Dehumanization and Whiteness
Paulo Freire (1970) describes dehumanization as when people are considered less-than-human and that their status as humans is different than what it should be. Being humanized means they should have the ability to pursue their hopes and dreams, some of the very things that make them so human (p. 44). Humanization is when we actively see the humanity in others and therefore treat people like they are worthy beings and therefore that their lives matter. One of the biggest reasons that Ethnic Studies became a field of study is because historically the European settlers that colonized the Americas and developed the structures of this nation by dehumanizing Native Americans, Africans, and other non-Europeans. Not only do many of these structures still exist today but in what ultimately became white supremacy were systems, beliefs, languages, laws, practices, and more that continually work to maintain a dominance of an elite class. In this chapter, whiteness is the construction of identity that enables privilege and power based on skin color and white supremacy is the system in which whiteness is perpetuated and maintained even through things like policies.
White supremacy has been maintained by continual adaptation to localized and generational contexts but the underlying basis is white, middle class (and beyond) male, Christian heteropatriarchy. Whiteness is not a “natural” category of identity, it is created and is maintained by a belief in its superiority. When whiteness is used to uphold power, it is white supremacy. The power of whiteness lies in its ability to be largely invisible and therefore functions as the standard of humanity. When teaching Ethnic Studies students, I make it a priority to help them process some of their racialized experiences especially in relation to their positionality, meaning where they are socially located for example in terms of race, class, gender, etc. In one class, I had a white female student say that she couldn’t think of instances where race was a salient feature in situations. I hear this a lot from white students and my response is typically, “OK. So then, that is where you start! Why is it that you haven’t had to think about your race? Can you think of situations where others have experienced something where someone made an issue of their race but not of yours? Or where someone made an issue of their race, and it made you think something about being white?” This type of interaction between my students and I help to prove the point about whiteness as invisible, normalized, and the standard but it also helps them see that they were also taught to perpetuate whiteness in these ways.
