From Barbados to Nazi Germany

This chapter considers the process of dehumanization through key historical events. It demonstrates how, when one group of people dehumanizes another, they first think of them as members of an alien and inferior race: a lesser kind of human being. Racist denigration morphs into dehumanization when they are imagined to be not merely inferior, but to have a subhuman essence, and this promotes and legitimates their oppression in the eyes of their oppressors. But this is not the whole story of dehumanization. As this chapter reveals, the reality is much more complex. Through a number of historical examples, the chapter shows how certain patterns perfectly illustrate the intersection of hierarchy and essentialism that drives the dehumanizing process, often with catastrophic results.