When there is a topic surrounding race and inequality, the term racism is used to describe the belief that one race is superior over another. Calling it racism is not enough to describe the inhumane treatment several groups have experienced. Dehumanization is the removal of a person’s right to free will. In a sense, the person is stripped all the way down of their humanity. Human being are distinct from all species of our planet due to our consciousness and advanced intelligence. These characteristics are inside of everyone. The belief of a superior race leads to the destruction, injustice, and suppression of the oppressed.
In the article “Less Than Human” by David Smith, Enlightenment thinkers, who advocated the rights of human individuality and human rights, “routinely excluded nonwhites from the category of the human.” To exclude nonwhites gave them a moral justification to treat nonwhites, particularly Africans, like slaves. Thomas Jefferson who gave us the Declaration of Independence, owned several slaves as well as other
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The dehumanizers, who were the Europeans, pay a psychological cost in slavery. The slaveholders lost their sense of humanity by their loss of compassion for their fellow human beings. Their actions made them inhumane because if they would not commit the same torture to the people of their own race, what gave them the right to do it to another group? They were morally disengaged from being humans. The louder the slaves screamed, the harder they whipped. Their wicked natures turned them into bloodthirsty animals filled with anger and hate. Harriet Jacobs, a young slave whose middle-aged slave master sexually assaulted her, pointed out that “slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched”