Human is not a neutral term. It is laced with socio-historical positionality that masquerades as neutral, universal, and even innocuous. What exactly do we mean when we invoke terms like human, humanity, or any other derivative? Suppose humanity is, in fact, universal, neutral, and innocuous. Why can people be rendered inhumane, commit crimes against humanity, be thrown out of the species, and become non-human animals when specific actions are perpetrated? Why can some groups of people engage in one activity, and another engage in the same activity, but one of the groups becomes monsters while the other becomes heroes? How can being human claim stability while embodying so much precarity?
In Dr. Sam Dubal’s book Against Humanity, he questions the term humanity. He illustrates how humanity is a dichotomizing term dividing the reasonable and the unreasonable (Dubal 13). He calls into question a specific socio-historical conception that constructs what it means to be human, rooted in Western Renaissance and Enlightenment traditions. Dubal also acknowledges the elephant in the room regarding race as he quotes Achille Mbembe, “Discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework . . . of a meta-text about the animal—to be exact, about the beast.” As the absolute other to the West, he argues, Africa becomes a way for the West to define itself as different, to create a self-image that poses a problem to the “idea of a common human nature, a humanity shared with others “(Dubal 6).
Dubal is doing ethnographic work on the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, which has been thrown out of humanity because of the violence they committed. If humanity distinguishes the reasonable from the unreasonable, the human from the animal, and the good from the bad in every way, the LRA becomes exempt from humanity. The task then becomes to “re-humanize them into peace civil society of humans” (Dubal 14). Therefore, humanity becomes a tool that does a specific kind of work. Humanity serves the purpose of making certain subjects that do not disrupt the status quo. It is important to note that Dubal was not nor am I defending mass violence but rather questioning the type of work humanity does and how it was constructed.
Sylvia Wynter calls the modern origins of humanity Man2, framed in the context of Charles Darwin’s natural selection and science. The shift to a more secular idea of humanness categorizes all the colonized, darker-skinned natives of the world and the darker-skinned poorer European peoples themselves. The new master code, a purely scientific one, divided the world into the selected and “dysselected.” Within this Darwinian contest, the figure of Man is overrepresented as human (Ferreira da Silva, 91).
Humanity, as we utilize it, is located in a socio-ethnic framework of Western Europe galvanized by the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Darwinian frameworks that constructed man and made that prototypical socio-ethnic man the universal man. In doing so, it barred “others” from any meaningful access to humanity. It divided the world into humans and non-humans, which largely fell along the color line white and non-white broadly and white and Black in particular. I make the distinction not because non-white, non-Black people are not subject to a precarious relationship with humanity but because Blackness is at the end of that continuum. When the world becomes dichotomized, the “bad” end of the continuum, in this case, Blackness, highlights the organizing work humanity can be weaponized to do.
Blackness, as the Western world imagines it, was conceived out of European “voyages of discovery,” the slave trade, and colonialism. These events begat racism. As mentioned above, the construction of humanity was being conceived in tandem with dichotomizing and ordering projects of the West race and racism being manifestations of these projects. In Edward Said’s Orientalism, Said explains that part of colonialism creates binaries of us vs. them, civilized versus uncivilized, and extractor versus those subject to extraction. Once race is constructed, it becomes operationalized as racism, meaning one could think of race as embodying difference, and racism ascribes meaning and value to those differences. Said writes, “the colonizer views the subordinate race as lacking the ability to govern themselves, illogical, and weak.” Slavery and colonialization of African-descended people rendered and re-enforced non-humanness because those racialized as Black were property to build global capitalism. There were debates about the humanity of Black people because if they were, in fact, human, slavery, and colonization would not be morally acceptable. However, non-humanizing Blackness absolves slave owners of guilt.
Achille Mbembe aptly describes the work Blackness does,
The term “Black” was the product of a social and technological machine tightly linked to the emergence and globalization of capitalism. It was invented to signify exclusion, brutalization, and degradation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred. The Black [Wo]Man, despised and profoundly dishonored, is the only human in the modern order whose skin has been transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise—the living crypt of capital (Dubal 16).
In W.E.B Dubois’s Souls of Black Folks, he asks how it feels to be a problem. Dubois is asking this question at the beginning of the twentieth century. The heart of the question seems to be how it feels to have your very being, be an issue to the world around you. Versions of this question continue to be asked. In Black Skins, White Masks, Franz Fanon writes, “Wherever he goes he remains a Negro”. Suban Ahmed Nur’s article On Being and Becoming Black in a Globally Dispersed Diaspora, says,” To “become” Black, on the other hand, is a determinant of the world experiencing you in your Blackness; it is how you are perceived in the non-Black world and treated by non-Black people .” These reflections on Blackness reveal the enduring quality of Blackness and the work it was constructed to do, as well as the instability because one can “become” Black when entering the Western world. Blackness, humanity, and other terms purport self-evidence, but they were only constructed that way. So, then what does it mean to embody identity influx? I hope to explore that embodiment in the following parts.
Work Cited
Busey, Christopher L., and Tianna Dowie-Chin. “The Making of Global Black Anti-Citizen/Citizenship: Situating BlackCrit in Global Citizenship Research and Theory.” Theory & Research in Social Education, vol. 49, no. 2, Apr. 2021, pp. 153–75. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2020.1869632.
Dubal, Sam. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2018. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1zk0n03. Accessed 12 Oct. 2023.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Brent Hayes Edwards, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Ong, Aihwa. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. University of California Press, 2003.Nur,
Suban Ahmed. “On Being and Becoming Black in a Globally Dispersed Diaspora.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 3, May 2022, pp. 257–69. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2022.2077626
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Facsimile edition, Penguin, 2003.
Silva, Denise Ferreira Da. “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme.” Sylvia Wynter, edited by Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 90–105. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375852-003.
Image Source: Engraving showing the diseased part of a skull. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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