Debunking Dehumanization

"Racist dehumanization is not merely symbolic," Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his foreword to Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others (2017), "it delineates the borders of power" (xv). Prompting this reflection is not merely Morrison's cultural criticism but also Coates's recollection of Officer Darren Wilson's account of killing the unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown. In his grand-jury testimony, Wilson said of Brown, "The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked" (qtd. in Cave).¹ Wilson, of course, hailed from the same Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department that passed around an email depicting Barack Obama as a chimpanzee (Hernandez). It may have even been the same "family photo" email that Orange County Republican Party Central Committee member Marilyn Davenport circulated featuring President Obama "as a baby chimpanzee with two chimp parents," captioned "Now you know why—no birth certificate" (Sheridan). Little surprise, then, that a "'dehumanizing' implicit association test" administered to police officers found that "the more readily participants implicitly associated black people with apes, the higher their culpability ratings were for both black misdemeanor and black felony suspects" (Henning 62). Well before Charlottesville and the election of "'Donald Trump … birther-in chief,'" the virulent climate of US racism led sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson to conclude that we are witnessing "the dehumanization of African-American people" (Gass; Goodman).

It is tempting, in such a climate, to trace the origins of this racist logic of dehumanization to slavery. What could be more dehumanizing than grouping people as property alongside livestock and other chattels? If you cover any material about slavery in any of your classes, you will find students confidently asserting that slaves were considered subhuman—or, following the conventional misreading of Article 1, Section 2, of the original Constitution, three-fifths human.

Just here, however, we may want to pause and join Stephen Best in questioning the seemingly "unassailable truth that the slave past provides a ready prism for apprehending the black political present" (453). Or, rather, positioning ourselves on the other side of the prism, we might ask whether our present vantage clarifies or distorts our view of the slave past. Specifically, to appreciate what Best, following Leo Bersani, calls "the radical alterity of the past," we need to understand that, far from denying black humanity, slaveholders extracted profit from recognizing and exploiting that humanity (455). It's been 20 years since Saidiya Hartman first demonstrated how "the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress" the black subject both during and after slavery (5). As Christopher Freeburg trenchantly observes, "white subjects need to strip blacks of their personhood because of their humanity and not in spite of it" (89).² Historian Walter Johnson further cautions against the liberal rhetoric of dehumanization as "misleading, harmful, and worth resisting."

For many students of the subject, however, it remains difficult to realize that, in the words of proslavery Virginia lawyer John Howard, "the very idea of a slave is a human being in bondage" (qtd. in "Mail" 172). Howard made his point in US v. Amy (1859), a federal mail theft case argued before a circuit-riding Chief Justice Roger B. Taney two years after Taney's Dred Scott decision (1857). It wasn't just impossible for the slave to "be divested of his characteristics as a natural person, a human being,—a human body inspired with intellect, feeling, volition," Howard explained; "it is that which makes him so valuable a chattel" (qtd. in "Mail" 176).

Part of the difficulty in assimilating this aspect of slavery derives from the way that "humanity" itself became "an avowed ideological and ontological battleground" for the black studies movement that emerged over the long twentieth century, as Alexander Weheliye reminds us (21). In his influential Habeas Viscus (2014), Weheliye builds on...