Thread by @jenmercieca

Reification (treating people as objects) gives people permission--people can think of themselves as good people who care & do the right thing so long as they convince themselves that these people aren't real people. Slavery, genocide, capitalism, etc all work on this principle.

If they're not people, then they don't count. What are they if they're not people?

A problem, a threat, dangerous, a plague, an invasion, a Trojan horse, rats, cancer, cockroaches, rapists, drug dealers, murderers, etc.

The word "immigrant" itself is a condensation symbol ("a name, word, phrase, or maxim which stirs vivid impressions involving the listener's most basic values and readies the listener for action")--immigrants aren't people, but a category of threat that motivates people to act.

Categories of immigrant/migrant/asylum seeker are collapsed--there is no "good immigrant" anymore on the right because of the way that all immigrants have been reified as a dangerous threat (a smooshing together of all of the ways they've been reified).

So how do you get people to be less afraid of what they've learned to fear most? Weirdify and Humanize. Fight reification by explaining how the strategy works and turning objects back into people. Treat the reifiers as people too--what are they afraid of? Why are they afraid?

Cultivate empathy on both sides. There are autocratic leaders who know very well that these are people in need of our help, but those leaders cynically position immigrants as hate-objects. Their followers learn to see the issue through this frame and it becomes real to them.

Most people have no actual first hand information about this issue (I'm not on the boarder or in the airports, checking IDs and passports and papers). They only know about immigrant through the media/elites who frame reality. They've been told to be afraid & to reify & to hate.

It is awful to be dehumanized and turned into a scary hate-object. It is also awful to be terrorized and manipulated by your media and political leaders for profit and power. We're all vulnerable to being reified & terrorized in this way.

Sadly, it's central to our political discourse today. The really big lie is "politics is war and the enemy cheats," which is a reification that condones all other reifications.

Kant applies here. People are ends, not means. Republican discourse today is anti-Enlightenment rationality, which is why it's so hard to argue against with arguments. You're bringing Enlightenment norms, values & methods to a pre-Enlightenment fight.

I'm going to keep doing "weirdify" threads like this one. I hope folks find them useful!

Weirdify (v): to make weird, the opposite of "normalize." A way of breaking down and exposing fascist rhetoric. Normalize democracy; weirdify fascism.

A democrat is someone who is motivated by freedom, equality, social justice, and political practices that allow all citizens to meaningfully share power. Democracy is a way of life, it’s also a way of thinking & communicating. So is fascism.

Here is a great thread that gives context to the situation and helps to humanize the people involved:

Here's another way to think of immigrants: they are what makes America, America. When they become citizens they actively consent to our Constitution. They are ambitious and want a better life for themselves and their families. None of that is scary, it's hopeful and joyful.

Allowing immigrants to be framed as hate-objects makes both them and you less human: “when you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.”--Eleanor Roosevelt