On Inhumanity: Dehumanization And How to Resist It

The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again–that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche–deeper than prejudice itself–leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human.