There’s a famous scene in The Eternal Jew, the notorious anti-Semitic documentary masterminded by Joseph Goebbels, that shows a river of rats swarming through sewers and cellars. The voiceover says the following:
Where rats appear, they bring ruin by destroying mankind’s goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. . . . They are cunning, cowardly and cruel and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction—just like the Jews among human beings.1
The aim of this footage, as well as some other parts of the film, is to elicit disgust by representing Jews not only as subhuman, but also as filthy harbingers of disease—the “Jewish disease” of Goebbels’s diary entry. Nazi propagandists exploited this imagery in their propaganda posters too, portraying Jews as rats, lice, and carriers of typhus.
Themes of dirt, disease, and disgust loom large in the rhetoric of dehumanization, and not just the Nazi variety. Dehumanized populations are very often described as dirty vectors of infection, and even as disease organisms themselves. And when they’re interred in concentration camps, it’s not uncommon for them to be kept in unhygienic conditions and to be denied opportunities to wash, thus denying them the treatment a person would deserve while forcing them to prove the allegation that they, as a class, are unclean.
Filth and disease are repulsive, so it’s in the interest of dehumanizers to instill or reinforce the belief that members of the dehumanized group are a source of pollution. But I think there’s something more to this than meets the eye—something that’s central to the phenomenon of dehumanization. To begin to comprehend it, we’ve got to turn to a deservedly famous book by the anthropologist Mary Douglas entitled Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, first published in 1966.2
Douglas argues that every culture views the world through a system of categories, and that these define the natural order—a picture of the world in which everything has its allotted place, and that the idea of purity boils down to the idea of things being in their proper place within the scheme. The problem with this is that every system of categories results in anomalies—leftover things that don’t fit into any of the boxes. Such things are regarded as impure and threatening.
In the last chapter, I began to build the case that when people dehumanize others, they conceive of them not simply as subhuman animals, but as both human and subhuman together. Dehumanizing propaganda often makes use of this theme. For instance, there is an anti-Semitic poster from occupied Denmark showing an immense rat. But instead of having a rat’s head, it’s topped with the head of a Jewish man. Even though the text on the poster reads, “Rats, destroy them,” the poster doesn’t depict a rat. It depicts a ratman—an impossible fusion of human being with subhuman rodent. Douglas’s insights are immensely helpful for making sense of this. In the natural order of things, a human can’t be a rat, and a rat can’t be a human. But the poster gives us an image of an unnatural entity—one that straddles the boundaries between natural kinds. On the poster, the ratman is gazing out of its dark hole at what looks like a map of Denmark. The scene exudes an aura of menace and pollution, exactly as Douglas’s theory would predict.
Because every society inevitably encounters things that violate the categories that it sanctions, every society must find ways of dealing with these anomalous things. Douglas identifies five such ways, and all of them turn out to be pertinent to the ways that dehumanized people are treated. One method is to try to eliminate the contradiction.3 Dehumanizers try to strip dehumanized people of their humanity, so they’re nothing but animals. For example, some slaveholders in the United Stated fed enslaved people out of animal troughs along with the plantation dogs. Another way to produce the same result is to exterminate the dehumanized group. Another method is to physically control the anomalous thing. Dehumanized people are beaten, raped, castrated, sterilized, incarcerated, enslaved, subjected to discriminatory laws, and denied ordinary rights and privileges. Dehumanized people are avoided: they are segregated, expelled, neglected, or herded into ghettos, prisons, or concentration camps that separate them from and make them invisible to the dominant majority. Dehumanized people are labeled; time after time, dehumanized people are described as dangerous and dirty. They’re given derogatory names and sometimes required to display certain forms of identification or distinctive forms of dress, such as the yellow star given to Jews in Germany,4 or the blue checkered scarf that those slated for extermination were forced to wear during the Cambodian genocide.
Douglas also identifies a less obvious method—the use of religious rituals to restore and reaffirm the broken social order. We see this in the ritualized humiliation, punishment, and killing of dehumanized people. In a brilliant essay, the sociologist Orlando Patterson argues that spectacle lynchings were literally sacrificial rituals designed to restore the Southern social order. To many Southern Whites, a world in which Black people could claim the rights and privileges that had hitherto been reserved for Whites was a world turned upside-down—a perversion of the racial hierarchy that God and nature had intended. Spectacle lynching was reassuring to them, because it symbolically demonstrated the absolute power wielded by Whites over Blacks, and also ensured that every Black person, from childhood onward, lived in constant terror of being humiliated, tortured, and killed.
The 1893 lynching of Henry Smith is a particularly compelling example of this. Smith was a mentally disabled farmworker accused of raping and killing a four-year-old child. He was arrested in Arkansas and brought back to Paris, Texas, where his lynching had all the trappings of a sacrificial rite. An eyewitness reported the event in gruesome detail, all the while showing no sympathy for Smith:
The Negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the most inhuman monster known in human history.
This first part of the ceremony is best understood as a ritual of degradation. By presenting Smith as a king, the mob was, paradoxically, saying that he was anything but one. The ritual is reminiscent of the story, recounted in the Gospel of John, that the Romans placed a sign on the cross where the tortured Jesus hung stating, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” It’s hard to imagine that the similarity would have been lost on a crowd composed largely if not entirely of Christian churchgoers. In Smith’s case, though, the mockery was not about a claim to be the Messiah. Instead, it mocked this “monster’s” pretention of being a human being. Once the procession reached the designated lynching site, the physical torture began:
His clothes were torn off piecemeal and scattered in the crowd, people catching the shreds and putting them away as mementos. The child’s father, her brother, and two uncles then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. . . . Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons . . . After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons . . . were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and the irons were thrust down his throat.5
After close to an hour of this, Henry Smith was burned alive.
Dehumanization is much more complex than merely thinking of other people as lower forms of life. When people dehumanize others, they think of them as both human and subhuman at the same time, and as violating the categorical distinctions that underpin the natural and social order. That’s why dehumanized people are seen as harbingers of disorder, pollution, and disease. And even though these people are almost always marginalized and vulnerable, they’re depicted and treated as though they are profoundly threatening—thus justifying the violence against them.
When we strive to resist dehumanization, we must take into account these complexities, and understand the sense of threat and doom that dehumanized groups evoke in those who dehumanize them. We must also take into account that once the dehumanization of some group is underway, this growing sense of danger prompts dehumanizers to double down on their oppressive measures, which promotes the spread of dehumanizing ideology. Reasoning and evidence are usually impotent once dehumanization gathers momentum, so resistance needs to happen early. Unfortunately, it’s easy to ignore the warning signs, deny what’s going on, and underestimate how quickly dehumanizing beliefs can gain traction.