The Political Implications of Dehumanization

Of Monsters and Men: The Political Implications of Dehumanization

A dissertation presented by

Ioana G. Hulbert

to The Department of Political Science

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the field of

Political Science

Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts August 2020

ABSTRACT

At a superficial look, polarizing and even hateful types of discourse have grown more pronounced as of late, but scholars know little about the mechanisms that lead individuals to engage in such behavior or thinking. This dissertation project seeks to shed new light on the effects one such mechanism - dehumanization - has on a myriad of policy attitudes, both individual and immediate, and more systemic and long-term. Defined as the act of perceiving or treating people as if they are less than fully human as a means of denying them a sense of individuality, autonomy, or dignity, dehumanization has significant implications for race relations, national identity, public opinion, polarization, and welfare, criminal justice and immigration policy, yet it remains an understudied phenomenon in political science, especially in the American political context. When it is studied, the focus is overwhelmingly on a. race and b. a specific subtype – animalistic dehumanization. The first article of this dissertation offers some historical and political context and explores dehumanization’s role in shaping narratives surrounding national identity and citizenship. The other two articles rely on original survey experiment data to find that animalistic dehumanization, as well as dehumanization by way of pathogen- threat and natural disaster metaphors have a significant and negative impact on policy attitudes surrounding immigration.

Acknowledgements

Pursuing a doctorate is a one of a kind exercise in endurance and passion and I am delighted I can say I spent my 20s studying dehumanization. I owe my interest in the topic to Dr. David Livingstone Smith, who first introduced me to the topic during his seminars at UNE. As my first and foundational mentor, his intellectual rigor is the standard by which I measure all my work – and hope this dissertation does it justice. I would never have pursued a PhD without his encouragement, alongside that of Drs. Brian Duff and

Eric Zuelow. Their enthusiasm, feedback, and support were instrumental in me successfully embarking on the doctorate journey at Northeastern.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and careful feedback of my committee members. Dr. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, apart from reading countless versions of my theory drafts has given me one of the most important skills of all

- knowing how to write a good literature review. A passionate scholar and incredible instructor, his seminars remain my favorite at Northeastern by far. Dr. Thomas Vicino has had my back when I needed it the most and has always encouraged me to look at the big picture – both in my research and in my career trajectory. His positive attitude and ability to take care of anything have been examples of leadership I am grateful to have witnessed and benefited from. Dr. Spencer Piston is the type of unicorn mentor you only hear about in wishful legends – fair, patient, kind, constructive, and responsive. Not only was he instrumental in running the survey experiments in this dissertation, but he also patiently answered every methodology question I could think of. Together, my committee has been a class act and any shortcomings of this project are despite their best feedback.

I am also grateful to my Northeastern colleagues. I am lucky to have worked alongside many bright PhD students, but I am particularly indebted to Summer Marion,

Zeynep Balcioglu, Arie Figgins, Kendall Bailey, and Kate Petrich Horn for the countless hours of grading, teaching, writing, proofreading, brainstorming, stress-eating, crying, and laughing together. These five years would not have been as fun without them.

It takes a village outside of academia as well, and I am forever grateful to my all my family and friends for their support over the years. Clara Irvine has been the most enthusiastic supporters throughout my entire academic career, while Nicole Allen always made sure to crack a joke and cheer me up even during 3 am last minute panic writing sessions. Beth and John Hulbert have been beacons of support and excitement towards my research, and their house in Vermont has been a writing haven for me on countless occasions. I especially appreciate every time they have realized I am struggling to make my R code work, and just poured me a glass of wine to help.

Cecelia French, while in the process of pursuing her own PhD, has been my biggest cheerleader and shoulder to lean on through this process. I am incredibly lucky and grateful to have her as a friend. Ian Hulbert, who started dating me in the thick of graduate school applications and decided to stick around for the full madness, has been the most supportive and proud partner I could have ever asked for throughout this process. He deserves an honorary Master’s by this point (I do not make the rules though).

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my sister, Dr. Alexandra Panaitiu. She is forever my role model and words cannot begin to describe how blessed I am to have her as a sister.

Table of Contents

Dissertation Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………2 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………….3 Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………………………4 Dissertation Introduction…………….………………………………………………………………………….6 First Manuscript - Apes and Anticitizens: Simianization and U.S. National Identity Discourse……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..17 I. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..…..18 II. Humanness and National Identity………………………………………………………22 III. The White Man’s Burden: Racial Science in Enlightened Europe……………30 IV. The Ape and Its Symbolism………………………………………………………………..32 V. The Simianization of African Americans……………………………………………..36 VI. Conclusion and Discussion………………………………………………………………..44 VII. References……………………………………………………………………………………….47 Second Manuscript - Swarms, Tides, and Caravans: Dehumanizing Rhetoric and Anti- immigrant Attitudes……………………………………………………………………………………………..51 I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….52 II. Illegals, Aliens and Waves: Dehumanization and Public Opinion……………54 III. Data & Methodology………………………………………………………………………….62 IV. Results and Discussion……………………………………………………………………..67 V. References……………………………………………………………………………………….77 Third Manuscript - Containment and Contagion: The Policy Implications of Dehumanizing Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric………………………………………………………………..92 I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….93 II. The Literature and Theory on Immigrant Dehumanization……………………95 III. Data & Methodology………………………………………………………………………..101 IV. Results and Discussion…………………………………………………………………….107 V. References………………………………………………………………………………………115 Dissertation Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..….127 Complete Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………..134

Dissertation Introduction

At a superficial look, polarizing and even hateful types of discourse have grown more pronounced as of late, but scholars know little about the mechanisms that lead individuals to engage in such behavior or thinking. At the infamous “Unite the Right” rally, alt-right demonstrators made monkey sounds as a means to ridicule Black Lives

Matter counter-protesters (Heim 2017). In May 2018, The White House published a news update on their website, titled “What you need to know about the violent animals of MS-

13.” For a three-minute read, it manages to characterize members of MS-13 as animals 10 times, as well as violent, abhorrent, heinous, murderous, brutal, predatory, and savage

(White House 2018). Similarly, Hillary Clinton described Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables,” Bill Maher labeled Republicans as “treasonous rats,” and a mayor described Michelle Obama as an “ape in heels.” (Reilly 2016; Delk 2018, Brennan et al.

2015). Elsewhere, Donald Trump Jr. described Democrats as “not even people” and compared Syrian refugees to Skittles, while his father, President Donald Trump, described former White House staffer Omarosa Newman as a “dog,” Democrats as “dims” and characterized immigrants, among others, as “infesting” the United States (Hauser

2016; Tarlo 2018; Trump 2018; Stracqualursi 2018).

This infestation characterization is not new, nor an isolated instance. The

President has characterized immigrants as criminals, rapists, bad hombres, and as originating from shithole countries. This is, as many have pointed out, not normally socially sanctioned discourse. Given the highly charged history of the coon caricature motif in U.S. race relations, it is perhaps not surprising that Mayor Whalig’s ape comment cost her her job (Brennan et al. 2015). Yet, even on its best days, public opinion in the U.S.

6 casually describes immigrants using metaphors evocative of natural calamities – tides, waves, influxes, and surges that overwhelm or contaminate the body of the nation and need to be contained. The very legal jargon that is supposedly unbiased defines immigrants as resident or non-resident aliens.

This dissertation project seeks to shed new light on the effects one such mechanism

- dehumanization - has on a myriad of policy attitudes, both individual and immediate, and more systemic and long-term. Defined as the act of perceiving or treating people as if they are less than fully human as a means of denying them a sense of individuality, autonomy, or dignity, dehumanization has significant implications for race relations, national identity, public opinion, polarization, and welfare, criminal justice and immigration policy, yet it remains an understudied phenomenon in political science, especially in the American political context.

For a field preoccupied with power dynamics, political science and public opinion in particular have often overlooked the importance of one of the most fundamental in- and-out-group dyads: human and non-human. Othering members of a different group to that extreme is not new – one only has to turn their attention to the propaganda surrounding major ethnic conflicts and world wars. There is even a rich literature in critical race studies focusing on how definitions of humanness are used as means of colonial oppression and where the very notion of humanness is synonymous with whiteness. After all, the human-animal dichotomy, resting on notions of hierarchy that are evocative of the Great Chain of Being - from the minerals of the ground all the way to the Christian God – are in and of themselves Western creations, in tension with

7 indigenous ways of thinking about the natural world around us (Gillespie 2018; Mills

2003, 2008).

