American Dehumanization of Black People

It’s a tradition going back generations. The dehumanization of one person or another has always been a tactic used by swamp rats to get laws that were in their favor passed. Let’s revisit several of the more prominent dehumanization efforts. We start with the enslavement of black people. It is commonly known that only three out of every five black people were counted as a person. They were considered an inferior race with a heathen culture, and thus it made enslaving them easier.

Changing rhetoric is always employed first.

And that is the point of dehumanization. To be able to do things to or with another human being that you wouldn’t otherwise. If they aren’t human, you can enslave them and work them to death on your plantation without suffering a moments unrest for your conscience. So black people, even after slavery was abolished, were not counted as fully human. Thus it took 50,000 black people to gain the same representation as 30,000 white people.

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Black People and American Citizenship

The Dred Scott decision famously held that the U.S. Constitution was never meant to include citizenship for black people. And it didn’t matter whether they were slaves or free. No one ever said they were not human beings; that wouldn’t look right. Just as “that peculiar institution” was never called slavery. However, taking any amount of another person’s humanity away is still wrong and disgusting.

The founding fathers, for all their good intent, set up within the constitution protections for slavery because owning and selling other people was a very lucrative business. A lucrative business the Civil War and the 13th amendment shut down forever in these United States. The Dred Scott decision was seen as a catalyst for these two historic events, the argument between North and South heating up around it.

Dehumanization an Inspiration for the Holocaust

Hitler did the same thing in Nazi Germany. His viewpoint was that the Aryan (German) race of people were so superior to other people that, especially with Jews, their superiority rendered other people almost non-human. This, of course, enabled him and his followers to do things to Jews and others that should never be done to another human being.

Hitler and his cronies routinely conducted horrific “scientific” experiments on Jews and black people. As is well known, the Nazi’s erected concentration camps, in which they placed huge gas chambers and ovens. In addition, they made soap out of the fat renderings of dead Jews and turned their skins into lampshades and the like.

Hitler’s death camps were stocked with Jews and others from all over Europe as part of his final solution. But it started with the infirm and those with birth defects. His goal was to wipe out impurities in the “master race”. These impurities were anything from retardation to Jewish blood. Rendering them non-human seared the collective conscience of Germans and others around the world. That made it easier for Hitler to perpetrate one of the most horrific mass genocides in the history of the world.

The Magical Mystical Birth Canal

Changing rhetoric is always employed first. Such as NPR’s internal memo charging that it’s “journalists” never call a baby, a baby. From NPR: “The term ‘unborn’ implies that there is a baby inside a pregnant woman, not a fetus. Babies are not babies until they are born. They’re fetuses. Incorrectly calling a fetus a ‘baby’ or ‘the unborn’ is part of the strategy used by antiabortion groups to shift language/legality/public opinion.”

It is just this sort of rhetoric that sears the public conscience and renders babies ripe for murder when it is convenient for a woman to do so. This is why abortions are no longer “safe, legal, and rare.” They certainly are legal. But that is all they are. Proponents of abortion must make the public think there is scientific basis for dehumanizing unborn babies.

If they do not, the public will not support their billion dollar industry, and will come to the understanding that abortion is murder, and murder is not a right. If you don’t believe that the birth canal is some sort of mystical portal to person-hood, you may just wish to outlaw the practice of abortion. And we can’t have that, now… Can we?