This is a photograph of a portion of Raise Up, a sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas displayed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It depicts African American men (the full sculpture depicts ten), eyes closed in concentration, and arms, with remnants of shackles still attached, extended heavenwards, their bodies entombed in a massive concrete block.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates the victims of lynching in the United States. Most Americans have an incorrect notion of lynching—one that they get from sanitized versions in the movies and on TV. Very often, the victim was tortured for hours. His body was mutilated, including castration, until death (often by being burned alive) delivered him from agony. Lynchings were often public events, attracting hundreds or thousands of spectators—men, women, and even children. Lucky onlookers returned home with a cherished souvenir: a finger, a toe, or a bit of charred bone from the smoldering corpse.
There were 4467 recorded lynchings between 1883 and 1941 (many more probably went unrecorded). It was a national phenomenon—a practice as American as apple pie. It occurred mostly in the South, where lynching was a tool to oppress ostensibly free former slaves, and in the West, where there was little law enforcement. Of this total, 73% of the victims were African Americans, 24% were European Americans, and the remaining 3% consisted of Mexicans, American Indians, and Asian Americans. If we limit consideration to the lynchings that took place in the South, the proportion of African American victims to others is vastly increased.
You may have noticed that I’ve described lynching victims using the pronoun “him,” and you may have also noticed that Raise Up portrays African American men, rather than men and women. Of the 4467 lynching victims, a staggering 4027 were men. Only 99 were women. The gender of 341 of them could not be determined from the newspaper reports, although these were likely all or mostly men. If we exclude these from consideration, it turns out that 97% of those lynched were men. In the South, practically all of them were African Americans.
The media often pictured Black victims of mob violence as monstrous or demonic—as rampaging beasts, rapists and murderers devoid of any moral or even human sensibilities. African American men were also demonized in the racist literature of the day, both academic and fictional. The character Gus, a villainous former slave in Thomas F. Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansmen (brought to the big screen in 1915 as The Birth of a Nation) exemplifies this. Gus, who rapes a White teenage girl, has “gleaming apelike” eyes, and his “thin spindle-shanks supported an oblong, protruding stomach, resembling an elderly monkey’s, which seemed so heavy it swayed his back to carry it. The animal vivacity of his small eyes and the flexibility of his eyebrows, which he worked up and down rapidly with every change of countenance, expressed his eager desires.” Re-enacting his sexual assault, Gus’ “thick lips were drawn upward in an ugly leer and his sinister bead eyes gleamed like a gorilla’s. A single fierce leap and the black claws clutched the air slowly as if sinking into the soft White throat” of his victim.
The image of the demonic Black male lives on in American culture. It was there in the use of Willie Horton to scare White voters during George H. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, in the “superpredator” panic of the 1990s, and it is here today in the rhetoric used to characterize gang members, and the ideology underpinning the carceral state. Criminologist John M. Hagedorn writes in Gangs on Trial: Challenging Stereotypes and Demonization in the Courts:
The dehumanization of nonwhite gang members underwrites the logic of mass incarceration…. If the defendant is less than human, the jury, the court, and the law itself washes its hands of his fate. If he is inherently evil. He can’t be reformed so, of course we should lock him up forever if we can’t “put him down.”… Through the power of prototypes, while an actual human being stands before the court, the prosecution frightens the jury to see instead a scary monster or bloodthirsty animal.
I call this “demonizing dehumanization” to distinguish it from other kinds of dehumanization. Demonizing dehumanization very highly gendered. Those who are demonized are almost always male.
The demonization of African American men is but one example of a broader pattern of dehumanization.
I explain in detail Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, that this kind dehumanization has two components. One is the element of physical threat. Demonized men are supposed to be inherently criminal and dangerous to the social order. They are characterized as murderers, rapists, pedophiles or terrorists. But the accusation of criminality is only half the story. Demonized men are not merely enemies of law and order. They are also transgressive in a deeper, and more disturbing way. These men are thought violate the natural order by being both human and subhuman simultaneously. You can see this idea at work in the description of Gus in The Clansmen. Gus is human (he is a rapist, and to be a rapist, one must be human), but his hands are “claws” and he has the body of a monkey and the eyes of a gorilla. When he attacks his female prey, it is with “a single fierce leap.”
My research into dehumanization has convinced me that when racialized men are dehumanized, they are very often represented as monsters, unlike the case for women. To see this, let’s move on to a second, very well documented example: the dehumanization of Jewish men during the Holocaust. Nazis labelled Jewish men as inherently criminal, just like their African American counterparts in the United States. Michael Berkowitz explains in his book The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality:
Numerous Nazi leaders, aping Hitler, went on record identifying Jews with “criminals,” deriding them as “thugs and beasts of prey, who commit so many crimes that their elimination would enable the Reichstag to cut the criminal code in half.” The Nazis took pride and solace in quoting Martin Luther on Jew hatred generally and “Jewish criminality” in particular. In 1935 a “typical speech” by Julius Streicher to the Hitlerjugend equated “the Jewish people” with an “organized body of world criminals”….Interspersed in countless Nazi statements, reports, and orders were equations of Jews with “criminals” or “gangsters,” which automatically jettisoned any ground for humane treatment.
Although the word “Jew” is gender-neutral, in this context it was applied to males alone. There are many illustrations of Jewish criminals in Nazi visual propaganda. They were presented as thieves, rapists, pimps, pedophiles, and murderers. But seemingly without exception, these images of Jewish criminals are images of Jewish men.
Nazis also portrayed Jewish people as Untermenschen (“subhumans”)—often as vermin. The best-known example is perhaps the scene in the 1940 film The Eternal Jew where the Jewish people is compared to a swarm of rats. But it is crucial to understand that the Nazis did not regard Jews as nothing but rodents. Rodents, after all, cannot be criminals. Nazis thought of Jewish people as human-subhuman chimeras, as as portrayed in the image above.
The fusion of criminality and subhumanity transmuted Jewish men into monsters in the eyes of their persecutors. To test this hypothesis, my former student Emily Birdsall examined the representation of Jews as demonic or monstrous in Nazi visual propaganda. She found that in every case where the Jewish person’s gender is specified, the monstrous Jew is male. Nazi propagandists depicted Jewish women as ugly and repellent, but not as monsters.
Excellent piece.