Yet dehumanization is not present only in genocides or colonial violence, where its role is well documented. What happens when a group is dehumanized in times of peace, in democracies, in common discourse, at home, here in the U.S.? Does it result in lack of empathy and support for welfare measures? In increased support for restrictive and punitive policies? In barring some from citizenship or even forcefully removing members of a group? These are some of the overarching research questions of this dissertation.

The issue with studying dehumanization in the American context is that it has mostly been done through historical analysis ex post facto. The U.S.’ history is filled with instances of dehumanizing treatment towards Native Americans and Blacks in particular, though other races, ethnicities and religions have been subject to the same treatment at various times. America’s roots in European colonialism and scientific racism paired with

American exceptionalism resulted in notions of American chosenness, where the new country was Nature’s Nation and its people were “geographically predestined;” their mission to tame and conquer native and non-white populations, the latter of which were viewed as unnatural and less than human (Hughes 2003, 113). Manifest Destiny, the myth of the American cowboy, and slavery exemplify these notions of a country defined by ethno-racial considerations, packaged as civic ideals of freedom, justice, equality.

It makes sense, then, that where dehumanization is studied in political science in the American context, the focus is overwhelmingly on a. race and b. a specific subtype – animalistic dehumanization (Haslam 2006). The history of American depictions of Blacks

8 as apes, from the coon caricature all the way to Michelle Obama being called an “ape” and

Barack Obama a witch doctor, is as rich as it is infamous – but it is by no means an outlier

(Dyson 2016). In fact, the American Museum of Natural History’s debut galleries in 1877 included exhibitions devoted to Asian, African and North American native peoples among reptiles and lions, and early assessments of urban American neighborhoods

(predominantly non-white, predominantly immigrant) were routinely made using zoological language. Upton Sinclair’s Chicago is a jungle, after all (Jacobson 2000). To this day race itself plays a fundamental role driving American polarization, and the realignment of the Republican party (Abramowitz 2018).

The mechanism of dehumanization is however at the core of such racism. I argue that we must take a step back from simply talking about racial and immigrant resentment or polarization as abstract umbrella terms for various confounding, interacting processes, and discuss the role of dehumanization and its political implications, as a phenomenon that describes a potentially causal mechanism for racism, high polarization, or high levels of any antagonism in general. Defined as the psychological act of perceiving or treating people as if they are less than fully human as a means of denying them a sense of individuality, autonomy, or dignity, dehumanization fills in a blind spot in our field’s literature, where most of the focus in studying political attitudes has traditionally gone toward measuring conscious, explicit attitudes, in contrast with implicit or latent attitudes that pertain more to the phenomenon of dehumanization.

Statement of Problem

My dissertation deals broadly with dehumanization - defined as the psychological act of perceiving or treating people as if they are less than fully human as a means of denying them a sense of individuality, autonomy, or dignity – and its political consequences (Haslam 2006). This dissertation argues that the phenomenon of dehumanization plays a fundamental role in in/out-group identification and that despite having significant implications for race relations, political violence, the criminal justice system, welfare reform, polarization, public opinion and even democratic theory, dehumanization remains an understudied topic in political science. Where it is discussed in the political science scholarship, it is done so primarily in the race and ethnicity literature, as part of a typology of either cultural racism (based in socio-economic and cultural rationalizations for inequality such as “culture of poverty”-type of rationalizations for inequality) or biological racism (deterministic beliefs that some groups are actually biologically and genetically inferior), where blatant dehumanization more or less maps onto the latter.

While the first third of the dissertation grapples with the extent of dehumanization’s impact on race relations in the U.S., the other two thirds of the dissertation expands the literature on dehumanization outside its narrow race-centric extant focus, to grapple with dehumanization’s effect on specific political and policy attitudes with respect to a different target group - immigrants. Moreover, in this dissertation I use dehumanization to challenge the long-standing assumption in the public opinion literature that posits that in-and-out-group identities are distinct psychological phenomena. Humanness can only be constructed in opposition to what it

10 means to not be a human. Dehumanization is inexorably tied to notions of hierarchy, and as such ascribing human or less-than-human identities are necessarily constructed in opposition.

In short, a broad overarching research question for this study is how does dehumanization shape non-extreme political and policy attitudes (that do not amount to genocide, the only phenomenon where dehumanization is recognized by international law as key step in an eight-prong process) within the American political context?

Brief Overview of the Literature

While each of the three central manuscripts includes their own stand-alone literature reviews, it is worth summarizing briefly here the gap this dissertation project aims to fill. The (empirical) concept of dehumanization enters the modern scientific stage in Kelman’s work in social psychology, where the focus at first skewed heavily toward genocide studies (Kelman 1973; Staub 1989). Dehumanization was a matter of hindsight, to be documented by historians ex post facto but little was known about its content or mechanisms. Thus, social psychologists turned their attentions to explaining the process itself. For Leyens et al. (2001), dehumanization represents the tendency to deny others uniquely human traits, while for Haslam (2006) the phenomenon occurs when we deny others uniquely human (UH) or human nature (HN) traits. The former constitutes animalistic dehumanization, while the latter is mechanistic. While Haslam’s typology led the way to better empirical measures, the focus remained on ethno-racial conflicts

(McDonald et al 2015; Nagar and Maoz 2015; Saguy et al. 2015; Prati et al 2016; Kteily et al. 2016; Miranda et al. 2014, among others).

Within the U.S., dehumanization studies have overwhelmingly focused on African

Americans as the target group, with Mekawi et al. (2000) showing that shooting bias is higher among whites who fear Blacks, while Goff et al. (2008) find support for an implicit association between Blacks and apes. The issues with implicit bias testing led Bruneau et al. (2015) to develop he Ascent of Man scale for exactly such a study, which resulted in a number of works that employ it to study race relations (Kteily et al 2015; Jardina et al

2017), presidential candidates (Cassesse 2019), and partisan attitudes (Martherus et al.

2018; Casesse 2020). The scale consists of a visual depiction of the folk-theory of evolution, with 5 humanoid figures depicting the “ascent of man,” from quadrupedal mammal to modern Homo Sapiens. Below this picture rests a slider scale, from 0 to 100, meant to give subjects a chance to rate the humanity level as it corresponds to the “stages” depicted above it.

There is a reason this scale maps onto racial dehumanization so well, which is the focus of the first manuscript below. One the most enduring forms of othering African

Americans in this country is a specific form of dehumanization – simianization – defined as the conceiving or depicting of a minority as non-human primates (generally apes and monkeys). There are three main arguments made by scholars of nationalism that inform the theoretical lens of the first paper, and the dissertation broadly. Firstly, Amilcar

Barreto’s notion that U.S. nationalism is a nested one – at its core ethno-racial, identity- based, packaged as civic and ideal-based (Barreto 2016). Second is Joel Olson’s juxtaposition of the American Creed against the American Dilemma – the tension between lofty ideals of life, liberty and justice for all, all while terms and conditions apply

– citizenship is reserved for whites, resulting in a Herrenvolk democracy (Olson 2000).

Third is Loring Danforth’s argument that national identities are fluid, particularly suspectable to renegotiation in times of conflict and always constructed in antithesis to each other (Danforth 1995).

Based on these three insights, I aim to challenge mainstream public opinion scholarship, which treats in-group and out-group attitudes as silos. A vast number of works on political attitudes, in general, and racial ones, in particular, have focused on whether or not out-group attitudes subscribe to the Stereotype-Content-Model, ethnocentrism, are distinguishable from racial animosity or in-group solidarity. However, foundational works in the field continue to treat in and out-group attitudes as independent of each other (Gleason 1983; Kinder and Dale-Riddle 2012; Jardina 2017).

Through the case study of the simianization of African Americans, I engage directly with this literature to show that dehumanization fundamentally undercuts this silo model.

Blackness has always been constructed in opposition to whiteness, resulting in

‘anticizens,’ as Olson puts it, and inhumanity always is set against someone else’s standard of humanity (Olson 2004).

While there is some ethno-racial overlap, the subject of the other two manuscripts, the dehumanization of immigrants, broadly defined, remains understudied in political science. Anti-immigrant attitudes have traditionally been studied in political science through one of two lenses – economic, cultural, or some combination of the two.

According to the former, market competition and economic self-interest fuel anti- immigrant sentiment, as low-skilled workers perceived themselves as threatened by other low-skilled workers (Scheve and Slaughter 2001; Mayda 2006; Malhotra 2013), while

13 others do not find support for this thesis (Hainmuller and Hiscox 2010) -but rather general outlook on the economy shapes feelings towards immigrants (Gimpel 2000).

