Dehumanization and Extirpation: Hatred and Sacrifice in History

Among the many key insights contained in Kate Manne’s 2017 Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (previously written about here by Lilian Calles Barger) is a striking argument about the role of dehumanization in gendered oppression. I want to explore that argument and its implications for historical analysis here. Her argument is especially useful (and provocative) because Manne indicates that her reconceptualization of dehumanization may be more broadly applicable, as is appropriate for her intersectional method and understanding of how misogyny works. It is therefore appropriate to think further about how historians might apply this argument to particular episodes in the past beyond her central concern of misogyny.

Manne understands the argument for the importance of dehumanization as in some way a narrative about personal redemption (my word, not hers). As she says, the logic behind the dehumanization narrative goes, “If people could only appreciate their shared or common humanity, then they would have a hard time mistreating other members of the species” (134).

One of the most creative and intellectually germinal moves in Manne’s analysis of dehumanization is to ask us to look at the phrase “human being.” When we think about how extreme forms of oppression work, we think about this phrase as a story: oppressors try to erase or break down the “human” part of the term in order to ease the way to eliminating the second part. Dehumanization is supposed to precede and permit actions like murder or even genocide; a usually tacit corollary is that in order to commit murder or genocide, most humans need to reimagine their victims as something less than human first. But what if we focus on the second word—“being”—as the lever of oppression, the place where the oppressor asserts his grip?

Manne’s core argument about the nature and operations of misogyny is that it is not a psychological attitude that some men (and possibly some women) have—misogyny is not hatred of the category “woman.” Instead, it is a repertoire of corrective responses to perceived threats to a patriarchal order—one where men receive a disproportionate amount of attention, love, admiration, reassurance, etc. (as well as more tangible goods like promotions or raises). These responses need not even be personal—they can be generated by institutions or even by environments. What is more important is that these responses are meant to reestablish the “correct” distribution of roles and benefits between men and women, most often by punishing women who are claiming more of the goods designated for men. Therefore,

misogyny may target women in ways that presuppose a sense of her as a fellow human being. The key contrast naturally shifts to the second part of the idiom instead. Women may not be simply human beings but positioned as human givers when it comes to the dominant men who look to them for various kinds of moral support, admiration, attention, and so on. She is not allowed to be in the same ways as he is. She will tend to be in trouble when she does not give enough, or to the right people, in the right way, or in the right spirit. And, if she errs on this score, or asks for something of the same support or attention on her own behalf, there is a risk of misogynist resentment, punishment, and indignation. (xix)

Dehumanization, in other words, is neither a sufficient nor even a necessary condition for oppression, at least of women.

There are immediate analytical benefits to Manne’s redefinition of misogyny and her decentering of dehumanization from the standard narrative of how oppression happens. As she says, it allows us to see that

misogyny’s essence lies in its social function, not its psychological nature. To its agents, misogyny need not have any distinctive “feel” or phenomenology from the inside. If it feels like anything at all, it will tend to be righteous: like standing up for oneself or for morality, or—often combining the two—for the “little guy.” It often feels to those in its grip like a moral crusade, not a witch hunt. And it may pursue its targets not in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of  loving justice. It can also be a purely structural phenomenon, instantiated via norms, practices, institutions, and other social structures. (20)

To me, this is a parallel move to many critiques of racism that seek to shift its grounds from the individual psychological state of the oppressor—does this boy feel like a racist when he’s doing this?—to the structural conditions that produce this concrete situation and the inequalities of power and resources that are embodied in it.

There are reasons particular to the usual relations of men and women why the psychologization of misogyny as intrinsically dehumanizing does not make sense, Manne argues. The default presumption about dehumanization is that its obverse—humanization—is always positive, that it always leads to a feeling of commonality and empathy. To “humanize” someone is ostensibly to look for the ways they are like us. But that assumption, Manne argues, is “radically incomplete.”

For a fellow human being is not just an intelligible spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague, etc., in relation to you and yours. They are also an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc. Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, or shame you… So, when it comes to recognizing someone as a fellow human being, the characteristic human capacities that you share don’t just make her relatable; they make her potentially dangerous and threatening in ways only a human being can be—at least relative to our own, distinctively human sensibilities. She may, for example, threaten to undermine you. (147-148)

If Manne’s argument about the nature of misogyny is correct—if it more satisfactorily and more productively explains certain common experiences of women—then it should be obvious how misogyny can occur in the absence of dehumanization, even how it should almost always occur precisely in concert with a fully humanized woman. Women are threats to the patriarchal order only when they are possessed of a full complement of human qualities—intentionality, agency, etc. If misogyny is the set of responses meant to isolate and eliminate those threats and to restore women to their role as human givers, then it cannot go hand in hand with dehumanization.

Manne’s full argument about misogyny and dehumanization considers a number of potential counterarguments—such as, importantly, the notion of women’s objectification—but I want to move on to consider how her emphasis on the second word in “human being” might apply to other historically oppressed groups.

