1.Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New York: Picador, 2005), 47, 144; Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 347–348.
2.New York Times, January 9, 1943.
3.Michael C. C. Adams, “Retelling the Tale: Wars in Common Memory,” in G. Boritt (Ed.), War Comes Again: Comparative Vistas on the Civil War and World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 216.
4.Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Picador, 2013), 50, 161.
5.Stan Groff, “Hold On to Your Humanity: An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq” (Southern Cross Review, 2007), https://southerncrossreview.org/31/goff.htm.
1.Tom Segev, Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 264.
1.This figure is actually an underestimate, as an unknown (but very large) number of Mexicans and Native Americans were lynched in the western United States.
2.Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 130–131.
3.W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 387.
1.Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New York: New Press, 2012), 3.
2.L. Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1994), 13–14.
1.Rebecca Traister, “Our Racist History Isn’t Back to Haunt Us. It Never Left Us,” New Republic (June 18, 2015), https://newrepublic.com/article/122073/our-racial-history-isnt-back-haunt-us-it-never-left-us. This article is cited in Carlos Hoyt, The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), which is an impassioned plea to leave the concept of race behind.
2.The text, in translation, can be found at “Himmler’s Posen Speech—'Extermination,’ ” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/himmler-s-posen-speech-quot-extermination-quot. The sound recording, “Heinrich Himmler’s Speech at Poznan,” can be accessed on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRO04q_lQi4.
3.It’s worth noting that oppressed people do not need to accept the illusion of race to reap these benefits. It is enough to unite under the banner of a racialized people.
1.When I use the words “race” and “races,” I mean the ordinary, vernacular conception rather than the way that these words might be understood by, say, population geneticists.
1.With the exception of Reinhard Heydrich, members of the Nazi high command weren’t especially Nordic-looking. Many of them could have easily passed as Jewish.
2.The second volume of Dixon’s trilogy was the basis of the notorious film The Birth of a Nation, which contributed to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the early twentieth century.
1.Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X, Speeches and Writings (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992), 81.
2.Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indians Advocate Suing for Their Admission into the Church (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2001), 99.
3.Morgan Godwyn, Trade Preferr’d before Religion and Christ Made to Give Place to Mammon Represented in a Sermon Relating to the Plantations: First Preached at Westminster-Abbey and Afterwards in Divers Churches in London (printed for B. Took at the Ship in St. Paul’s Church-yard, and for Isaac Cleave at the Star in Chancery-Lane, 1685).
4.Morgan Godwyn, “Neglect and Decay Thereof in Those Parts,” in Francis Brokesby, Some Proposals towards Promoting of the Gospel in Our American Plantations (London: G. Sawbridge, 1708), 3.
6.“Der Untermensch” (The Subhuman), Holocaust Education and Archive Research Team, http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/deruntermensch.html.
1.T. J. Kasperbauer, Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes to Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.
1.Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979), 4.
2.Claudia Koontz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.
3.Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 50.
4.Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006), 106.
5.Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 69.
1.Edward Westermann, “Stone-Cold Killers or Drunk with Murder? Alcohol and Atrocity during the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 2.
2.Simon Harrison, “The Symbolic Construction of Aggression and War in a Sepik River Society,” Man 24, no. 4 (1989): 588.
1.This is a deliberately oversimplified account of the evolution of bird wings. It’s meant to illustrate a general point about how natural selection gives rise to functions, rather than capture the scientific details.
2.David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80.
1.Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History (New York: UNESCO, 1952), 12.
1.Zsolt Bayer, “Who Should Not Be?” Orange Files, May 9, 2013, https://theorangefiles.hu/2013/05/09/who-should-not-be/.
2.Dehumanizing speech doesn’t directly dehumanize people because, as I explained in chapter two, dehumanization is not a linguistic phenomenon. This form of speech dehumanizes indirectly, by causing others to adopt dehumanizing attitudes. The producer of the speech may or may not share these attitudes.
3.Miriam Eliav-Feldon, “Vagrants or Vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in Early Modern Europe,” in M. Eliav-Feldon, I. Benjamin, and J. Ziegler (Eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 290.
4.Adrian Bridge, “Romanians Vent Old Hatreds against Gypsies: The Villagers of Hadareni Are Defiant about Their Murder of Vermin,” Independent, October 19, 1993, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/romanians-vent-old-hatreds-against-gypsies-the-villagers-of-hadareni-are-defiant-about-their-meurder-1511734.html.
1.Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), 30.
2.Roger Money-Kyrle, “The Psychology of Propaganda,” in The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle (London: Karnac, 2015), 165–166.
4.“Donald Trump Transcript: ‘Our Country Needs a Truly Great Leader,’ ” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/06/16/donald-trump-transcript-our-country-needs-a-truly-great-leader/.
5.Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2.
1.Jeffrey Gettleman, “Rohingya Recount Atrocities: ‘They Threw My Baby into a Fire,’” New York Times, October 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-atrocities.html?fbclid=IwAR2JE8IBfOYEGYYv4sPsSd3tfjBA7mawsYAz NPifwyqcDtzAcLEYqGlKG-E.
2.As I write this, he is a fugitive from justice, not because of his incitements to violence, but because of his criticism of the regime.
3.T. A. Kyau, “Buddhist Monk Wirathu Leads Violent National Campaign against Myanmar’s Muslims,” GlobalPost, June 21, 2013, https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-06-21/buddhist-monk-wirathu-leads-violent-national-campaign-against-myanmars-muslims.
4.Cited in Nicholas Gier, The Origins of Religious Violence: An Asian Perspective (London: Lexington Books, 2014), 67.