The cultural lens focuses on a different type of threat activation. Here recent studies have focused on ethnocentrism (Kinder and Kam 2009), distinguishing immigrant resentment from racial one (Schildkraut 2011), and the identity-dependent content of negative stereotypes (Branton et al. 2011; Valentino et al. 2012). A subset of works has also focused on the affective dimension of anti-immigrant sentiment, looking at the role of anxiety (Brader et al. 2008; Gadarian and Albertson 2013), or that of disgust

(Kam and Estes 2014). A handful of studies finnd that dehumanization predicts support for anti-immigration policy in the U.S. context (DeLuca-McLean and Castano 2009;

Kteily and Bruneau 2016; Utych 2018). The first finds partisanship-driven differences in likelihood to dehumanize Latino hurricane victims, while the other two rely on the Ascent of Man scale, and the moderating effect of disgust, respectively. This dissertation aims to expand this literature by including measures of blatant and subtle dehumanization beyond the Ascent of Man scale, which assumes a type of evolutionary thinking that does not map onto prejudice directed at immigrants particularly well, particularly on forms of dehumanization other than animalistic.

Brief Overview of the Articles

The first article grapples with the much broader implication a specific form of animalistic dehumanization called simianization. Defined as the depicting or conceiving of a target group – here African Americans – as non-human primates, simianization has a rich history that traces its symbolism to medieval theology, by way of Enlightenment-

14 era scientific racism. Yet its effects reverberate throughout American history well beyond the end of slavery. The article offers a qualitative case study in how simianizing discourse and imagery fueled systemic racism, both cultural and biological, and firmly established

African Americans as American anticitizens.

This article also resembles most closely the literature review and theory chapter of a traditional dissertation, using the scholarship on nationalism to engage heavily with the literature on public opinion. Thus, the fundamental theoretical implication it advances is by using the former’s insights to challenge the latter’s well-established theory of in-and- out-groups as distinct psychological phenomena, but rather symbiotic identities necessarily constructed interdependently. Blackness has always been constructed in antithesis to whiteness, and vice-versa, and that carries implications for constructing citizenship in antithesis to immigration, and American to immigrant, despite the hopeful melting pot narrative. As a formatting note, the article appears here as it does in its published form in Social Identities. Given that this peer-reviewed journal is UK-based, it has been formatted according to British English and is reproduced as such here.

The second article moves the dissertation toward quantitative methods, political psychology and opinion, and a new target group. Using an original survey experiment, it tests the effects of exposure to animalistic dehumanization targeting immigrants on several policy attitudes, as well as a punitive immigration policy index measure. I find that exposure to this dehumanizing rhetoric significantly impacts support for such punitive measures, as well as the likelihood of conceptualizing immigrants as less than human on several measures including, but not limited to the novel Ascent of Man scale, the current

15 standard in dehumanization studies in social psychology. This supports the notion that dehumanization is distinct from immigrant or racial resentment.

The third and final manuscript uses the same methods and target group as the preceding one but breaks free from the limits of animalistic dehumanization to study the effects of other forms of it. It focuses on the effects of two common metaphors used in public discourse surrounding immigration: the immigrant as natural disaster, and the immigrant as pathogen. The article focuses on another set of policy statements, as well as an overall restrictive immigration policy index, and finds significant support for anti- immigration attitudes. As the second article, it includes the Ascent of Man scale, and a discussion of how scale implies a physiological folk-theory of evolution that does not properly map onto immigrant dehumanization. Moreover, it includes an emotion check and finds significant support for the disease metaphor treatment’s role in eliciting disgust from subjects in the study.

Apes and Anticitizens

-Simianization and U.S. National Identity Discourse-

*published in

Social Identities (2020), 26(1):109-127, doi: 10.1080/13504630.2019.1679621

Ioana G. Panaitiu Department of Political Science, Northeastern University

ABSTRACT Within the literature on public opinion, the mainstream framework is that in-group and out- group attitudes are distinct phenomena, especially with regard to racial attitudes. Elsewhere, in the literature on race and nationalism, scholars have concluded that the United States subscribes to cultural, color-blind racism, that has predominantly replaced biological racism. To explain the context in which white supremacy is again a viable political force in American politics, this paper argues that notions of biological racism that predate the Civil Rights Movement remain potent and continue to underlie cultural racism, and that that these out-group attitudes are not independent of in-group attitudes. This paper focuses on a form of dehumanization- simianization, or the depiction of racial groups (in this case African Americans) as apes, tracing its origins in Enlightenment-era scientific racism, its historical role in shaping U.S. race and class relations, and as its role in denying American citizenship as hierarchical. Moreover, this paper presents evidence of simianization in contemporary political discourse surrounding African Americans in the United States. The paper seeks to synthesize the literature on public opinion and that on race and nationalism in order to shed new theoretical light on our thinking about the relationship between in-group and out-group attitude formation.

KEYWORDS: Simianization; dehumanization; race; national identity; U.S

I. Introduction

The tiki torches had barely been lit when ‘Unite the Right’ marchers came face to face with counter-protesters. Among the sea of lights, signs, and chants on both sides, one particular sound from the marches is relevant to this paper – the monkey sounds they made at a group of Black Lives Matter counter-protesters (Heim, 2017). This essay deals entirely with the continued prevalence of the use of primate imagery as a form of racist behavior and discourse. With the nation still coming to terms with what happened in

Charlottesville, it becomes apparent that the specter of slavery haunts American nationalism, as the United States’ slave-state past poses a challenge to the young nation in terms of manufacturing its glorious past. Loring Danforth argues that the process of creating national identities requires a two-fold process of both collective remembering and collective amnesia (Danforth, 1995). Yet the United States does not benefit from being able to draw back long enough in time upon times immemorial in fixing its appropriate glorious past, as Eric Hobsbawm would argue (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1992).

The progeny of European colonialism, US nationalism has had to reconcile and rationalize the inclusion and exclusion of certain groups from the self-imagined nation – as well as the mechanisms through which it has accomplished in and out – group enforcement. There is a debate within the literature over the very nature of U.S. national identity. Some scholars, taking a Tocquevilian stance, argue that American identity is a civic one, placing the nation as the legitimate heir of Greco-Roman democratic tradition, with emphasis on rights and civil liberties – a direct transplant of Enlightenment ideals.

A second faction argues that American identity is an ethnic one, initially limited to those

18 who were white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, and later on expanded to include whites of other Christian denominations (Barreto, 2016).

This work, however, places itself under the third faction of a hybridized national identity, arguing that American identity is a combination of ethnic and civic considerations, with civic ideology nesting over ethnic identity. To be clear, this perspective is not a novel one – plenty of scholars have made the argument elsewhere that racial animosity underlies a plethora of political attitudes at the micro-level, and systemic discrimination at the macro-level, and that any attempt to claim otherwise is dog-whistle or naive. What this paper calls into question is the assumption that the two dimensions of American identity – ethnic and civic – could ever be successfully siloed, given that in- and-out-group identities are necessarily created in opposition to each other, and that in the case of American national identity, in-group ethnic identity has always been constructed in the context of other ethnicities’ political powers.

To do so, this essay looks at the role racial minorities – specifically African

Americans – play in the construction of U.S. national identity as a case study meant to highlight the symbiotic relationship between in-group and out-group racial prejudice

(specifically) and attitudes (generally) formation. By focusing of on an extreme form or racism as an othering tool – dehumanization by way of simianization, or the depiction of members of a group as non-human primates – this study aims to shed new light on how the very notions of whiteness and Blackness were constructed relative to each other and shaped a system of citizen haves and have nots.

While debates in the academic and public discourses regarding race focus on overt or covert racism in the U.S. – or indeed, a color blind approach that denies the very existence of institutionalized racism as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva would argue – the goal of this essay is to offer evidence in support of the hypothesis that the psychological mechanism that underpins U.S. white national identity is the dehumanization of minority groups. While this work agrees with Haney-Lopez’s notion that ‘racism is not disappearing, it’s adapting,’ the hypothesis is that color-blind racism (explained by market dynamics, socio-cultural differences, and other such neo-social Darwinism arguments of ‘culture of poverty’) has not completely replaced frameworks of biological racism, defined by notions of biological, sub-human inferiority (Haney-Lopez, 2015, xii), but rather that is simply masks dehumanizing behaviors and opinions, even under the veil of cultural rationalizations.

This dehumanization takes a particular form in the case of the African American community, that of simianization, which captures a spectrum of behaviors ranging from the mere depiction of individuals or groups as non-human primates to actually believing that they are less than human. This, in turn, facilitates and rationalizes the partial or total denial of the minority’s political and even human rights, and justifies symbolic and physical acts of violence and even genocide (Smith & Panaitiu, 2016a). If for example in the case of Macedonian nationalist movements, Greek nationalists refused to acknowledge the existence of a Macedonian minority within the state’s territory that is in any way different from Greek identity, U.S. nationalists have in the past openly denied the very humanity of the country’s racial minorities – and the psycho-cultural effects of that legacy linger on into the present (Danforth, 1995).

