Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  QUASI-HUMAN KINDS

  Dehumanization applies to whole groups, rather than particular individuals: all barbarians, all Native Americans, all Armenians, all Blacks, all Tutsi. In The Subhuman these groups are listed as Mulattos, Finn-Asians (Slavs), Gypsies, Blacks, and, above all, Jews. The collective character of dehumanization is exemplified by some of Himmler’s remarks in the Poznan speech. Himmler ridiculed those party members who wanted to make exceptions to the policy that all Jews were to be exterminated.

  This is one of the things that is easily said: “The Jewish people are going to be exterminated,” that’s what every party member says. “Sure, it’s in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination—it’ll be done.” And then they all come along, the 80 million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Of course, the others are swine, but this one, he is a first-rate Jew.63

  In a recording of the speech, you can hear laughter in the audience after the last sentence. For Himmler, as for other committed Nazis, anyone holding up an example of a “first-rate Jew” was missing the point of the Nazi race theory. The Jews were to be eliminated because they were Jews. The characteristics of individual Jews, however agreeable, were strictly irrelevant to the exterminationist project. The Jews were a kind of being, but not a human kind of being. Like all dehumanized populations, they were pictured as a quasi-human kind—a sort of nonhuman creature possessing superficially humanlike attributes, a monstrous mixture of outwardly human and inwardly nonhuman elements.

  APPEARANCE AND REALITY

  The very idea that there can be entities with superficially human characteristics, but which are inwardly subhuman, depends on a prior distinction between appearance and reality. Dehumanization would be impossible if we could not make the distinction between how things seem and how they really are. The discourse of dehumanization typically involves the idea that members of a certain population are not what they appear to be. This is usually implicit, but sometimes it is quite overt. In The Subhuman, Jews are portrayed as “beasts in human form,” even though they have “features similar to a human.” They may look like humans and act like them, but inside—where it matters—they are not at all like humans. When one group of people dehumanizes another, they imagine that, although the latter may look human (in the idiom of The Subhuman, they have “hands, legs, eyes, and mouth, even the semblance of a brain”), they lack that inner spark or soul that only humans possess. “Not all of those who appear human are in fact so,” The Subhuman warns, and “Woe to him who forgets it!”

  If subhumans are not really human, then what are they? This brings us to the “sub” in “subhuman,” which indicates that they exist at a lower rung of the great chain of being. They are lesser biological entities—typically, dangerous predators, poisonous animals, carriers of disease or disease organisms, parasites, traditionally filthy animals, or bodily products, especially feces. In The Subhuman, Jews are first described as a vector of infection. The Nazi diatribe goes on to describe Jews as nocturnal animals living in fetid environments.

  The subhuman is united with his peers. Like beasts among beasts, never knowing peace or calm. The subhuman thrives in chaos and darkness, he is frightened by the light. These subhuman creatures dwell in the cesspools, and swamps, preferring a hell on earth, to the light of the sun. But in these swamps and cesspools the subhuman has found its leader—The Eternal Jew!

  The text also hints at their predatory characteristics by gesturing toward their “wild and unrestrained passions” and “incessant need to destroy.”64

  Dehumanization does not always conform to the patterns that I have just described, although they are the most common. Sometimes dehumanized people are thought of as domestic animals (as when the Janjaweed refer to black Darfurians as “donkeys”), or as monkeys, baboons, or apes, as the German and Dutch colonists treated the Herero and Nama. More rarely, dehumanized populations are imagined as prey—animals to be hunted for pleasure (we will encounter examples of this when we look at the role of dehumanization in war). Very occasionally, they are portrayed as invasive or undesirable plants (for example, when Hutus referred to Tutsis as “weeds”).

  Demoting a population to subhuman status excludes them from the universe of moral obligation. Whatever responsibilities we have toward nonhuman animals, they are not the same as those we have toward members of our own species. So, if human-looking creatures are not really people, then we don’t have to treat them as people. They can be used instrumentally, with complete disregard for their human worth—they can be killed, tortured, raped, experimented upon, and even eaten.

  THE MYTH OF BLOOD: IMMUTABILITY AND HEREDITY

  The children are not the enemy.… The enemy is the blood in them.

  —SS OFFICER OSKAR GROENING (UPON BEING ASKED WHY JEWISH CHILDREN WERE KILLED AT AUSCHWITZ)65

  Subhumanity is typically thought to be a permanent condition. Subhumans can’t become humans any more than frogs can become princes. As the text of The Subhuman puts it, “The subhuman will always be a subhuman.”

  There is an important exception to this principle, though. Some religions, notably Christianity, claim to be able to transmute subhumans into human beings, just as, in the Roman Catholic mass, wafers and wine are miraculously transmuted into the body and blood of Christ. But in these cases there is often a tension between the religious notion of redemption through divine grace, and the more basic conviction that subhumanity is immutable. When Jews living in Spain during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were forced to convert to Christianity on pain of expulsion or execution, even those who chose to embrace Christianity, at least nominally, were not granted full equality. The so-called “new Christians” were constrained by discriminatory laws called limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) statutes. Jews who converted to Christianity, and even Christians with Jewish ancestors, remained marranos (swine).