Manne at one point makes a remark about the centrality of antisemitism to our paradigmatic understanding of prejudice and oppression. Antisemitism has, she argues, led us to look for particular kinds of emotions or ideologies as the root causes of actions that have discriminatory effects. In particular, it has caused us to assume that other forms of group-oriented hatred must be directed against an entire people in its entirety (52). Manne notes that this understanding of the nature of oppression doesn’t even accurately describe the history of antisemitism, but I think it is nonetheless worth thinking about why, as Manne argues, this paradigm of bigotry as hatred for a class of people “in its entirety” does not reflect the true nature of misogyny but why it is at least somewhat plausible as a description for a form of bigotry like antisemitism.

If we go back to Manne’s shift of emphasis from “human being” to “human being,” how might we apply that conceptual turn to antisemitism? Unlike women, Jews have not traditionally been forced into the role of “human giver”—in fact, it is precisely the stereotypical Jewish miserliness and pecuniary wizardry that is frequently at the root of both conspiracy theories and more casual expressions of antisemitism. In the imagination of the anti-Semite, Jews never give.

It is, in fact, difficult to think of a term that could replace “being” the way that “giver” does in the logic of misogyny. And that may be the crucial point. The logic of antisemitism presumes that there is no role for the Jew in a properly functioning society—either Jews must completely abolish their Jewishness or they must themselves be abolished. This may well be one of the reasons why so many critiques of finance—such as by the Populists of the 1890s—feel antisemitic even when they are not. They operate according to a parallel logic: there is a quite serious belief underlying the critique of “Wall Street” that there simply is no valid function that financiers as such could fill.

Let us shift quickly to a different example: Native Americans. At first, we might think that, like women, Native Americans have historically been positioned vis-à-vis whites as human givers—forced to sign treaty after treaty, ceding one tract of land after another. The mythology of Thanksgiving (Squanto and so forth), of Pocahontas, of Sacajawea all seem to suggest that the dominant narrative propagated to insure white dominance has perpetually placed Indians as selfless givers.

But I’m not sure that’s the whole of it. One of the key reasons why Manne finds dehumanization wanting as an explanation of how misogyny happens is that a woman’s role as a human giver is meant to be performed constantly; her giving nature is supposed to be always available, always on call, never depleted. That is generally not the case in the mythology of Squanto, Pocahontas, Sacajawea, et al. Instead, these figures—or the leaders who signed treaties clearing the way for white westward settlement—generally perform a single act of giving… and then they get out of the way. There is even a (horribly nasty) term for someone who gives something and then, on second thought, sticks around and demands the return of the gift—“Indian giver.”

Rather than “giving,” the more appropriate term might be “sacrificing.” This adequately conveys, I think, some of the deeper structures of the “vanishing Indian” motif in white American culture. It also helps us locate where to expect racist forms of entitlement to have coalesced and focalized—at those points where whites expected Native Americans to give and then leave, but Native Americans stood their ground. (Standing Rock, for instance.) Just as misogyny rears its head when women are “bad” givers, whites have punished Native Americans whenever they were “bad sacrificers.” Or maybe “bad sacrifices.”

Manne’s argument about dehumanization, in sum, may be useful to historians as a way of thinking both about what roles particular marginalized groups have been expected to fill and also about what kind of responses have been common when individuals from those groups have “failed” to fill those roles. It also may help us understand some of the very phenomena that the dehumanization paradigm is meant to explain—mass murder and, ultimately, genocide.

“Extirpation” is an uncommon word, but one of the few times you are likely to encounter it is in a plan or an appeal for genocide. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Autobiography that “if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.” Jeffery Amherst infamously announced his intention to “extirpate them [Indians] root and branch.” (You can see how fond he was of the verb by CTRL+F’ing it on this page.)[1]

“Root and branch” is an apt idiom for the verb: originally it had to do with clearing stumps or other debris in order to turn a field to cultivation. This makes it the perfect verb for settler colonialism, but it also signals the way settler colonialism reimagines murder and dispossession. One could focus on the way that the verb—deep down—equates people with stumps, a reading which would accord with the dehumanization paradigm: settler colonists had to mentally turn Native Americans into something non-human (like stumps) in order to give themselves license for their heinous acts.

Or one could instead think about what the relationship entailed by this analogy actually is. Clearing a stand of trees and leaving a bunch of stumps implies other facts—for instance, the fact that it will leave a lot of useful lumber. The colonist’s relation to the trees that have been cut is likely to be in some way one of gratitude: these trees are “giving trees.”[2] But the stumps are not “giving”—they are stubborn. They are refusing to take part in the sacrifice which the trunks and branches so graciously performed. They must be removed.

So what at first looks like a pure and simple case of dehumanization—of turning a human into an object in order to commit violence on that object—instead becomes something much more analytically tangled but also, I think, more insightful and probing of the whole dynamic at play. That, in the end, is what I think the promise of Manne’s insights may be for historians.