This, however, does not imply that African Americans are the only group dehumanized in the history of U.S. nationalism – indeed, evidence from U.S. historiography points to the same treatment being applied early on to Native-Americans as well as in contemporary times to individuals of Hispanic origins (Smith & Panaitiu,

2016b). This being said, this essay will focus specifically on the dehumanization of African

Americans in the process of defining U.S. national identity, and the subsequent projection upon them of all traits deemed ‘un-American,’ or the quintessential ‘anti-citizen,’ as Joel

Olson would argue (Olson, 2004).

In the process of discussing the intellectual and symbolic origins of the phenomenon of dehumanizing African Americans, with an emphasis on their depiction as apes, monkey or gorillas, this study argues that the incidence of such depictions in political discourse and public opinion, as well as in literature, movies, and the media is exacerbated during times of heightened inter-racial tensions and conflict, when the dominant race perceives its privileged status quo as threatened, and varies from perceives the minority as childlike and in need of paternalism, to seeing the group as a dangerous, aggressive, and a morally corrupting force. This correlation is not itself incidental, but a consequence of racial and political identities being renegotiated in flux with each other.

What follows in part II is a survey of the existing literature on nationalism, race, and public opinion, while part III discusses the legacy of 17th and eighteenth century

European racial science that informs that intellectual zeitgeist or early U.S. nationalism, part IV discusses the significance of apes and monkey as the choice of insult, tracing the symbolic origins back to medieval Christian theology, and part V offers evidence in support of the prevalence of this phenomenon in U.S. history. Finally, part VI offers a

21 conclusion and discusses the implications the essay raises for future studies of U.S. nationalism.

II. Humanness and National Identity

The concept of dehumanization is by no means new, and neither is its study in the context of (whites’) racial attitudes. Kelman (1973) and Staub (1989) conducted initial work in social psychology that focused on extreme dehumanization in the context of genocides and ethnic conflicts. More recently, scholars have begun focusing on types of dehumanization, that although less extreme, remain blatant (Haslam, 2006; Bruneau,

Kteily, Cotterill, & Waytz, 2015; Forscher & Kteily, 2017). Most of the existing works focus on the link between dehumanization and race, with scholars arguing that dehumanization occurs as a mechanism of psychological distancing that can justify lack of empathy or even violence, both symbolic and physical towards members of a group. In philosophy, Haslam developed a typology of animalistic versus mechanistic dehumanization, of which simianization falls under the former category (Haslam, 2006).

This being said, the gap in the literature that this paper hopes to shed new light on is the mainstream public opinion scholarship, which treats in-group and out-group attitudes as silos. A vast number of works on political attitudes, in general, and racial ones, in particular, have focused on whether or not out-group attitudes subscribe to the

Stereotype- Content-Model, ethnocentrism, are distinguishable from racial animosity or in-group solidarity. Donald Kinder, who has written extensively on race and politics, explicitly distinguishes between in-groups as providing ‘solidarity and opportunities for coordination,’ while out-groups supply points of comparison and targets of resentment

(Kinder & Dale-Riddle, 2012, p. 20). Membership in social groups is not inconsequential, but according to group theory, individuals more often than not ‘orient themselves to groups other than their own,’ and these orientations are what political scientists operationalize as attitudes (Kinder & Dale-Riddle, 2012, p. 21).

As Ashley Jardina notes, the very idea of identity (and by extension identity politics) is a new one, having entered mainstream social science only in the late 1950s

(Gleason, 1983; Jardina, 2017). She also notes that the existing literature focuses overwhelming on out- group attitudes, specifically in the form of racial prejudice and racial resentment. Jardina’s work on white identity politics aims to look at ‘whites’ in- group attitudes, and make a strong case that such attitudes are not synonymous with prejudice, nor do strong out- group animosities necessarily follow from a strong sense of in-group identity’ (Jardina, 2017, p. 4; emphasis added). While she notes that white racial identity is more than the air we breathe and a distinct dominant identity, that is

‘sometimes latent, but it is also reactive,’ she still subscribes to the view that in-group and out-group identities are still fundamentally distinct categories.

‘Instead, I argue we should follow the expectations of a long line of work in social identity theory, which demonstrates that in-group favoritism and out-group hostility are separate phenomenon, rather than two sides of the same coin (Brewer, 1979) [...] My approach rests on the foundation of previous studies of intergroup relations, which demonstrate that in- group favoritism and out-group hostility are distinct (Jardina, 2017, p. 43).’

It is this very assumption that in-group identity is somehow distinct from the out- group one that this study challenges. By incorporating the literature on race and nationalism, the goal is to show that Blackness in the United States has always been

23 constructed not in a void, but in antithesis to whiteness, and citizenship, making the racial group the quintessential ‘anticitizen,’ as Joel Olson argues (Olson, 2004). The very notion of dehumanization by way of simianization implies that the hierarchy of races is profoundly interdependent – you can only define what is not human by looking at what it does mean to be human. Thus, borrowing from Loring Danforth, this paper sets out with the assumption that national identities are socially constructed categories of ascription that emerge in times of conflict, when one dominant ethnic or racial group perceives its status-quo as threatened by another. Whereas Benedict Anderson stresses the inclusionary nature of nationalism and downplays the development of racism alongside nationalist movements, Danforth acknowledges that national identities are constructed in opposition to ‘the other’ – ‘people know what they are not before they know what they are’ (Ander- son, 2006; Danforth, 1995, p. 56).

Moreover, the essay aims to address the same paradox at the heart of Eduardo

Bonnilla- Silva’s work – that of systemic racism without many identifable, self-reported racists – but disagrees with his assumption that color-blind racism has replaced biological racism and that contemporary survey designs lend themselves to measuring biological racism instead of color-blind racism. On the contrary, we know we can measure attitudes that amount to laissez-faire racism according to the four frameworks of color-blind racism identified by Bonilla-Silva (abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism and minimization); what we can rarely capture is people openly stating they believe some groups deserve violence or are subhuman (Bonilla-Silva, 2006).

In terms of defining the white habitus, U.S. nationalists can only go so far back in time to look for an appropriate glorious past, the subject of longing mottos such as ‘Make

America Great Again.’ Given that the U.S. nation-state emerged as a slave-state, in order to make the imagined nation feel perennial, the nationalist intelligentsias must make the inequality and oppression of its minorities feel perennial, something that Joe Feagin touches upon in his discussions of the foundation of U.S. society residing in chattel slavery. Furthermore, he traces the cultural roots of North American racism back to seventeenth century European scientific racism. This paper will draw on the same racial theories developed in Enlightenment-era Europe and discusses in part III of the essay how they inform notions of hierarchy and blood impurity in early American nationalism

(Feagin, 2000).

Taking the discussion beyond notions of dehumanizing thinking, Joel Olson juxtaposes the American Creed and American Dilemma – the notion that humanity is reserved for whites, and in this case, is operationalized through citizenship, or specifically white citizenship, whose distinct feature is that it bridges class lines (which might explain why there was never a viable Marxist movement in the U.S., something David Roediger also explores). The results are a Herrenvolk democracy which rests on notions of negative freedom that block any possibility of talking about power and social responsibility as linked, as well as ‘double consciousness’ in Blacks. Moreover, the author argues against color-blind approaches or theories of multiculturalism and recognition: the former do not account for anything post-Civil Rights movement, while the latter frame discrimination as a cultural conflict, not a power dynamic. More importantly, he argues that theories of difference isolate race from historical reality, and misconstrue ‘racial domination as a problem of exclusion – for which the solution is inclusion – rather than a problem of privilege – for which the solution is abolition (Olson, 2004; Roediger, 1991). Indeed,

25 inclusion under theories of difference is logically impossible given the paradox of in-and- out-group formation: they are constructed in antithesis, precluding any seamless movement between categories.