  Belief in the unchangeability of the subhuman condition is linked to another assumption. Subhumanity is thought to be passed down by parents to their offspring. Even innocuous infants carry the dangerous, subhuman essence within. Typically, the subhuman essence (as well as the human essence) is imagined to be carried in the blood. In this framework, it is vital to prevent human blood from being polluted by subhuman blood. German Nazis (as well as fifteenth-century Spaniards, North American racists, and others) were preoccupied with heredity and the purity of blood to the point of obsession. Even young children were required to memorize poems extolling the purity of their blood, such as this ditty, which was a favorite of Walter Gross, head of the Nazi Party’s Racial Policy Office.

  Keep your blood pure,

  it is not yours alone,

  it comes from far away,

  it flows into the distance

  laden with thousands of ancestors

  and it holds the entire future!

  It is your eternal life.66

  The mystical notion of blood-borne subhumanity was the basis for laws against miscegenation (Hitler compared ethnically mixed marriages to “unions between ape and human”).67 Racial mixture “taints” the purity of human blood with a subhuman contaminant. (The Subhuman states that Aryan nations that are “tainted by the mixing of blood” are thereby destroyed.)

  The notion of blood purity had an obvious bearing on one of the fundamental problems confronting the Nazi program of racial hygiene. Jews often look just like Aryans. Given this, it was vital for the Nazis to hit upon some way to reliably distinguish subhumans from humans. Duke University historian Claudia Koonz describes how, during the early 1930s, German biologists launched a research program with the aim of discovering “the distinctive traits in Jewish blood.”

  Writing in a popular magazine published by Gross’ Office of Racial Politics, a biologist exulted in 1934, “Think what it might mean if we could identify non-Aryans in the test-tube! Then neither deception, nor baptism, nor name change, nor citizenship, and not even nasal surgery could help!… One cannot change one’s blood.” Despite s
ignificant funding and considerable publicity, success eluded them. Even a task-force of the Nazi medical association led by Gerhard Wagner admitted failure. No blood-type, odor, foot- or fingerprint pattern, skull size, earlobe or nose shape, or any other physiological marker of Jewishness withstood scrutiny.68

  The abject failure of scientific efforts to pin down exactly what it is that makes Jews Jews caused Hitler to reorient his racial policy. Koonz remarks “From that point on … the burden of proof shifted away from the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities.”69 The new race experts were literary and legal scholars, linguists, historians, geographers, and anthropologists, rather than physicians and biologists.

  Hitler explicitly denied that race can be biologically defined. He set this out clearly in a letter dictated in February 1945 to his private secretary, Martin Bormann.

  We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the Jewish race.… The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit.… Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race. Wherever he goes, the Jew remains a Jew … presenting sad proof of the superiority of the “spirit” over the flesh.70

  Having given up on biology, Hitler embraced a vague, nonbiological notion of heredity. However, a moment’s reflection shows that this strategy doesn’t solve the problem at all. Instead, it creates what philosophers call an “infinite regress.” Suppose that a Jew is anyone with Jewish parents. Then you’re stuck with the problem of how to determine if that person’s parents are Jewish. To do this, you need to figure out if their parents were Jewish, and so on, ad infinitum. To make matters worse, many Germans had Jewish ancestors, so the Nazis needed to quantify just how much of a Jewish lineage makes one a Jew. Having concurred that “no satisfying biological solution [to this problem] exists,” Hitler decided to define as “Jewish” anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. This was a pragmatic and obviously arbitrary solution. “Right now, we’re not discussing utopias,” he remarked, “but we’re looking at the day-to-day reality and the political situation in the eye.”71

  Having identified some of the main features of dehumanization, we are finally in a position to explore why it has such a powerful grip on the human psyche. In the next chapter, I will show that this terrifying, destructive, and tragic dimension of human existence stems from perfectly ordinary psychological processes and inclinations. Ironically, capacity to dehumanize members of our own species turns out to be rooted in our distinctively human psychology.

  6

  RACE

  Listening … a slow horror would drain the blood from my throat and I would think, He is saying these things not caring what they hear, as though they were not human! And then would come the tearing dialogue. Well, are they? are they? of course they are! they’re just like me. but are you sure? Of course! then why are they not in our church? why are they not in our school? Why can’t we keep playing together? what is wrong what is wrong?

