On June 28, 1964, just short of a year before he was brutally assassinated, Malcolm X stated, on behalf of the African American people, “We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”
Reading these words closely and carefully, you might experience puzzlement. Rather than declaring that Black people have the right for their humanity to be recognized, he talks about the right to be a human being, and says that Black Americans intend to bring the state of being human about, along with its attendant rights and respect. These words are deeply insightful. They point to a concept of the human that’s crucial for understanding how dehumanization works. Malcolm suggests—correctly, in my view—that being a member of our species isn’t the same as being human, and that Homo sapiens can be denied humanity, robbed of it, and gain or regain it.
In this chapter I’ll explore the view that, far from being an objective biological category, as most people seem to assume, the category of the human is an ideological construction that’s basic to ways that human societies exercise power.
You might think that this is a fool’s errand, because scientists have proved that to be human is to be a member of the species Homo sapiens. It’s true that scientists—and anyone with a modicum of scientific education—accept that all Homo sapiens are human. But it’s definitely not true that there’s a scientific consensus that all humans have been, and therefore must be, members of that species. Many scientists include all members of the genus Homo—a group that includes extinct species such as Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) and Homo erectus—under the umbrella of the human. And there are others who are even more expansive and regard earlier ancestors, such as the small, furry, ape-like creatures called australopithecines, as human too.
These conflicting points of view aren’t really scientific disagreements, even though they’re disagreements between scientists. Scientific disagreements concern facts. Even theoretical disputes between scientists ultimately boil down to disagreement about facts. And scientists settle these disputes by making observations to determine what the facts are. So, for the question of what it is to be human to be a scientific question, there’s got to be some possible empirical evidence that could settle it, even if there are practical reasons why these observations can’t be made.
You might think that there is some fact of the matter about which of our prehistoric ancestors were human and which ones weren’t, but the evidence that would allow scientists to reach a univocal conclusion is out of reach. If only the scientists could actually examine a species like Homo erectus, which died out around one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, they could tell whether or not these individuals were human. Well, let’s try a little thought experiment to find out. Imagine that a team of paleoanthropologists who want to answer this question have access to a time machine. They climb aboard and set the dial to 1 million years ago, so they can meet Homo erectus in the flesh. If this could be done, it would vastly expand our knowledge of this extinct species. The time-travelers could make observations that would answer many questions about these primates’ anatomy and physiology, their social organization, and their behavior. And they could draw well-grounded conclusions about the similarities and differences between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens. But ask yourself whether they could make any observations to determine whether Homo erectus is human. What sort of evidence would answer this question? The fact is, there isn’t, and couldn’t be, any such evidence.
The reason why has to do with how the concept of humanness works. “Human” isn’t a scientific category. It’s a category from folk taxonomy. Folk taxonomies are ordinary, nonscientific systems for classifying things. Some folk-categories map seamlessly onto scientific classifications. For example, the folk category “table salt” corresponds exactly to the chemical category “sodium chloride.” Because the correspondence is exact, whenever you’re talking about table salt, you’re also talking about sodium chloride, and vice versa. When the biologist Ernst Mayr went to New Guinea to catalog bird species, he identified 137 species and was astonished to discover that the local, preliterate people distinguished 136 of them. But the Karam, who also inhabit New Guinea, classify the large flightless cassowary as a human being—not because they are incompetent natural historians (they’re not), but rather because of the peculiarities of the category “human.”
Many folk categories don’t have any systematic relation at all to scientific ones. Think of weeds. Very many different species of plants count as weeds, but there aren’t any biological characteristics that they all share that sets them off from other sorts of plants. So it’s literally impossible to map the category “weed” onto any scientific grouping. Imagine that there’s an alien super-botanist from a distant galaxy who has a complete knowledge of the biological characteristics of Earth plants, but who has no knowledge of human ways of life. Even though there’s literally nothing about Earth plants that the alien doesn’t know in every detail, they wouldn’t be able to tell weeds apart from other kinds of plants.
The reason why the alien would be stumped is that what makes a plant a weed is the role that it plays in certain of our social practices—practices such as gardening, farming, and lawn maintenance. Weeds are just plants that are growing where we don’t want them to be growing, so the category gets its meaning from the way that humans in post-agricultural civilizations live their lives. In hunter-gatherer societies, where there is no clearing and cultivation of land, the concept of a weed would be unintelligible. Fifty thousand years ago, when everyone was a hunter-gatherer, weeds didn’t exist. Weeds are an invented kind—an artifact, or social construction—even though the plants that are weeds are not. And today, in a weed-infested world, the notion is extremely elastic. What counts as a weed in one context doesn’t count as one in another. A dandelion plant growing on my lawn is a weed, but if the very same plant were growing in the woods behind my house, it wouldn’t be one.
I’ve spent so much time talking about weeds because the weed example helps us critically interrogate the concept of the human. The relationship between the folk category “weed” and the various species of plants is very similar to the relationship between the folk category “human” and scientific categories like “Homo sapiens.” The model helps, because, despite their similarities, figuring out what it means to be human is much more challenging than figuring out what it means to be a weed. It’s challenging not because the question of what it means to be human is especially complicated, but rather because the notion of the human is so highly charged for us that we have a hard time thinking clearly about it.
The category of the human is a social construction. This is obvious when we look at some of the ways that it’s actually been used for much of human history and across the globe. Some of the most illuminating examples come from the anthropological literature. The science of anthropology began in the nineteenth century, and from the start anthropologists noticed that there are many cultures in many different parts of the world that refer to themselves and only themselves as “the human beings” or “the real human beings.” As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it in an often-quoted passage, “Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the village. . . .”1
The lesson to be taken from this is that when a group of people essentializes itself—sees itself as fundamentally and ineradicably distinct from all other people—the concept of the human becomes indistinguishable from the concept of “our kind.” In ethnically homogeneous societies, this means members of the society are human, and everyone else is not. In heterogeneous societies where there is “racial” or ethnic diversity—that is, most modern societies—the situation is more complex. In such societies, the concept of the human is an ideological structure. It’s a concept that’s used to legitimate and regulate relations of domination. If, as is often the case, the dominant group essentializes itself, that becomes the paradigm of the human and all others are either lesser humans or, at the extreme, subhumans.
This view of what it means to be human has some important implications for the struggle against dehumanization. One is that it shows us that the idea of the human is a contested and unstable category. Its boundaries shift as power relations change, so invoking a common humanity to combat dehumanization is unlikely to be effective.
A second, related point is that attempts to refute dehumanizing beliefs by pointing out that we are all members of the same species is likely to fall on deaf ears. That argument could only be persuasive to someone who is already committed to the view that all Homo sapiens are human, and that’s the very person who doesn’t need to be convinced. It’s quite rare in the modern world for people to deny that those whom they dehumanize are members of a different biological species (as was common in the nineteenth century and before). And there’s no need for them to do so, because it is perfectly intelligible for them to hold the view that there are members of our species that aren’t human.
Malcolm X understood that humanness is a political status that’s brought into existence by social and political forces rather than a biological condition, and he understood that when dehumanized groups assert that they are human, it is an act of staking a claim rather than one of asserting a fact. Fighting dehumanization isn’t primarily about debating facts: it’s about clashing visions of what sort of world we want to live in. These are political conflicts that are deeply entwined with the psychological processes that I described earlier in this book—psychological essentialism and hierarchical thinking—that make them seem to be about facts. There’s much more to be said about the underlying psychological dynamics, how these respond to political forces to produce dehumanizing attitudes, and what all this implies about resisting dehumanization. But first, we need to look at the role of political speech in the cultivation and spread of dehumanizing attitudes.