Unlike Anthony Marx’s Making Race and Nation, this research focuses on one case study – that of American national identity-, and does not focus on intra-white conflict as the independent variable that creates a path dependent accidental racism, but rather aligns itself more closely to David Roediger’s work in The Wages of Whiteness (Marx,

1998). He argues that the white American class was not the result of economic determinism, but had its own ideological and cultural imperatives. If Marxists usually focus on how race divides classes, Roediger focuses on how the white labour class here actively maintained those divisions through the ideology it elaborated. He notes the role of the American revolution in creating a separate white class (Olson’s Herrenvolk) with the need to distinguish itself from both the slave class and the pre-industrial white farmer class, as a means of coping with jealousy of preindustrial life and traits and values associated with them by negatively projecting them onto African Americans, turning the minority into anti-citizens. Roediger also details the cognitive dissonance of the founding fathers lamenting white enslavement at the hands of the Crown while being an actual slave society (as a means of reconciling the American Creed and Dilemma, as Olson would argue) (Roediger, 1991). These class/race divisions were so potent in the U.S. that the literature notes the creation of Irish-American identity in opposition to African

Americans; to become American the Irish had to become non-Black, or essentially white

(Ignatiev, 2008).

In terms of the content and form of dehumanization, Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence

Ranger’s work in the literature sheds light on the importance of the invented traditions and symbols the nationalist movement manufactures or re – appropriates (Hobsbawm &

Ranger, 1992). As such, part IV of this paper offers an analysis of the significance of the ape as the animal of choice used most often to dehumanize those of West-African descent, with origins of the symbolism dating back to medieval European Christian theology. This section of the essay is also informed by Pierre Bordieu’s theory of symbolic power and violence, which explains through a sociological lens the internalized cultural production methods through which the dominance of norms and behaviors, as well as social hierarchies are enforced, to the point where they become hegemonic – and seem natural and perennial enough that they even become internalized by the oppressed group, as

Fanon notes in the processes of lactification and affective erethism, supporting the overarching argument that in-group attitudes are inexorably shaped by out-group attitudes even beyond internalizing discrimination (Bordieu, 2010; Fanon, 1952 [2008];

Gramsci, 1971).

With regard to the topic of race and nationalism, given that the focus of my research is racial dehumanization, I must draw on works not only from political science, but from history, psychology, and sociology. Thus, this research paper must first clarify the terms operationalized in the analysis. As such, the terms ‘African American,’ ‘racial minority,’ ‘Black,’ and ‘people of color’ are all used interchangeably here to denote individuals of West African descent, whether American citizens or not, that are labeled as part of the Black race based on phenotypical features. Furthermore, a distinction between race and ethnicity must be made, especially in a political science context. Here the

27 discussion is informed by Rogers Brubaker’s summary of the distinctions between the two concepts. As such it is said that,

race is involuntary while ethnicity is voluntary; race is a matter of external categorization, ethnicity of internal self-identification; race to be based on differences of phenotype or nature, ethnicity on differences of culture; race to be rigid, ethnicity flexible; race to involve super and subordinate, ethnicity coordinate groups; race to arise from the process of exclusion, ethnicity from that of inclusion; race to have grown out of the European colonial encounter with the non-European world, ethnicity out of the history of the nation-state formation (Brubaker, 2009, p. 25).

This essay will use Jean-Jacques Weber’s third step out of his typology of four levels of racist behavior as a conceptual starting point in the analysis. The first two steps describe covert racism – the type of dog-whistle discourse employed by using linguistic proxies such as ‘illegals’ or ‘inner cities’ to target in a vailed way specific groups (similar to Roediger’s discussion of words such as ‘hireling’ and ‘coon,’ and to a lesser extent

Fanon’s discussion of the significance of language as a means of symbolic violence, alienation, and dehumanization)1 – and overt racism – where the discourse is specifically about race (Fanon, 1952 [2008]; Roediger, 1991). However, Weber’s third step consists of the ‘dehumanization of Others, along with a partial or complete denial of their human rights’ which enables the final step – that of acts of violence, discussed more in depth in

Roger Petersen’s Understanding Ethnic Violence, where he identifies resentment as the

1 For a similar discussion see Mugabi Jouet’s Exceptional America for contemporary conservative conflation of American exceptionalism and superiority during Obama’s term.

28 psychological state that nullifies humans’ innate aversion towards violence against other humans (Petersen, 2002; Weber, 2015, p. 103).

Furthermore, following George Lipsitz’s approach, this paper does not dwell on race from the perspective of African Americans, but rather analyses Black identity as it is constructed by and within the white American nationalist movement – it is a research paper about the white habitus and whiteness and how it defines itself in opposition to

Black Americans, rather than about the latter’s experience or own internalized identity

(Lipsitz, 1998). My paper agrees with the assessment of the elite imposition model of nationalism as insufficient to account for the persistence of dehumanizing racism in U.S. nationalist thought, which shapes not only political life, but private life as well, similar to

Jacqueline Urla’s notion of governmentality – a politico-cultural rhetoric that proposes that certain racial minorities are less than human carries significant implications beyond the political ones and fundamentally alter how notions of citizenship, whiteness and

Black- ness are constructed (Shelef, 2010; Urla, 2012).

That being said, it is worth closing with Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of governmentality and biopolitics, according to which the personal and the political bleed into each other – the private and public spheres are no longer separate, and neither are in and out-group attitudes, as the modern sovereign nation-state has biological power over its citizens – especially those it intends to bar from citizenship

(Agamben, 1998; Foucault, 1997). Such a framework is at the foundation of works such as

Charles Mills’, who discusses the role of whiteness as the hegemonic condition that shapes even the very Enlightenment ideals that underlie the core civic values of the American nation-state, as well as Jason Stanley’s work on propaganda which reveals the

29 mechanisms that underlie the cognitive dissonance through which some members rationalize their privilege at the disadvantage of others in a liberal democracy (Mills,

2003, 2008; Stanley, 2015).

III. The White Man’s Burden: Racial Science in Enlightened Europe

As Olson and Feagin note, the intellectual origins of the U.S. slave system can be traced back to notions of scientific racism that arose in seventeenth century Europe. These notions would create the cultural and social conditions that sanction the dehumanization and enslavement of other human beings. Because Enlightenment ideals of freedom, natural rights, and equality could not be reconciled with the subjugation and oppression of others that underlined European colonialism, the rise of racial science offered a loophole to this cognitive dissonance resulting out of the tensions between principles of natural rights and the pressure created by the rise of capitalism.

Firstly, however, a distinction between racial thinking and racist thinking must be made. Racial thinking is not something new to nineteenth century Europe, or any other part of the world for that matter. Racial thinking simply denotes an awareness of the existence of phenotypical differences. By contrast, racist thinking attaches normative values to those differences, creating moral hierarchies between individuals. Such a hierarchy already existed at the time, commonly known as the Great Chain of Being – a hierarchy of all living entities, ordered from minerals at the lowest point, moving up to human, angels, archangels and God at the apex. What racism ads is a gradation within the human level of the chain – a nested hierarchy (Janson, 1952).

To further illustrate the difference, an example would be a census. Reporting one’s race is something fairly common, at least in the United States – in other places of the world it can be a very contentious and dangerous thing to even ask. Yet census sheets that would time after time put races in a certain order that is not alphabetical could indicate some underlying hierarchizing thought process. Indeed, Anderson notes the obsession with the census within the last wave of nationalism, as a means of neatly ordering everyone in the colony in their designated status (Anderson, 2006). Furthermore,

Jacqueline Urla also discusses this in the modern obsession with statistics as a consequence of governmentality (Urla, 2012).

That being said, in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of

Species is co-opted by racial scientists. As such, Darwin’s notions of evolution, survival of the fittest, and taxonomies of species, families, and regna become evidence reinforcing tropes of the superiority of the white Europeans and the inferiority of those colonized by the former. In 1900, Charles Caroll publishes a book titled The Negro a Beast: or, In the

Image of God, in which he attempts to argue that Blacks were not descendant from biblical Adam, and support this notion with anthropological evidence (Carroll, 1900).

In fact, most of early anthropological works had a distinct racist agenda of reinforcing non-white inferiority through cultural or biological evidence. However, certain works such as Carroll’s were meant to support polygenist notions, which posit that human races are of different origins and do not share one common ancestor. Michael

Barkun notes the case of Samuel Norton, who used cranial proportion measurements to argue that the cranium of the Caucasian man is larger and therefore can accommodate a larger brain than that of people of other races. Other ‘scientific’ attempts of the main

31 aimed to use measurements of posture and structure of the patella in the knee as evidence of the fully biped posture of Caucasians, while Africans displayed a posture somewhere between biped and quadruped (Barkun, 1996).

To make matters worse, in the 19th and even 20th centuries the European intelligentsias took it upon themselves to reconcile biblical tradition with the evidence coming from anthropology and archeology that human cultures existed centuries before the Bible’s timeline. Furthermore, the age of exploration meant that Europeans were increasingly coming into contact with other cultures and civilizations that rendered

European exceptionalism questionable. As such, intellectual efforts conducted at the time aimed to ground racist notions that reinforced European and white superiority, as well as to offer a justification for the massacres and exploitation of native peoples encountered as European states expanded and competed with each other in a new, imperial market.

