Inlast month’s blog, I began to explore the political role of the concepts ofnaturalnessandunnaturalness. To recap, every human culture makes use of a system of conceptual categories—a sort of cognitive grid—to make sense the world. The beings that fit into these are welcomed as natural, whereas those that don’t are abhorred as unnatural. Unnatural beings elicit very powerful aversive reactions: they horrify us. I concluded with the following words:

Some of the most hideous acts of atrocity have been perpetrated against those who do not fit into the boxes endorsed by their culture. A person who’s out of place may be put in their place, but a person that has no place, because they straddle the categories used to define what is normal, are marked for destruction or shunted off to the margins of society—in the past, exile, and in the present, prison.

And I promised to “explain in greater detail how we turn ordinary human beings into monsters and demons: avatars of the unnatural.”

Then, after writing this, President Trump gave a speech in Youngstown, Ohio—a speech that contained remarks that are so relevant to the topic that I wanted to address, that I decided to change my plan somewhat and structure this month’s installment around them. Here’s a bit of what he said:

我们一个接一个地发现非法团伙成员，毒贩，小偷，强盗，罪犯和杀手....那些用毒品毒害我们的社区、以无辜年轻人为猎物的掠夺者和外国罪犯，这些美丽、美丽、无辜的年轻人将在我们的国家找不到安全的避风港。你们已经看过这些动物的故事了。他们不想用枪，因为那太快了，而且不够痛。所以他们会带走一个年轻漂亮的女孩，16或15岁，还有其他人然后用刀把她们切成片切成片因为他们想让她们在死前经历极度的痛苦。这些就是我们保护了这么久的动物。他们不再受保护了，伙计们。

特朗普的话非常值得仔细思考。他描绘了一幅真正可怕的人形掠食性动物的画面，这些动物拼命折磨、杀戮，根据他之前的一些言论，人们必须假定，这些动物强奸了美丽、无辜(大概是白人)的少女。

Trump’s image of marauding Latinos is strikingly close to John DeIiulio’s infamous 1995 description of what he calledsuperpredators—young Black males who—he alleged—form “wolf packs” to hunt down their victims. “The superpredators,” he wrote, “…. are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons (for example, a perception of slight disrespect or the accident of being in their path).”

他们既不怕被逮捕的耻辱，也不怕被监禁的痛苦。他们生活在最恶劣的街道上，遵循着最恶劣的准则，这种准则强化了而不是抑制了他们的暴力、一触即发的心态。无论是在监狱里还是监狱外，超级掠食者通过犯罪行为获得的东西——性、毒品、金钱——都是他们自己的即时回报。对他们来说，其他什么都不重要。因此，只要他们的青春活力还在，他们就会做一些“自然而然”的事情:谋杀、强奸、抢劫、袭击、盗窃、贩卖致命毒品和吸毒。

Trump’s speech should not be regarded as thereturnof the superpredator idea, because the idea that young Black and Latino males are roving, predatory beasts never really disappeared. Instead, it merely went very shallowly underground for a while—simmering away just outside the border of social acceptability. In speaking as he did, our president empowered believers to come out of the closet. He made it a little more OK to say in public what had long been said under the cover of privacy—that young men of color are monsters.

For the past ten years or so, my work has been focused how it’s possible for a whole group of people to be demonized in this way. This was the topic of my 2011 bookLess Than Human, and it’s also the subject of a book that I’m working on now, that’s entitledMaking Monsters. This research has led me to the conclusion that if you really want to understand what’s going on when people think of other people as superpredators, you’ve got to consider this phenomenon in a wider context, for although the term “superpredator” was coined here only a little more than two decades ago, the idea behind it is a whole lot older.

要了解这一点，你需要做的就是看看大量的文献，这些文献记录了从19世纪中期到20世纪早期有多少美国白人看待黑人男性。这些白人头脑中的形象，以及他们在演讲、报纸和书籍中复制的形象，实际上与一个多世纪后迪留里奥和特朗普所宣扬的形象没有什么区别。在美国白人的想象中，黑人男人是卑鄙的、无法控制的暴力怪物，有着巨大的性欲，热衷于谋杀、破坏和残忍地强奸白人女性之花。

例如，南卡罗来纳州国会议员本杰明·蒂尔曼(Benjamin Tillman)对他的参议员同僚说，奴隶制废除后，“可怜的非洲人……变成了恶魔，变成了寻找他可以吞噬的野兽，挤满了我们的监狱和监狱，潜伏在周围，想看看是否有无助的白人女性会被谋杀或虐待。”当时的文学作品中也有类似的描写。举几个例子，非裔美国男性被(严肃的思想家，而不仅仅是疯子)描述为“地球上最可怕的生物，最残忍和无情的”，“一个被欲望疯狂的怪物”。他的残暴几乎是恶魔般的。疯狂的公牛或老虎几乎不能比这更残忍”，他们对白人妇女的掠夺是“难以形容的兽性和可憎的[…]，以[…]为标志的是一种恶魔般的持续和恶性暴行的细节，在自然史上最兽性和凶猛的动物的整个范围中没有反映”。

但是将边缘人群视为超级掠食者并不是美国种族主义的独有现象，无论是现在还是过去。它在文化和历史上都更为广泛。看一看20世纪30年代和40年代在德国出版的反犹文学，就会发现类似的概念景观。犹太人经常被认为是天生的罪犯。他们是皮条客、强奸犯和毒贩:性狂热的野兽，渴望追求种族纯洁的德国女孩。

The image of the monstrous other can be traced back further still. Debra Higgs Strickland remarks in her bookSaracens, Demons, and Jewsthat during the European Middle Ages:

Jews were not only barbarians…they were also monsters. This monstrosity was supposedly expressed through unspeakable acts begun, of course, with the murder of Christ, but continuing into the present day with the ritual torture and murder of Christian boys and the desecration of the sacred host. The most prominent arena for the visualization of Jewish monstrosity was passion imagery featuring physically deformed, evil torturers of Christ.

中世纪的欧洲评论家也经常以类似的方式描述穆斯林。例如，一位英国十字军战士将土耳其人描述为“一个恶魔般的种族，强大而无情，天生畸形，不像其他生物，黑色的肤色，巨大的身材和非人的野蛮”。

There are many, many more examples that could be presented, from various historical periods and cultures. Of course, the details often vary. For example, nineteenth century descriptions of Black superpredators emphasize brute strength and insensitivity to pain, while German representations of Jewish superpredators emphasize their cunning and guile. But these variations are underpinned by several robust commonalities.

First, superpredators are malevolent—they are out to get you and yours. Second, they are devoid of morality—they will do anything to satisfy their depraved desires. Third, they are irredeemably evil—bad to the bone. The only way to deal with them is by banishment, prison, or execution. Fourth, they are racialized—they are not members ofour kind. And fifth (and very importantly) they have superhuman powers—superhuman strength, or endurance, or sexuality, or intelligence, which (combined with their other attributes) makes themimmensely dangerous.

The prevalence and far-flung distribution of these ideas shows that it’s a mistake to try to make sense of them entirely in light of what’s going on socially and politically at a single historical moment. In other words, we can’t fully comprehend Trump’s remarks unless we look further than the contingencies of the contemporary American political scene, or even the racial history of the United States. And that’s exactly what I intend to do in next month’s installment, where I’ll be linking them to ideas about the unnatural and will harness work on the philosophy of monsters to throw light on how and why societies transform ordinary human beings into inhumanly powerful, malignant creatures.