn spent ten years in Barbados before returning to England in 1680. The year that he returned, he published his most important work, an explosive little book entitled The Negro’s [sic] and Indians Advocate.
Godwyn’s book may be the first book ever written about the phenomenon of dehumanization. Of course, he didn’t give a detailed analysis of its psychological dynamics (the science of psychology wouldn’t be invented until more than two centuries later). But, on the basis of personal experience rather than third-hand reports or conjecture, he testified that White colonists thought of enslaved Africans as subhuman beasts. He detailed abuses inflicted on enslaved people, including the rape by White slaveholders, and condemned the perpetrators as “the Oppressor” and “the very dregs of the English Nation,”2 who were motivated by their lust for profit and power to regard enslaved human beings as less than human.
As a devout Christian cleric, Godwyn’s overarching concern was the colonists’ practice of excluding Africans from the church. The exclusion was economically motivated. During the seventeenth century, the English were uncertain whether Christians could be legitimately enslaved. Colonists were therefore motivated to deny religious instruction to enslaved people, for fear that this would lead to their manumission. Godwyn makes it clear that this was an important motivation for dehumanizing Black people and Native Americans. Subhuman beasts can’t possibly be Christians, and as non-Christians it was permissible to keep them in bondage. As Godwyn pithily put it in the title of a later publication, this was an example of “Trade Preferr’d before Religion.”3
Looking closely at Godwyn’s report, the core components of dehumanization are plain to see. Godwyn wrote near the beginning of the book that he had been told “privately (and as it were in the dark) . . . That the Negro’s [sic], though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men.”4 Translating his seventeenth-century idiom into twenty-first-century English, Godwyn is telling his readers that Whites believed that although Black people appeared outwardly human, they were not in essence human beings. Later on, in the same text, he adds a bit more detail. Black slaves, he said, are “Unman’d and Unsoul’d” (in other words, dehumanized) and are “accounted and even ranked with Brutes” (relegated to a subhuman position in the hierarchy of nature). And in another work written several years earlier, and posthumously published in 1708, Godwyn stated in a similar vein that White colonists believed that Africans were “Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly.”5 As the possession of a soul was regarded as the essence of the human, any being lacking a soul was thereby excluded from the family of humanity. Godwyn held that the “unsouling” of enslaved Africans was used to justify the unimaginably cruel atrocities to which they were subjected.
Now, let’s leave the horrors of Caribbean slavery behind and travel two hundred and fifty years and five thousand miles east to Germany, and then on to the Nazi extermination camps in Poland. In 1942, the Berlin publishing house of the SS—the elite paramilitary organization responsible for the sprawling network of concentration and slave labor camps, as well as the five extermination camps in Poland—produced the eye-catching pamphlet entitled Der Untermensch (“The Subhuman”) that I briefly mentioned in chapter four.
Der Untermensch describes the Jewish race as a race of subhuman beings that are intent on destroying everything that’s good and wholesome in the world: “Just as the night rises against the day, the light and dark are in eternal conflict. So too is the subhuman the greatest enemy of the dominant species on earth, mankind.” The first page announces that Jews aren’t human, despite appearing so.
The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes, and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.
And the next paragraph states explicitly that their rank on nature’s hierarchy is below humans:
Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any human. . . . Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it!6
Although hundreds of years and thousands of miles separate the two examples, the way that Jews are portrayed in Der Untermensch is uncannily similar to the descriptions in Godwyn’s report. In both cases, the idea that a being can have a human appearance conjoined with a subhuman essence plays a major part. Of course, there are important differences between these two examples as well. Some of these are cultural (for instance, the Nazis didn’t think that having a soul is what makes one human, so they didn’t claim that Jews didn’t have souls). But others have to do with the particular form of oppression that dehumanization facilitates. Black people in the Caribbean were dehumanized as part of their enslavement and they were therefore imagined as creatures akin to farm animals. Jews during the Third Reich were slated for extermination, and were compared to filthy vermin or diabolical monsters.
Looking at these episodes of dehumanization, we can see at work all the processes that I’ve described. Dehumanized groups are racialized and then attributed a subhuman essence that’s said to lay underneath their human appearance. This makes it easier to perpetrate atrocities against them—to exploit, torture, or kill them.