The myth of the white man’s burden was thus born as part of an intellectual effort to make race seem just as natural and immemorial as the nation.

IV. The Ape and its Symbolism

In discussing the dehumanization of racial minorities in the U.S. nationalist movements by way denying them full humanity and bestializing them, the analysis must begin with the choice of animal used to depict the targeted minority. The choice of animal carries a symbolic significance that varies across cultures and conflicts.

For example, in the case of the Rwandan genocide, Hutus characterized Tutsis as snakes, which represent Satan via the Garden of Eden parable (Olsen & Beek, 2015). Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as rats and vermin, while a 2007 Columbus Dispatch

32 cartoonist replaced Iran on a map with a sewer out of which cockroaches are crawling out and invading neighboring countries (Parsi, 2007). Furthermore, a Qur’anic verse – Sura

5:60 – is invoked to dehumanize Jews: ‘Shall I inform you of [what is] worse than that as penalty from Allah? [It is that of] those (i.e. the Jews) whom Allah has cursed and with whom He became angry and made of them apes and pigs and slaves of Taghut. Those are worse in position and further astray from the sound way’ (Kressel, 2012, p. 26). Thus, to understand the significance of depicting African Americans as apes, one must first understand the symbolism of the ape that informs the dehumanizing phenomenon.

The fascination and disgust with apes and monkeys is in no way a modern phenomenon and evidence of this ambivalence towards the similarity between humans and apes can be dated back to ancient times. As such, Roman poet Quintus Ennius captures the uncanny resembles in his verse ‘simian quam similis turpissima bestia nobis’

– ‘how similar to us is this ugly beast’ (Janson, 1952, p. 14). Similarly, in ancient Greek thought the ape was seen as a defective or incomplete human. In the oral mythological tradition, there is a version of the myth of Heracles and the Cercopes according to which

Zeus turned the latter into monkeys as punishment for tricking and stealing from the

Greek hero. Heraclitus in Plato’s Hippias Maior argues that ‘the most beautiful of apes is ugly compared to man and the wisest of men is an ape beside God’ (Janson, 1952, p. 15).

However, if in antiquity the ape is seen as trickster, an imperfect, and incomplete poor beast, once Christianity enters the intellectual arena in the void left behind by Greco-

Roman civilization, not only is the ape seen as less than human, but it is also demonized.

Apes begin to be associated with the Devil – who is even given the superlative ‘simia Dei,’ which translated to ‘God’s ape’ (Janson, 1952, p. 14). One sees evidence of this association

as early as the 2nd century AD. In an entry in the Greek bestiary the Physiologus, offers an intriguing explanation for the ape-devil association: ‘He [the devil] had a beginning, but he has no end; at the outset he was one of the archangels, but his end [tail] is not in view.

Now the ape, not having a tail, is without species, and his rear, without a tail, is vile: like the devil he does not have a good end’ (Janson, 1952, pp. 16–17).

The argumentum ex cauda seems strange at a superficial look. To understand why the lack of tail is significant, one must turn to the Old Testament. According to Isidore of

Seville, in Leviticus XXII-23, God/Yahweh declared the tail to be an essential part of every beast; those who lacked a tail where deemed unfit for sacrifice. Possession of a tail meant that Yahweh had determined the animal’s ‘end,’ while the human, free to make choices, lacked one. The ape lacked a tail (cauda), just as the devil lacked codex (divine law)

(Sorenson, 2013, p. 45). Furthermore, as Janson discovers, there is also a Talmudic tradition according to which Adam had been initially created with a tail, later removed for unclear reasons (Janson, 1952).

Tails aside, the human-ape relation is construed as one of devolution down the

Great Chain of Being, with God at the top, then the angels, humans, and apes below. The folk-theory thus becomes that the descent of ape from man is one where biological degradation results from transgressing divine law. Janson notes several instances of this line of thinking. One example is a story of Eve, who in the Garden of Eden takes certain prohibited herbs, and ends up giving birth to semi – humans, apes, and monsters.

Furthermore, according to a Talmudic version of the Babel Tower parable, Yahweh threw the builders off " the tower, and those who fell in the woods turned into apes, while in

Islam, a Mohammedan tradition states that Moses turned those who disregarded the

Sabbath into apes. These sorts of punitive myths spread far and wide, and were very popular throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, the Brothers Grimm collected a similar punitive story tracing to Japan, that relays the story of a virtuous but ugly maid that is mistreated by her masters. She encounters a spirit in the woods that transforms her in a beautiful woman, and when her masters ask the spirit for the same makeover, they are asked to sit on a hot brick, and turned into apes (Janson, 1952).

This being said, the most telling and famous ape as punishment story is the biblical story of Ham, son of Noah, and his descendants. This story would become the single most prominent Christian justification for the enslavement of Blacks and would be popularized in nineteenth century US politics. According to the Book of Genesis, after the flood is over,

Noah plants a vineyard, becomes intoxicated, and falls asleep naked. His three sons discover him, but while Shem and Japheth look away while trying to cover their father,

Ham sees Noah’s nakedness (and it is rather unclear what is implied by this). However, when Noah wakes up, he curses Ham’s son, Canaan, and all his future descendants to be servants of Shem’s and Japheth’s descendants according to Genesis 9:20-27. While the biblical text never mentions the issue of skin color, the idea that it referred to people of color was popularized in the 18th and nineteenth century U.S., by drawing upon early

Christian, Jewish, and Islamic interpretations of the biblical passage describing ‘Ham’ as meaning ‘Black,’ ‘dark,’ or ‘heated’ (Goldenberg, 2005).

A prominent example of a work that tried to combine scientific racism with this

Biblical origin story is Arthur comte de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races. In it, he fleshes out the notion of degeneration and blood purity, central to biological notions of race and mechanisms of dehumanization. Moreover, the author argues against

35 polygenesis despite arguing that there are three human races – hamites, semites, and japhetites – it is here that he goes back to biblical justifications for ‘natural’ inferiority by way of the curse of Ham’s descendants narrative. Gobineau also ends his argument with an exposition of ten great civilizations, all founded by whites (fixing several appropriate glorious pasts), and argues that degeneration by ‘hybrids’ is at the root of their downfalls

(Gobineau, 1967 [1854]).

V. The Simianization of African Americans

Aside from the Bible and smallpox, European colonists also brought dehumanization to the Americas. Writing in 1708, Anglican missionary Morgan Godwyn chronicled some of the atrocities committed by the European settles in Barbados and present-day Virginia. Godwyn offers an insight in the way the Europeans regarded natives and slaves, writing that he had been told by the settlers that ‘the Negros, though in their figure they carry some resemblances of manhood, yet are indeed no men. They are unmanned and unsouled; accounted and even ranked with brutes, creatures destitute of souls, to be ranked among brute beasts, and treated accordingly’ (Godwyn, 1708, p. 33).

Almost a century after Godwyn’s writing, at the time of the Constitutional

Convention, the 3/5th compromise sanctioned the political and legal inferior status of

African Americans as less than or incomplete humans. Roughly six decades later and nine years before the adoption of the 13th Amendment, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger

Brook Taney noted in the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford that ‘the Black man has no rights which the White man is bound to respect. [...] He may justly and lawfully be

36 reduced to slavery [...] and treated as an ordinary article of traffic and merchandise’ (Dred

Scott v. Sanford, 1856).

This lawful reducing to slavery line of argument is not a new one at the time of

Dred Scott. In fact, its origins can be traced to a form of racism that packages itself as not abusive or violent, but as a form of beneficial paternalism, a variant of the white man’s burden myth described in section III. This follows an Aristotelian line of thinking, according to which barbarians, the trademark out-group of the ancient world, were noble savages, whose naturally ordained condition is slavery. Thus, if African Americans are modern day noble brutes, enslaving them is really doing them a favor, so the logic goes.

In his study of African American depiction in U.S. historiography, Images of

Savages, Gustav Jahoda includes five chapters on the depiction of members of the minority as child-like. This, he notes, has implications that extend into the twentieth century, most notably in the attempts to ground racist claims in new scientific methods

(Jahoda, 1999). For example, the 1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in

American Life, written by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles

Murray was heavily criticized for arguing that there are significant racial differences that determine intelligence (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). Similarly, Dorothy Roberts argues that we are currently in the midst of efforts to medically sanction the biological and genetic existence of race, which she dubs as the rise of race medicine and the quest for the so-called ‘Black gene,’ even though there is no biological basis for race, given that there is more interrace genetic variation than intra-race, and phenotypical traits cannot be isolated to any specific gene (Roberts, 2012).

