hey Ryan, thanks for yer generous reply and yes to the structuralish/political-economyish aspects and along those lines am tempted to point out that those are different/differing phenomena (using people as property, name calling, etc) and that’s true but more to the point I think there is too much being given to the idea(l) of being Human and or being recognized as fully or truly Human, do we really still want to go down that line?

I get this argument, dmf. I’d say that dehumanization is one way that such acts are made possible. It doesn’t explain everything, but I think it can be a big part of the picture. But it depends. Sometimes violence is detached, distant, and abstract. Like this person I’m talking about in the post–that’s a very detached, dehumanized way of thinking about millions of people. I’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing, people rationalizing mistreatment or violence because ‘those people’ are somehow evil, or different, or scary, and therefore deserve it. Sometimes though violence is very close and committed with intimate knowledge. Even with intimate violence, though, I’d say that various forms of dehumanization can potentially be part of the picture. People may be neighbors, but they may think of their neighbors in racist, discriminatory, and yes dehumanizing ways. Slavery may have involved intimate contact and knowledge, but it was no less dehumanizing. Slavery is literally the dehumanization of other people…turning them into mere property that can be treated (and abused) as such. Dehumanization–calling people savages, animals, etc–has been used to justify and rationalize violence, displacement, dispossession, and so on. And while I think more knowledge of others can help (which is a very Boasian argument), I don’t think that’s some sort of panacea. I mean, that was a shortcoming of a lot of anthropology up through the end of the 20th century, which didn’t account for power, structural factors, etc when addressing issues like racism and dehumanization (see the work of Mullings 2005 and others on that point). More knowledge and empathy are a potential start, but people have to be willing to change their ideas, think about others in different ways, and make some choices. I talk about this in one of my classes when I compare the cases of Dylann Roof and Derek Black, for example. There are always choices and responsibilities. But of course, there are also bigger issues at play as well that a focus on more knowledge, or empathy, won’t be able to address. Again, that’s back to the critiques of Mullings and others from a while back.