The (Relative) Ease of Dehumanization

Yahoo

28-05-2025

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A recent Michigan Advance article, 'Michigan leaders call attention to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people,' painted a poignant picture of the lack of attention scores of missing indigenous people have been given by the criminal justice system and society in general (nearly 4,200 missing persons cases have gone unsolved, nationwide).
Obviously, this isn't a purely Michigan problem. Disregarding people, specifically women of native origin, that have gone missing is a worldwide issue, from the reservations of Arizona to the Outback in Australia, including Michigan, the majority tends to turn a blind eye to classes of people that the society, writ large, does not view as worthy of concern. We see this over and over again, but not only in the world of law enforcement. It is a general practice to put time and effort into finding missing women, regardless of race or gender or profession, but the importance that the voting public puts on those victims is directly related to the amount of budget applied to those cases.
There is a stark contrast when a member of the majority, say a Gabby Petito, goes missing. Large scale investigations are well-funded and equipped with manpower and there is an endless stream of media coverage. What if Gabby Petito was a Navajo woman? Would there be the same urgency? Or what if Gabby Petito were a sex worker? Homeless?
This is an extreme example, of course, but the relative ease of dehumanization (the act of relegating a group of people socially as 'less than human' by a majority of society) is something that isn't solely in the world of extreme examples. Every day we dehumanize groups of people for any number of reasons. When we do that, it is easy to disregard them. It is also easy to harm them because, in a social appraisal, they aren't really people, right?
The phenomenon is not limited to the world of crime and investigation. We can simply look to the Michigan House GOP's attempt to legislate trans athlete participation as a way of providing safety for (italics are my emphasis) real girl athletes. This means that the existence of real girls is threatened by the existence of unreal girls in an obvious act of dehumanization.
It is like using the term 'illegal alien' as opposed to undocumented person. In both of these instances, the danger to the 'non-human' subjects of this type of rhetoric is apparent. State Rep. Matt Koleszar (D-Plymouth), in opposition to the bill, noted 'Make no mistake, this legislation and the rhetoric that surrounds it could get somebody killed.' The words of the bill matter. It is immaterial that the Governor is unlikely to sign such a bill if it even made it to her desk, the damage is done in the nomenclature.
The speed at which this can happen is stunning. We learned a great deal from Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. The ethical concerns of the experiment helped lead to the creation of institutional review boards to police psychological ethics. In the experiment, Zimbardo collected twenty-four male college students with some assigned to be prisoner and some assigned to be guards. The prisoners were subjected to real arrest procedures and placed in cells while the guards were given uniforms and authority over the prisoners. The experiment was scheduled to last two weeks but was terminated after six days. The prisoners became increasingly sadistic towards the prisoners while the prisoners effectively became submissive and bought into their own dehumanization.
At its core, the experiment showed the power of situational forces on behavior and just how quick and easy we can react to the label a person wears. In this case, it was guard (power) or prisoner (less than human). The real shock is at the speed this can happen. Now, as we expand this, think of what one hundred years of systemic dehumanization can do to a society? How do you feel about prisoners, for example. Not individuals, but that group. How do you feel about police officers? Again, not individuals, but the group. As Zimbardo showed us, sometimes all it takes is a uniform for us to label a group as 'pigs' or 'animals' and treat them accordingly.
We don't escape this in our faith systems, either. The dangers of using dehumanizing language in terms of antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, or any other faith of choice does nothing more than put either metaphorical, or in the case of most world conflicts at this point, literal crosshairs on the subject of the dehumanizing language. The innocent human beings being killed in both Palestine and Israel at this point in history, depending on which side your political rhetoric lands on, are either victims or 'deserved it.'
This is the same process we use to pay little attention to missing sex workers or indigenous women and the same process a group of college students used to treat their classmates like animals in 1971. Beverly Eileen Mitchell takes a deep, and disturbing look, at the process in terms of dehumanizing language being components of White supremacy and antisemitism in her 2009 book Plantations and Death Camps: Religion, Ideology, and Human Dignity from Minneapolis Fortress Press. She writes, 'The absence of empathetic imagination—the inability to see members of the 'pariah' group as being like oneself—is the psychological foundation for participation in dehumanizing a fellow human being'.
This is where we have to assess our own participation in dehumanization. Those tiny, innocuous moments in our daily discussions can be harmful and carry with it the danger of relegating a group of human beings as pariah. The same way many of us bristle at the thought of being called 'Libtards,' for example, as we are categorized into a fundamentally flawed person unworthy of consideration and potential violence is equally as dangerous as considering a group of people 'MAGAts,' equitably categorizing the obverse of a political rhetoric as also fundamentally flawed and unworthy of consideration and potential violence.
It is that ease that we must be aware of. How we discuss other groups of people have direct consequences on how those people are treated.
Be careful, because words matter.
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