However, returning to earlier instances of African American dehumanization, the turn of the twentieth century sees the switch from the African American as child-like to the African American as dangerous. Indeed, one can argue that in the early part of colonial rule and even U.S. rule in the Americas, the European whites were not all that worried about the slaves posing any threats. That however changed drastically after the 1804

Haitian slave rebellion, followed by the Nat Turner revolt of 1831, and, of course, the U.S.

Civil War. As the era of Jim Crow turned increasingly to criminalizing and imprisoning

African Americans, the political discourse turned to the dangerous and aggressive nature of the racial minority.

To illustrate, in 1903 on the floor of the 52nd Congress, a Congress already shaken by the 1898 Spanish-American War, South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman declared that ‘the poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails, lurking around to see if some helpless white woman can be murdered or brutalized. Yet he can read and write. He has a little of the veneer of education and civilization’ (Tillman in Congressional Record 1903). Two years later, in

1905 we see this imagery of the Black man as dangerous penetrating literature and popular culture through Thomas Dixon’s The Clansmen: A Historical Romance of the

KKK. Later adapted into the 1915 The Birth of a Nation film, the novel, part of the Ku

Klux Klan trilogy, criticizes the Reconstruction era as a Republican attempt to stay in power through securing the Black vote. The novel portrays Black slaves as turning violent and bestial once freed. To no one’s surprise this far into reading this essay, Gus, a former slave from the Cameroons accused of rape is described as having animal-like features in the passages below:

‘His head was small and seemed mashed on the sides until it bulged into a double lobe behind. Even his ears, which he had pierced and hung with red earbobs, seemed to have been crushed #at to the side of his head. His kinked hair was wrapped in little hard rolls close to the skull and bound tightly with dirty thread. His receding forehead was high and indicated a cunning intelligence. His nose was broad and crushed flat against his face. His jaws were strong and angular, mouth wide, and lips thick, curling back from rows of solid teeth set obliquely in their blue gums. The one perfect thing about him was the size and setting of his mouth—he was a born African orator, undoubtedly descended from a long line of savage spell- binders, whose eloquence in the palaver houses of the jungle had made them native leaders. 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’ (Dixon, 2010, p. 249).

If in the passage above the description of Gus having animal-like features seems fairly innocuous for early 1900 standards of political correctness, in a subsequent passage of the novel, specifically the rape scene, Gus’s physical description takes on a demonic tone:

‘Gus rose to his feet and started across the cave as if to spring on the shivering

figure of the girl, the clansmen with muttered groans, sobs, and curses falling back

as he advanced. He still wore his full Captain’s uniform, its heavy epaulets flashing

their gold in the unearthly light, his beastly jaws half covering the gold braid on the

collar. His 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’ (Dixon, 2010, p. 324).

That being said, the depiction of African Americans as hypersexualized predators is best captured in the metaphors and symbols underlying the story of King Kong, which originated in a 1933 movie with the same name. Even at a superficial look, one can note the racist undertones of King Kong as the aggressive, dangerous super-gorilla that destroys iconic American urban landscapes and kidnaps Ann Darrow. The implied rape of the female character is illustrative of the paranoia that underlined the American psyche at the time, with its obsession for blood purity and anti-miscegenation measures. Not only was the Black man inferior, but he was also a dangerous predator out to take American women.

This super-predator imagery continues well into the twentieth century, at the end of which the term is coined (Dilulio, 1997). In 1991, a video made public showed Los

Angeles Police officers physically assaulting unarmed African American Rodney King.

This incident coupled with reports in 1992 that some police officers responding to calls made in the African American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles assigned them a NHI code – ‘No Humans Involved’ – sparked outrage and a series of riots. Moreover, a BBC report notes that ‘members of the predominantly white, male police force said it was

‘gallows humor’ and regularly described the African Americans they were meant to protect and serve as ‘monkeys’ and ‘gorillas’’ (Morris, 2012).

One only has to take a look at the highly salient incidents of police use of fatal force against African American men in the past few years to see that not much has changed. In fact, Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown testified that:

‘When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year- old holding onto Hulk Hogan [...]. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon,

how angry he looked [...]. He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me [...]. At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him’ (Sanburn, 2014).

Yet the dehumanization of African Americans is not limited to the written and spoken word, but it is pervasive in visual depictions, caricatures, and modern-day social media memes. A nineteenth century caricature featured on the cover of Harpers’ Weekly depicts the balance of power between the North and the South as a arms of a scale, holding a Black man on the South’s arm, and a white man on the North’s one, both with simianized features. The depiction as such of the white man alludes that he is an Irish- man, racially profiled as Black in British Victorian thought (Figure 1).

Two other caricatures from more recent times make use of the same simian symbolism. Figure 2 shows a cartoon from the 1980s of Michael Jordan, depicted as a larger-than- human ape, giving an interview. More recently, depicts a cartoon from a

February 2009 issue of the New York Post shows two police officers standing over the body of a gorilla one of them has just shot, while the other police officer says ‘They’ll have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill,’ indicating that the slain gorilla represents

President Obama, as the cartoon came at the height of discussions over the bailout after the 2008 economic crisis (Delonas, 2009).

Then again, this is not the first time President Barack Obama has been depicted as a non-human primate. The presidential campaign leading up to his election in 2008 was filled with instances of such depictions, not to mention the persistence of the birther movement to this day. Figure 3 shows three instances of anti-Obama memorabilia that

41 depicts the then-Senator as an ape. One is a t-shirt that features a drawing on a smiling ape with a peeled banana in hand, with ‘OBAMA in ‘08’ written under the image, while a badge depicts a similar image, albeit with a worse-quality drawing. The third image features yet another t-shirt that features the iconic evolution-of-man-type drawing, with the title ‘Evolution of a President’ above, and a picture of Obama under it.

Photoshop was also instrumental in the dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at Senator

Obama during the campaign and even after his election. A simple Google Image search of

‘Obama Ape’ returns countless poorly photoshopped memes of both Obama’s and his wife, Michelle’s faces superimposed on ape heads, or with the first couple’s faces modified to have simian features. Furthermore, a recent incident regarding the First Lady involves a Facebook comment made by a West Virginia official. Clay County Development

Corporation Director Pamela Ramsey Taylor posted a comment in the wake of Donald

Trump’s election, in which she states that ‘It will be refreshing to have a classy, beautiful, dignified First Lady in the White House. I’m tired of seeing a Ape in Heels,’ to which Clay

Mayor Beverly Whalig replied ‘Just made my day Pam’ (Brennan et al., 2015). More worryingly, research conducted in social psychology and political science shows that this is not a phenomenon restricted to a few viral incidents – but that white Americans consistently rate African Americans (among other racial- ethnic groups) as less evolved when asked to rate their level of humanity using a visual depiction of the Ascent of Man scale (Jardina, McElwee, & Piston, 2016; Kteily, Bruneau, Cotterill, & Waytz, 2015).

Figure 1. Nast, T. (1876, December 9). The Ignorant Vote - Honors Are Easy. Harper’s Weekly. Credit: The Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

Figure 2. Source: N/A. ‘The Coon Caricature: Blacks as Monkeys.’ The Authentic History Centre. Last modified July 20th 2012. Retrieved online from http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3- coon/6-monkey/

VI. Conclusion and Discussion

The goal of this essay was to shed light on an aspect of American national identity that is seldom integrated with the literature on public opinion and attitude formation.

While the exclusion of African Americans from the nation-state, first by enslavement and then by disenfranchisement and denial of most citizen rights is well studied in the field, the psychological and cultural mechanisms by which this othering and exclusion is accomplished is an understudied area within the field as long as we treat racial attitudes as silos.

The evidence presented in the essay suggests a possible explanation for why racism remains such a potent, institutionalized force in American society and politics. Unlike

Anthony Marx’s suggestion that racism in the U.S. is some form of collateral damage, an accidental result of a path dependent way to mitigate intra-white conflict, this essay argues that race and racism cut much deeper in the social fabric and the national psyche.

Racism can be traced back before any intra-white conflict in the young state – in fact, racism was part of the intellectual and cultural legacy Europeans brought with them from the Old Continent. The age of racism coincides with the age of nationalism Gellner describes (Gellner, 2009).

