In our increasingly secular world, the idea that dehumanized people are literally demonic or in league with Satan has lost credibility, except in religious fundamentalist circles. This did not eliminate the idea that dehumanized people are monstrous or demonic—it simply cast the basic idea in a different mold. The medieval idea of essentially demonic people gradually morphed, from the seventeenth century onward, into the idea that there are essentially criminal ones.
The lynching epidemic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the mass incarceration of Black Americans that came in its wake, was driven by the idea that Black people—especially Black men—are criminal to their core. This was the received wisdom among many Whites, both in the North and in the South. Hinton Rowan Helper, whom Lincoln appointed as US consul in Argentina, wrote graphically of the “crime-stained blackness of the negro,” which he fleshed out in a popular White supremacist diatribe:
In every district and community of considerable size, on the right hand and on the left, they are almost constantly committing brutal murder and highway robbery; breaking into dwellings and warehouses; depredating on orchards, fields of grain, and granaries; appropriated to their own use other people’s cattle, pigs, and poultry; stealing everything that they can lay their hands upon; outraging pure and innocent white girls; and not infrequently, in a spirit of the most savage wantonness and revenge, setting on fire and utterly destroying the houses of their white neighbors. Terrorism reigns supreme among the white females of every family, and sleep is banished.1
The picture of Black men as predatory animals was promoted by White women as well. The image of the Black male, and the vicious attitude that accompanied it, was succinctly expressed by the suffragette (and later senator) Rebecca Felton, who declared “if it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say, lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.”2 This picture of Black men has never fully dissipated. During the 1990s, political scientist John Delulio popularized the term superpredator for a new edition of the racial monster trope. He described superpredators as vicious, degenerate young men who gather in “wolf packs” to hunt down, rape, and murder innocent victims. When five Black teenagers—christened the Central Park Five—were falsely accused of brutally raping a New York jogger, future president Donald J. Trump spent eighty-five thousand dollars on four full-page newspaper ads calling for their death, writing, “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them. . . . I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.”3 Not to be outdone, conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan urged, “If the eldest of that wolf pack were tried, convicted and hanged in Central Park . . . and the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds were stripped, horsewhipped, and sent to prison, the park might soon be safe again for women.”4
Even though the Central Park Five were eventually exonerated on DNA evidence, after serving time in prison for a crime they did not commit, Trump continues to claim that they are guilty.5 In doing so, he conforms to the dehumanizing logic of racial essentialism. If Black males possess a superpredatory essence, then they are fungible. They are guilty of rape and murder even if they never commit rape or murder, because they have rape and murder in them. As Yusef Salaam, one of the five, put the point, “We were convicted because of the color of our skin.”6
More recently, dehumanized people of color have again been in the news. If President Trump and his cohort are to be believed, vicious Brown monsters have been swarming across our southern border from Mexico and Central America. He proclaimed at a 2017 rally in Youngstown, Ohio, that “these animals . . . take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15, and others and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long.”7
Dehumanized people aren’t always imagined as superpredators, partly because this is a gendered category that’s mainly reserved for males, and partly because there are forms of dehumanization that don’t involve the crucial element of physical dangerousness (I discuss this in chapter twenty-five). However, the image of the predatory monster is an important component in a great deal of dehumanizing propaganda, and it can strike a deep chord in us, because it triggers some of our most primal fears. Superpredators aren’t just criminals, and they aren’t even just violent criminals. They are subhumans endowed with superhuman powers.
This idea is commonly found in dehumanizing belief systems. Dehumanized people are formidable, monstrous, demonic. I’ve already discussed the anti-Semitic idea that Jews control the entire world—a theme frequently represented in Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda as an enormous octopus emblazoned with the Star of David, whose tentacles envelope the world, and in the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be a record of the Jewish project of world domination. We find a variation on the same basic theme in White people’s images of Black men from the post–Civil War period onward. Whereas Jewish men were supposed to be endowed with superhuman, demonic intelligence, Black men were supposed to possess superhuman physical powers—an aspect of dehumanization that psychologists Adam Waytz, Kelly Marie Hoffman, and Sophie Trawalter call “superhumanization.”8 Not long before their paper on superhumanization was published, Waytz, Hoffman, and Trawalter wrote an article for the Washington Post arguing that police officer Darren Wilson’s description of his encounter with Michael Brown, whom he fatally shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, suggested that Wilson superhumanized Brown. Wilson told the grand jury that investigated the shooting the following:
The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, how angry he looked. . . . He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. . . . At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.
The psychologists plausibly commented, “Although unclear whether Wilson’s ‘it’ refers to Brown’s facial expression, or Brown himself, the use of the term, ‘demon,’ both sub-humanizes and super-humanizes Brown, clearly casting him outside of humanity.”9
The idea of inherent criminality is at the core of the superpredator myth. In the present-day United States, Black and Latino males are most often tarred with this brush. However, the idea of the racialized criminal is quite widespread—both historically and culturally. Romani people have been regarded as essentially criminal for centuries, and this was (and is) used as a pretext for persecuting them. And the claim that criminality is part of the Jewish essence was a mainstay of Nazi propaganda used to justify their mass incarceration, over-aggressive policing, and ultimate extermination. Michael Berkowitz examines this in great detail in his book The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality:
National Socialism actively cultivated the association of Jews with criminality.
Jews needed to be contained and closely watched, the Nazis contended, because of their propensity to criminality, and they had to be dealt with aggressively, because Jewish communal existence was an incubator for vice. A great amount of thought, energy, and effort was directed, then, to substantiating the stereotype that Jews . . . were always and preeminently a community of crooks, and that the key to managing and controlling Jews en masse was to deal with the phenomenon of Jewish criminality.10
Jews were incessantly represented as rapists, pimps, drug dealers, thieves, and swindlers. The notion that Jews are essentially predatory is explicit in a memo from the Nazi Periodical Service stating, “It is expected that German periodicals will . . . conduct the orientation on Jewish guilt with a tenacity that leaves no doubt in the mind of anyone that every single Jew, wherever he is and whatever he does, is an accessory to crime.”11
It’s possible to describe someone as a monster without ever using the word monster. Unlike the dehumanizing rhetoric of centuries past, present-day dehumanizing rhetoric uses words like “demon” and “monster” figuratively, if at all. Today, the figure of the racialized criminal is the embodiment of monstrousness in developed nations. To resist dehumanization, it is vital to resist the idea that any group of people are inherently, irredeemably criminal. This kind of rhetoric is a danger signal that the members of this group are, or will soon be, considered as less than human.