The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah once commented that the claim that genocidal killers think of their victims as subhuman animals is “not quite right,” because “it doesn’t explain the immense cruelty—the abominable cruelty, I’m tempted to say—that are their characteristic feature.” He continued:
The persecutors may liken the objects of their enmity to cockroaches or germs, but they acknowledge their victims’ humanity in the very act of humiliating, stigmatizing, reviling, and torturing them. Such treatments—and the voluble justifications the persecutors invariably offer for such treatment—is reserved for creatures we recognize to have intentions, and desires, and projects.1
The virulent anti-Black racism that swept through the South in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the epidemic of lynching that followed in its wake illustrate Appiah’s insight all too well. Before emancipation, White people typically regarded Blacks as “docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior full of infantile silliness and his talk inflated with childish exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence.”2 And when Black people were dehumanized, they were more often seen as livestock than as monsters. But this soon changed. The image of the monstrous, rapacious, murderous Negro became a mainstay in popular culture and the media—including the blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation, which was screened in the White House in 1915, and apparently endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson. The Birth of a Nation was a movie adaptation of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman, which presented the Ku Klux Klan as restoring order to the chaotic, war-ravaged South by putting Negros back in their proper place. Of course, the cast of characters included a Black rapist, who is lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. Less than a year later, the movie inspired the rebirth of the Klan, which had fizzled out around forty years before, and it inspired many thousands of Americans to support the White supremacist cause.
One year later, in the spring of 1916, a fifteen-thousand-strong mob lynched a teenage boy named Jesse Washington in the city of Waco, Texas. He was convicted of raping and murdering a fifty-three-year-old White woman in the nearby hamlet of Robinson. The all-White jury deliberated for all of four minutes before pronouncing him guilty. Immediately, a man stood up in the back of the courtroom and bellowed, “Get the nigger!” A lynch mob seized the young man, dragged him out of the courthouse, ripped off his clothes, wrapped a long chain around his neck, and made him walk to the town square, pushing, prodding, stomping, and stabbing him until he was covered in blood. Once they reached their destination, the mob amputated Jesse’s toes, fingers, ears, and penis. They rubbed coal oil all over his bleeding body, flung the chain over a tree limb, and hoisted him up over a bonfire. They then lowered Jesse into the fire and raised him up again repeatedly, taking every step possible to prolong his agony. Two hours later, as souvenir hunters were picking through his smoldering remains, a man rode up on horseback, flung a lasso around the charred torso, and dragged it through the town. When the head came off, children pulled out the teeth and sold them as souvenirs. Then, what was left of the blackened remains of this young man’s body was tied behind a car and dragged to the town of Robinson, stuffed into a burlap sack, and hung from a telephone pole.
Appiah was right when he wrote that the abominable cruelty has something to do with the fact that dehumanizers see their victims as human beings. It is because dehumanizers cannot help recognizing that their victims are human, and this recognition coexists in their minds with the belief that they are animals, that the members of the dehumanized group are regarded as horrific monsters, and such monsters are, by definition, malevolent, evil beings. And because those who are dehumanized come to be seen as evil, they become targets of the most extreme forms of moralistic aggression. The magnitude of their wickedness is such that no imaginable punishment is too severe for them.
In addition to the barely imaginable physical cruelty handed out to people like Jesse Washington, there is another element that begs for an explanation. Almost always, dehumanizers take pains to humiliate those whom they dehumanize. It is not enough to mutilate, burn, or gas the victim. The dehumanized person must be made to feel that they are lowly creatures, undeserving of consideration and respect. An explanation for this behavior is not difficult to find. Recall that dehumanization begins as a way of diminishing others—to think of them as mere animals. But because dehumanizers are unable to stop seeing their victims as humans, the victims are inadvertently transformed into monsters. Monsters are far removed from mere vermin: they are uncanny and endowed with superhuman powers. They are profoundly threatening and dangerous. Because of this, dehumanizers feel compelled to diminish their own creations—to render them mere animals again. Like many Black people, Jesse Washington was a monster in the eyes of his persecutors. The ritual of lynching was a way to degrade him, to strip him of his monstrousness by obliterating his humanity and rendering him entirely subhuman—an animal to be skinned, castrated, and burned on the barbecue.
There are many different ways to be human, but relatively few ways of being a human monster. The examples of demonizing dehumanization all involve variations on a few basic themes. Recall that Nazi ideology pictured Jews as the supremely powerful, demonic enemy of the German people, who combatted them with guile and superhuman intelligence rather than brute force. In 1938, Austrian Jews were literally brought to their knees to scrub the pavements of Vienna before being exported to slave labor camps or to die in the Polish extermination factories. “This was a ritual humiliation,” writes historian Timothy Snyder. “Jews . . . were suddenly on their knees performing menial labor in front of jeering crowds. . . . A journalist described ‘the fluffy Viennese blonds, fighting one another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half dozen young hooligans with swastika armlets and dog-whips.’ ”3 The Indians of North America were also explicitly characterized as savages, devils, demons, and monsters that reveled in the blood of White settlers. They were to be starved and abused in concentration camps called “reservations,” and ultimately exterminated. The well-known literary figure William Dean Howells wrote in an essay celebrating the centennial of the United States that mere contact with these creatures provides justification enough for degrading them.
The red man . . . is a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence. In blaming our Indian agents for malfeasance in office, perhaps we do not sufficiently account for the demoralizing influence of merely beholding those false and pitiless savage faces; moldy flour and corrupt beef must seem altogether too good for them.4
The language of demonization, whether subtle or explicit, is always dangerous. Whenever those in power represent members of a racialized group as monsters in human form, the stage is set for human rights abuses or worse. When people in positions of power and influence speak of others as monsters, or indulge in such rhetoric, it’s a sign that a particularly destructive form of dehumanization is in the offing.