5.Thomas Fuller, “Extremism Rises among Myanmar Buddhists,” New York Times, June 20, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/world/asia/extremism-rises-among-myanmar-buddhists-wary-of-muslim-minority.html.
6.C. J. Werleman, “Burma’s ‘Bin Laden’ Compares Rohingya Muslims to Animals Who Eat with Their Asses,” Medium, September 12, 2017.
7.Jonah Fisher, “Anti-Muslim Monk Stokes Burmese Religious Tension,” BBC News, August 29, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23846632.
8.Patrick Winn, “Myanmar State Media Alludes to Rohingya Muslims as ‘Human Fleas,’” GlobalPost, November 30, 2016, https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-11-30/myanmar-state-media-alludes-rohingya-muslims-human-fleas.
9.Steve Stecklow, “Why Facebook Is Losing the War on Hate Speech in Myanmar,” Reuters Investigates, August 15, 2018.
10.Gettleman, “Rohingya Recount Atrocities.”
11.Cited in “ ‘They Gave Them Long Swords’: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity in Rakhine State, Myanmar,” Fortify Rights [p. 97], July 2018.
12.Alex Preston, “The Rohingya and Myanmar’s ‘Buddhist Bin Laden,’” GQ Magazine, February 12, 2015, https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/myanmar-rohingya-muslim-burma.
13.Hannah Beech, “The Face of Buddhist Terror,” Time, July 1, 2013, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2146000-2,00.html.
14.Francis Wade, “Wirathu, Time Magazine, and the Power of Propaganda in Burma,” Asian Correspondent, June 25, 2013.
15.Kate Hodal, “Buddhist Monk Uses Racism and Rumours to Spread Hatred in Burma,” Guardian, April 18, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/18/buddhist-monk-spreads-hatred-burma.
16.“Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar,” Human Rights Council, September 12, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/A_HRC_39_64.pdf, 14.
18.Matt Steib, “Everything We Know about Inhuman Conditions at Migrant Detention Camps,” New York Magazine (July 20, 2019).
19.Anna Lind-Guzik, “I’m a Jewish Historian. Yes, We Should Call Border Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps,’” Vox, June 20, 2019, https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/6/20/18693058/aoc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-concentration-camps-immigration-border.
1.Cited in Robert Jan van Pelt, Lodz and Getto Litzmannstadt: Promised Land and Croaking Hole of Europe (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015), 36.
2.Joseph Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi (Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, 1927), https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/responses.htm.
1.“The Eternal Jew,” https://archive.org/details/TheEternalJewDerEwigeJude1940.
2.Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2002).
3.You might be wondering why I don’t also say that they could eliminate the contradiction by accepting that dehumanized people are fully human. This is possible in principle, but given the reasons why they’re dehumanized in the first place, this isn’t very likely.
4.Jews were forced to wear distinctive clothing—sometimes including a cloth badge—in the Middle Ages in parts of Christian Europe and the Muslim world. The Nazis revived this practice.
5.Cited in Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 193.
1.This is the testimony of Paul Mahehu, interviewed by Caroline Elkins, from her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 157.
2.Most people hear the words “concentration camp” with Hitler and the Nazis. But Hitler was a latecomer. He was inspired by the internment camps that the British set up in South Africa during the Boer War.
3.Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 97.
4.In Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 327.
5.Cited in Barbara Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 169.
6.Charles Smith, “Have American Negroes Too Much Liberty?” Forum (October 1893): 181; George Winston, “The Relations of the Whites to the Negroes,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 108f.
7.Arthur Machen, The House of Souls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 116.
1.H. R. Helper, The Negroes in Negroland; the Negroes in America; and Negroes Generally. Also, the Several Races of White Men, Considered as the Involuntary and Predestined Supplanters of the Black Races (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868), 14, 244.
2.Cited in Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999), 109.
3.Leonard Greene, “Trump Called for Death Penalty after Central Park Jogger Attack and Still Has No Sympathy for Accused Despite Convictions Overturned,” New York Daily News, July 19, 2018 https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-news-trump-death-penalty-central-park-five-20180713-story.html.
4.Patrick Buchanan, “The Barbarians Are Winning,” New York Post, April 30, 1989.
5.Dareh Gregorian, “Trump Digs In on Central Park 5: ‘They Admitted Their Guilt,’” NBC News, June 18, 2019.
6.G. Bruney, “Breaking Down Donald Trump’s Deranged Involvement in the Central Park Five Case,” Esquire, May 26, 2019, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27586174/when-they-see-us-central-park-5-donald-trump/.
7.“ ‘I Can Be More Presidential Than Any President.’ Read Trump’s Ohio Rally Speech,” Time, July 26, 2017, http://time.com/4874161/donald-trump-transcript-youngstown-ohio/.
8.A. Waytz, K. M. Hoffman, and S. Trawalter, “A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 6, no. 3 (2015): 352–359.
9.A. Waytz, K. M. Hoffman, and S. Trawalter, “The Racial Bias Embedded in Darren Wilson’s Testimony,” Washington Post (November 26, 2014). The authors go on to remark that in one of their studies, “whites were particularly adept at processing a set of words including Wilson’s depiction, demon, when a black face appeared on the computer screen just before.” Needless to say, whether or not this conjecture is correct has no bearing on the guilt or innocence of Darren Wilson, whom the grand jury acquitted.
10.M. Berkowitz, The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 48.
11.Quoted in A. G. Hardy, Hitler’s Secret Weapon: The “Managed” Press and Propaganda Machine of Nazi Germany (New York: Vantage, 1967), 197.
1.Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 144.
2.Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 82.
3.T. Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015).
4.Quoted in D. E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press,1992), 245.
1.John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond, “The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur,” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 875–902.
2.C. A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? and Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4.