  —LILLIAN SMITH, KILLERS OF THE DREAM1

  WITH THESE WORDS, civil rights activist Lillian Smith described her memory of standing in a crowd in a small Georgia town, at the dawn of the twentieth century, listening to a segregationist politician harangue his audience “telling us lies about skin color … lies made of their own fantasies, of their secret deviations—forcing decayed pieces of theirs and the region’s obscenities into the minds of the young and leaving them there to fester.”2

  Smith’s account highlights the way that dehumanization is sometimes overtly intertwined with racism. In this chapter, I am going to argue that dehumanization probably is, despite appearances to the contrary, always bound up with racism. In fact, the concept of race is the place where the psychological, cultural, and ultimately biological dimensions of dehumanization all converge. Attending to it not only gives us a clearer conception of what dehumanization is all about. It also throws new light on notions of race and racism.

  THE PUZZLE OF RACE

  To most of us, the reality of race seems to be so self-evident as to be unquestionable. In fact, the idea of race is reinforced day in and day out. Census forms ask us to check the box corresponding to our race (sadly, there is no box available for those to check who identify themselves as members of the human race). Universities offer courses in Black Studies (and, increasingly, in Whiteness Studies). Antidiscrimination laws forbid employers from excluding job candidates on the basis of their race. We are surrounded by practices, attitudes, and institutions that presuppose the reality of race.

  To most people, questioning the concept of race is likely to sound as crazy as questioning the claim that the Earth revolves around the sun. It seems self-evidently true that there are races. Just look around! However, science presents us with quite a different picture of the mosaic of human variation. Although there are people with striking physical similarities, conventional racial categories of the sort that loom so large in nonscientific discourse—categories of the sort represented by the boxes ticked on census forms and job applications—don’t have scientific justification. This was pointed out as early as 1935 by biologist Julian Huxley, anthropologist Alfred Court Haddon, and zoologist/sociologist Alexander Carr-Saunders in their book We Europeans, which they wrote in response to the rise of fascism in Europe. These authors made it clear that, from a biological standpoint, the racial classifications that most people take for granted are sheer fiction, on a par with elves, trolls, and fairies, and work in the biological sciences since 1935—in particular, dramatic progress in molecular biology—has amply confirmed their assessment.

  For the standard racial categories to make biological sense, racial boundaries should be circumscribed by genetic commonalities. In other words, any two members of a “race” should have more genetically in common than any two people belonging to different races. But this isn’t so. It’s quite possible that I (a light-hued, blue-eyed person of mainly European descent) am more genetically similar to my wife (a dark-hued, brown-eyed person of mainly African descent) than I am to someone whose skin and eye color more closely match my own. As Huxley and his coauthors put the point over seventy years ago, “With a species in which intercrossing of divergent types is so prevalent as our own, no simple system of classification can ever be devised to represent the diversity of the situation.” Biologists can and do sometimes talk about “races” as local breeding populations, but this has nothing to do with the typological notions that suffuse popular culture.3

  Nevertheless, the race concept not only seems to make sense, it is extraordinarily compelling. After all, people are physically different from one another, in a number of obvious ways, and these differences allow us to group them into categories based on similarity. These are bodily differences passed on biologically from parents to children, and are distinct from acquired cultural differences such as language, religion, and forms of dress. Aren’t these differences the basis for racial membership? People belong together, racially, because they resemble one another. What could be more obvious?

  But look closer, and the seemingly commonsensical idea that obvious similarities are the basis for the race concept is revealed as chimerical. Think for a moment about similarity. Any two people are similar in some respects and dissimilar in others, and many of these similarities and dissimilarities are inherited from parents and passed on to offspring. This is broadly true of conventional racial markers like skin color and hair texture. But why single out certain traits as the basis for racial classification, while ignoring others? Couldn’t we equally well use eye color, dividing humanity into blue-eyed, brown-eyed, and green-eyed “races”? How about height or earlobe size, or combinations of all traits? Wh
y privilege nose shape over eye shape when distinguishing blacks from whites, while privileging eye shape over nose shape when distinguishing whites from East Asians? Why carve up the human world in just these ways, when there are so many similarities and dissimilarities to choose from?

  WHAT MADE JANIE BLACK?

  The fact that race isn’t just a matter of how people look is actually quite a commonplace idea. For much of U.S. history, conventional ideas about race produced consequences that were at once tragic and absurd. Writer and social critic Lillian Smith gave us an unforgettable example of one such episode in Killers of the Dream, her deeply moving memoir of growing up in Georgia during the early decades of the twentieth century. “A little white girl was found in the colored section of our town,” she recalled, “living with a Negro family in a broken-down shack.” Members of a white women’s club concluded that the child (who is described as “very white indeed”—that is, visually white) must have been kidnapped, and persuaded the local marshal to take her into custody. The little girl, named Janie, came to live with the Smiths, where she and Lillian quickly became close friends, until a surprising phone call from an African-American orphanage revealed that Janie was, in “fact,” black. This discovery changed everything. In an instant, Janie was transformed into a black child who had to be extruded from the family circle.

  In a little while my mother called my sister and me into her bedroom and told us that in the morning Janie would return to Colored Town.… And then I found it possible to say, “Why is she leaving? She likes us, she hardly knows them. She told me she had been with them only a month.”