Thread by @RitikaGoelTO

Powerful people know that in order to enslave, colonize, criminalize, restrict movement, extract labour, invade - you *must* dehumanize those you seek to oppress - or else it will just be seen as what it is - violence. The most humanity is always granted to those at the top.

This phenomenon is important because it is the way people who have privilege but may not be in positions of power participate in oppression. Convincing the dominant group that others are “below you” because they are less deserving of humanity is key to continued oppression.

History is full of ordinary people who got up in the morning, went to work, loved their children, cared for their families and friends, and also participated in and benefited from oppression of people whose humanity had been denied, so their suffering mattered less.

We see this manifest historically - in how ordinary people in European nations were taught and believed that those in the colonies as 'backward' and and therefore needing the 'leadership' of European settlers.

Or how Indigenous people were infantilized and dehumanized, similarly labeled as 'savage' to allow the average European settler to feel comfortable with the colonization, settlement and segregation process involving violent relocation, later forced removal of children and more.

Or how enslaved Africans were dehumanized in intense ways allowing for brutal violence inflicted by their captors and owners (yup, ordinary people) often being told this was 'corrective' due to their 'lazy disposition' while they worked completely inhuman levels.

Or how women have been dehumanized, labeled as 'emotional'; and childcare, eldercare, housework is labeled as 'women's work' and devalued, justifying ongoing oppression of women as 'lesser than' men who are 'natural born leaders' and do 'important' economically productive work.

But this plays out still today in umpteen ways - those narratives that have been promoted and seeped into society to allow the justification of structural oppression, then continues to devalue and dehumanize people even as society claims to 'progress' and change things on paper.

We see this in differential sentencing for racialized people (esp Black, Latinx and Indigenous) for committing the same crime. We seen it in how young children are often told to dampen their dreams and ambitions based on what is viewed as 'fitting' for their race or gender.

We see it in whose pain is believed and managed in healthcare. It takes centuries of dehumanization of racialized people, women, people living in poverty that leads us today to repeatedly, predictably, deny their pain and suffering relative to wealthier, male and white people.

Right now, we see it in the response of our society to the opiate/overdose/toxic drug supply pandemic vs the #COVID19 pandemic, the former threatening to take the lives disproportionately of those we have devalued and dehumanized as 'addicts' who have 'made bad choices'.

To better see the humanity of others - we need positive representations in media that do not reinforce harmful stereotypes, we need contact between communities who have been intentionally segregated, we need to LISTEN and take leadership from communities who continue to resist.

And we need to learn the history of structural oppression - to know that the ideas we hold have been intentionally created, propagated and promoted in order to justify and perpetuate oppression. We have to fight the ideas in ourselves but also the system that created them.