Speaking of misunderstandings, I just caught this in Askia’s post (from Face):
No, he isn’t. If you consider yourself better than another race, you dehumanize people in that race because you are yourself human.
The process of dehumanizing begins with treating them like second class citizens; denying them basic rights, freedoms and equal treatment; subjecting them casual humiliations and abuse; segregating them to the fringes, either by tradition and law; equating them with animals; referring them in slurs; believing them capable of only the most depraved behavior; and mockery of their beliefs, culture, mores and history. Then comes plenty of elaborate justifications why they deserve to be treated this way, sometimes with spurious pseudoscientific biological drivel, or biased religious dogma, or elitist political policy. This often leads to justifications of war and ethnic cleansing.
Dehumanizing is perpetuated by people who are racist. Bigots might do some of this; racists tend to zealously cite nearly all.
Dehumanization is not limited to race or unique to racists, though. Consider sex offenders. Note that most people in American society are automatically bigoted thinking of them and dealing with them, and no one thinks abusing or harassing them is a big deal.
But processes start with thoughts and ideas. The act of dehumanizing someone doesn’t start with action; it starts with thought. I can’t dehumanize anyone without giving myself license to do so, and that license is usually the result of a long trail of racist beliefs, starting from mild prejudice to raging bigotry.
Slavery went on for so long because whites convinced themselves that blacks were like children, that blacks were mentally and emotionally ill-equipped to fend for themselves, that blacks were animals that needed to be reigned in. Lynching had the public support it did because whites believed that black men couldn’t resist white women and needed to be constantly reminded of their place. Jews and Gypsies were massacred by the Nazis because the citizenry thought they were a blight to the Aryan race, that they were genetically inferior.
If I proposed that the idea “Black men are a threat to white women” as a racist sentiment, based on what you’ve written, I assume that you would disagree with me. But can’t you see that this very idea led to people getting lynched and beaten and Jim Crowed to death? Just because the thought doesn’t explicity convey “violent hatred and anger” that are your prerequisites for racism, doesn’t mean that it can’t lead to the types of oppression you associate with racism.
To go back to the example I used before, “Native Americans are moral degenerates”, you can’t just look at that idea in isolation; to develop such a belief means you have a certain thought pattern, a certain way of thinking that allows you to reach that conclusion. Why would Native Americans be moral degenerates? Obviously its becomes something is defective about them as a group, something that doesn’t make them like us; they are different, lesser, ungodly, nasty, barbaric, animalistic, so on and so forth.
Once you decide that a race of people is inherently inferior in some way, the process of dehumanization has begun. I agree with Liberal on that point.
you with the face. We’re all in agreement on that point. I’m just saying until thoughts are shared and turn into actions, it’s just a harmless opinion. Once you actually start oppressing people in the ways described above, and sharing those thoughts, it’s a racist process. The only reason we care is about racism is we know that, unchecked and enflamed, those prejudiced thoughts turn to bigoted actions which will lead to racist violence to insure supremacy. If they kept those thoughts to themselves, we’d be arguing about, I dunno, football and race.
I just finished watching a PBS documentary on the international sex slave trade. I couldn’t help but be struck by the many parallels between the 21st century sex trade slavery and 19th century racist labor slavery. The dehumanization process needed to exploit the oppressed in the two are largely the same. The sexist attitudes are as bad as racist ones.