As I write these words, my new book,On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist Itis poised to be released byOxford University Press. This would normally be a joyous, exciting time for me. Ten years of painstaking research distilled into one, short, accessible volume is an accomplishment of which I can legitimately be proud.

But in reality, this is not a happy time for me, and not just because of the Covid pandemic. Pandemics come and go, but racism persists. Now, once again, the terrible things that I describe and try to analyze in the book have been thrust into the forefront of our collective consciousness.

首先，一个年轻的黑人男子Ahmaud Arbery在乔治亚州的一个小镇上慢跑时被白人治安维持会成员处死。他们声称他是个罪犯。接下来，一名在中央公园遛狗的白人女子拨打911报警，称一名黑人男子威胁她的生命。但是外出观鸟的克里斯蒂安·库珀并没有做错什么。他只是要求这位妇女遵守公园的规定，用狗绳拴住她的狗。最近，我们中的许多人以一种无法理解的恐惧看着一名明尼苏达州警察随意地跪在乔治·弗洛伊德的脖子上，直到这个无助的、戴着手铐的男人瘫软地躺在肮脏的人行道上。

These events, and many, many, others like them are links in a chain of violence extending back for centuries. And they are manifestations ofwhat I calldemonizing dehumanization,the most dangerous form of dehumanization. Demonizingdehumanizationis highly gendered—almost always, it is men from racially oppressed groups who are dehumanized in this way. These men are seen as dangerous, subhuman creatures, endowed with superhuman powers, and who must be crushed into submission.

Demonizing dehumanization is frighteningly robust. We find it wherever racist ideologies predominate. Jews were the main racialized minority in Europe during the Middle Ages, and many Christians considered Jewish men to beliterallysatanic beings—vile and ruthless murderers, cannibals, and vampires. However, demonizing dehumanization is highly adaptable, like a rapidly mutating virus, assuming new forms in accord with changing social ecologies.

Here, today in the United States, the main targets are African American males.As I put it inOn Inhumanity:

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.

19世纪末20世纪初的私刑盛行，以及随之而来的大规模监禁美国黑人，都是由这样一种观念驱动的，即黑人——尤其是黑人男性——从根本上就是罪犯。这是许多白人接受的智慧，在北方和南方。

Hinton Rowan Helper, the man Lincoln appointed as US consul in Argentina, wrote 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.

It is very important to recognize that such beliefs are not confined to a brutal and ignorant past. They are with us still, always simmering below the surface of White American civility. They have never been exorcized because they have never been confronted fully and honestly.

The workings of demonizing dehumanization are too complex to describe in detail here, but its toxic core is easy to set out. When Black men are dehumanized in this way, the idea is not that they commit criminal acts. It is that they areessentiallycriminal. Someone who is thought of as essentially criminal is regarded as criminal by nature. It is supposed to be impossible for an essentially criminal person not to be a criminal. Just as poison remains poison even if it never poisons anything,黑人是罪犯，即使他们从未犯过罪。

This pattern of thinking has obvious and deeply disturbing implications for criminal justice. If Black men are essentially criminal, then they are guilty of the crime that is their very existence. Considerations of truth and evidence become irrelevant. Injustice masquerades as justice, and horrendous crimes ensue.

To prevent such things from endlessly recurring, it is vital to find a way to break the grip of demonizing dehumanization on the human imagination. And to do that, we need to understand how the dehumanizing mindset works. That’s why I do the work that I do. Please join me.

Photo byNicole BasteronUnsplash