There was a time when infamous newspapers such as the Punch used to entertain their readers by depicting Irish people as half animals and half humans. Their representations as apes were common. The language reserved for Irish people was as offensive as their images. Irish migrants were associated with discourses of beggary, backwardness, nomadism, superstition, and violence. These representations were not limited to Irish people or the 17th century.
Today, we see similar narratives and discourses in different media. Some ethnic minorities have been labelled as “parasitic under-class” with refugees and migrants often being described as vermin and welfare spongers. A former US president has called migrants “animals” and accused them of “poisoning the blood of our country” to the delight of his fans. Dehumanisation, whether in visual or written expressions, refers to the process whereby some individuals or groups are treated as less that human or not human at all. Whilst these “sub-humans” often retain some human characteristics, they are considered “inferior”, “threatening”, “savages”; “evil”, even “disgusting” or “diseased”. These people are seen as incapable of rational thought and driven by brutality and debased instincts. Whether compared with animals or things, the dehumanisation process render some people morally excluded, delegitimised, and completely devoid of rights.
The targets of dehumanising language are varied from homeless people to women, ethnic minorities, refugees, migrants, foreigners, Muslims, politicians, footballers…the list goes on indefinitely. Reflections about what is to be “human” are left aside as are the contradictions embedded in its language: Refugees may be portrayed as passive agents that drain the resources of a country and at the same time as assertive agents committing crimes arbitrarily; not very intelligent and at the same time cunningly deceitful; infantilised and yet demonised. The same can be said about the language unleashed toward other groups. Dehumanising language can be easily recycled and reactivated to serve in different communications contexts. It travels from location to location and is adapted to whichever group at any given time. This versatility, however, does not mean that dehumanising language is somehow fickle or unharmful.
The power of words
When we call people “vermin” we are using a rhetoric trope, that is, a figurative language element, a non-literal expression to persuade or create some effect. We all utter them in our everyday language. Tropes include metaphors – when we make an association between two unrelated things, like the famous Shakespearian metaphor “All the world’s a stage…”. Metaphors are very effective in guiding readers or listeners to a constellation of related meanings. When we use “vermin” to describe people we conjure up many other meanings such as “infestation”, “harm”, “disease”, “parasite”, “disgust”. Comparably, the metaphor “floods” when referring to migrants or asylum seekers brings about adjectives such as “sudden”, “uncontrollable” and “large” provoking a sense of insecurity and danger. Even metaphors that lack explicit negative connotations can be used to divert the attention from an uncomfortable issue like describing homeless people as “campers”, as if living in tents was their choice and thus diverting the attention to other topics like the problems local residents perceive them as bringing to an area. This language eliminates the focus on the tragedy of the homeless crisis, thereby eroding sympathy for them.
The problem is that metaphors are not just a subjective choice to say something in a more or less artistic way. Metaphors carry significant literal meaning with them too. As linguist George Lakoff observes in his book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are part of a coherent cognitive system according to which we organise our thoughts and actions. For Lakoff the reason we behave as if we were in a metaphorical war when we argue – we attack or defend, is because we conceptualise arguments as such. Metaphors are not just words but a matter of thought and action. This would help to explain why the more we use particular metaphors, the more they become the terms in which we understand something. When we describe migrants as “vermin” or the numbers arriving as “floods”, we associate migrants with those meanings until they become the only way many people think of migrants, in part shaping their behaviour toward them. Other scholars support the idea that language influences the way we think and act and warn about its effectiveness as an instrument of manipulation and oppression.
Perhaps the person who best described the transformation of language to control what people think and do was Victor Klemperer, a philologist who meticulously analysed the language of the Third Reich. For Klemperer, by controlling language Nazis were able to influence people’s thinking. Specifically, he realised that it was not the speeches or articles or any other medium that had to be read consciously that exerted the most powerful influence but the repetition of single words and phrases which permeated the minds of the people and ended up assimilated unconsciously. As Klemperer observed, words can poison language by embedding themselves so deeply inside that they achieve permanence: “Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all”. Tropes such as “final solution” (euphemism) not only succeeded in dehumanising Jewish people and other groups like Romanies, they also served to mask the brutality of the Nazis and concealed reality.
The stories we’re told
Similarly harmful are theme tropes, that is, the story lines we are all familiar like the “family man” or the “femme fatale”. They can also be normalised until we believe they speak the “truth” about groups regardless of their lack of accuracy.
A good example to illustrate this point is the popular belief that “Gypsies” kidnap children. The “child stealing Gypsy” is a dehumanising theme or a trope that has appeared in innumerable children books, novels and cartoons. This centuries-old tale portrayed Romanies as dark strangers who stole children for profit, either to obtain a ransom or to use them to rob. In Ireland, this made up “truth” contributed to the removal of two blonde Romani children from the care of the parents in 2013 because they were suspected to have been kidnapped. This event emerged as the by-product of a earlier case in Greece which was instigated by a frenzy of sensationalist media. This crisis did not happen by accident. We are all exposed to particular tropes in the books we read, the paintings we admire, the news we hear, the television programmes we watch, the ads that land on our feeds, etc. Once this language leaks into our everyday parlance and into our stories it becomes embedded in our cultural reserves. From here it grows into themes and tropes that can be rehashed repeatedly, lingering throughout generations and becoming ingrained in the collective consciousness.
The “child-stealing Gypsy” theme became a reliable account several centuries ago even though there was no evidence to support this belief. Among all stories that circulated about Romanies, the child stealer was particularly resilient notwithstanding the fact that the opposite was true: It was the Romani families who suffered the forcible removal of their children by the authorities to assimilate them and eradicate the “Gypsy problem”, as was the case in 18th century Austria. Moreover, Romanies have been known to rescue and bring up unwanted children often born outside wedlock. Writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot, among many others, were exposed to some of these negative and stereotypical stories circulating at their time about Romanies and chose to reproduce them in their narratives, perhaps at the expense of other accounts which were not as “interesting”. By rehashing them they contributed to fix them in our cultural stock becoming what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “sources of information” that provide a “blueprint” so the world around us can take on a form that we can interpret.
Language matters because these stories and tropes we persistently use are part of the cognitive schemas that guide the understanding of our world. Like scripts already written, they are the cultural cues that help us interpret experience and behaviour and create certain “dispositions”. Klemperer observed that the language of the victor is not only spoken, it must be breathed in and lived. We should approach what we read and hear with caution and scepticism because words and phrases that hover around us might be more harmful than populists and demagogues might care to admit. They are never “just” words. Fortunately, culture is not permanent and neither is the language that sustains it. Whilst language might be constraining, limiting, rigid, misguiding, even oppressive, it might also be the opposite. Stereotypical and dehumanising stories and tropes might be firmly fixed in our culture but language is not inevitable or preordained. Language always offers a way out, allowing us to think differently and break through restrictions. Language can be both a powerful instrument of manipulation and a liberating means of resistance.
Dr. Mayte Martín holds degrees in Philology, International Relations and Communications, and Sociology. She is co-founder with Lisa Rose of the consultancy Martin Rose which supports youth, communities, professionals, politicians, and civil servants in working towards more equitable and peaceful societies through training, research, mediation and advice.
Featured image via Openverse