Figure 3. Source: N/A. ‘The Coon Caricature: Blacks as Monkeys.’ The Authentic History Centre. Last modified July 20th 2012. Retrieved online from http://www.authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3- coon/6-monkey/

While dehumanization is a psychological phenomenon, it can and is used in the

United States as a political tool of reinforcing the in-and-out-group dynamics of who is and is not part of the nation. Furthermore, similar to Danforth’s argument that national identities are renegotiated in times of conflict, it appears that instances of dehumanization become more prevalent at times when the racial status quo is compromised (Danforth, 1995). Dehumanization as a psychological mechanism also

45 highlights a blind spot of sorts in our understanding of both the relationship between in- group and out-group attitudes, as well as the notion of whiteness as its own identity, necessarily constructed by opposition.

Given that the psychological mechanisms that underlie dehumanization make resentment, scapegoating, and violence permissible, future research is needed to illustrate the implications that such tactics play in race relations in the U.S., given that it is projected that by 2065 no demographic will represent a majority of the population of the United States (Cohn, 2015). Similarly, it would be interesting to analyze how this persistent tactic of dehumanization and institutionalized racism is perceived and internalized (or is not) by the targeted group, and how that plays into reactionary nationalist movements.

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Swarms, Tides, and Caravans

-Dehumanizing Rhetoric and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes-

Ioana G. Hulbert Department of Political Science, Northeastern University

ABSTRACT:

Dehumanizing rhetoric, defined as language that labels members of a group as less than human as a means of depriving them of dignity, autonomy, and rights, has been prominently featured by various political figures since the 2016 election, yet we know little about the lasting effects of this exposure on public opinion. Immigration is a prime example of a policy area in which the target group is conspicuously described in demeaning terms. This is evidenced even by jargon that is widely socially accepted, such as “alien,” and “illegal.” Using novel measures from social psychology, including measures of blatant dehumanization such as the Ascent-of-Man scale, I employ a large-N survey experiment to examine the impact that exposure to commonly used animalistic dehumanizing language has on out-group perceptions, partisan attitudes and immigration policy attitudes.

Keywords: Dehumanization; political communication; public opinion; immigration; political psychology; political attitudes.

Democrats are the problem. They don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest (emphasis added) our Country, like MS-13.

- Donald Trump2

I. Introduction:

In May 2018, The White House published a news update on their website, titled

“What you need to know about the violent animals of MS-13.” The article’s body labels the gang’s members as ‘animals’ ten times. Moreover, it characterizes the members’ actions as ‘violent,’ ‘heinous,’ ‘abhorrent’ and it evokes vivid predatory imagery: MS-13 ‘chased down,’ ‘brutally murdered,’ ‘ripped [his] heart out,’ ‘hacked up’ and ‘savagely beat’ victims. The article is a mere three-minute read (White House 2018).

This type of overt animalization is in infamous historic company. After all, dehumanization is listed as the fourth step in a ten-stage process of genocide, a framework established by Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch (Stanton 2019). Defined as the psychological phenomenon of describing or conceiving of other individuals as less than human as a means of denying them agency, dignity, and individuality, dehumanization offers an effective mechanism to lower our innate ambivalence towards violence (Smith and Panaitiu 2016a). “It isn’t easy for a man to rip a child away from his mother. Most of us couldn’t do it. This is where ‘animals’ comes in. Declare he isn’t really a child, she isn’t really a woman. Now it’s like pulling a piglet from a sow. This has always been how states

2 Trump, D., @realDonaldTrump. (2018). ” Democrats are the problem. They don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest (emphasis added) our Country, like MS-13 ” [Tweet]. June 19th. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1009071403918864385?lang=en

52 enable savagery,” writes The Washington Post’s Radley Balko in light of revelations of family separation at the border (Balko 2019).

Balko is right. Jews were “vermin” for the Nazis, Tutsis “cockroaches” and “snakes” for Hutus, Vietnamese “gooks” and “slants” for American soldiers, while Black people graduated from “coons” to “ape-in-heels” in modern-day America (Panaitiu 2020).

However, dehumanizing rhetoric is not confined to slurs targeting solely racial ethnic groups with the purpose of extermination or mass violence. Perhaps in less extreme forms, dehumanization is insidiously salient in contemporary politics. For example, in

2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton described Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” (Reilly 2016). Bill Maher labeled Republicans and “treasonous rats” (Delk 2018). As for Donald Trump, of note are the instances when he described former White House staffer Omarosa Newman as a “dog” (Stracqualursi 2018), his characterization of immigrants as “infesting” the United States (Trump 2018), and his labeling of democrats as “dims” (Tarlo 2018). His son, Donald Trump, Jr. described

Democrats investigating his father as “not even people,” and compared Syrian refugees to

Skittles (Hauser 2016).

Immigration offers a policy domain ripe for a high incidence of dehumanizing rhetoric for a couple of reasons. For one, the target’s racial, ethnic or religious identity could activate dehumanization. However, the subject’s partisan beliefs, as well as the way immigration is framed (as either an economic, moral, or security problem) can also determine how a person conceives of a foreign other. As such, one of the goals of this research project is to explore the extent to which the content and type of dehumanizing rhetoric matters. Employing a survey experiment administered to a nationally

53 representative sample, its specific goal is to explore the effects of the metaphor of immigrant as animal on a number of policy attitudes.

This article makes several contributions to the literatures on public opinion and public policy. First, it tests the effect of real historical narratives used to depict immigrants throughout American history (O’Brien 2003). Secondly, it includes individual-level measures of blatant and subtle dehumanization beyond the Ascent of Man scale, which assumes an evolutionary prejudice that is not all that compatible with prejudice towards immigrants. Lastly, it tests the effects of exposure to animalistic dehumanizing rhetoric directed at immigrants on an index of punitive anti-immigrant policy attitudes. The key implication of this empirical study is that language matters -metaphors and words meant to objectify, demean, and dehumanize others play a significant role in shaping the public’s attitudes and policy preferences. These three implications stand to enrich the literature on public opinion and that on public policy, if certain types of dehumanization activate anti-immigrant sentiment.

II. Illegals, Aliens, and Waves: Dehumanization and Public Opinion

Dehumanization:

Dehumanization is not a novel concept, but it remains understudied in political science. For a field centered around power dynamics and hierarchies in society, the fact that scholars have historically omitted the most fundamental form of othering – excluding individuals from humankind itself- is a major blind spot in the discipline. It was first introduced in the social psychology literature by Kelman, who focused on the phenomenon in relation to mass violence, genocide, and ethnic conflict (Kelman 1973;

54 see also Staub 1989). For Kelman, humanness encompasses identity, or the perception of the person as “an “individual, independent and distinguishable from others, capable of making choices,” and community, or the perception of the person as being “part of an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other” (Kelman 1973, 283).

When these two dimensions are denied in a person, they no longer elicit any moral responses, which in turn justifies violence against them. While Kelman’s definition refers to an individual target, early work on this topic tended to focus on overt forms of denial of humanity at the group-level: the kind documented in propaganda studies relating to genocides and ethnic conflicts, with more recent studies on non-extreme intergroup relations showing that dehumanization facilitates intergroup violence (Castano and

Giner-Sorolla 2006; Fiske 2011).

Not all forms of dehumanization are born equal – and neither are their effects.

Different types of dehumanizing narratives and attributes can activate different emotions in subjects – threat perception, disgust, paternalism, lack of empathy, and so forth. This can have important implications for the literatures on public policy and opinion if the content of dehumanization can favor different types of policies, ranging from a lack of empathy that results in lack of support for welfare measures, to punitive measures such as violence and removal of the target group. I argue that the type of dehumanization will dictate the way dehumanizers conceive and behave towards the dehumanized individual or group.

As for the forms it takes, Haslam (2006) develops a typology of dehumanization as either animalistic or mechanistic. Differentiating between uniquely human (UH) traits that distinguish humans from other animals (for example: higher order cognition,

55 linguistic capacity, and morality), and human nature (HN; or traits such as warmth, emotionality, and cognitive flexibility), his model argues that denial of either UH and HN leads to either animalistic or mechanistic dehumanization. The former occurs when UH traits are denied to members of a group, thus being perceived as immoral, lacking self- restraint, and beast-like. The latter occurs when HN traits are denied, and thus the group is perceived as cold, rigid, lacking agency, similar to machines (Haslam 2006).

Haslam’s typology, particularly his concept of animalistic dehumanization, has inspired a number of works on dehumanization, particularly focused on racial and ethnic groups. Prati et al. (2016) and Kteily et al. (2016) study the dehumanization of Muslims,

McDonald et al. (2016), Nagar and Maoz (2015) and Saguy et al. (2015) study the dehumanization of Palestinians, while in Dalsklev and Kunst (2015) and Miranda et al.’s

(2014) studies the target group are the Roma. Focusing on African Americans as the target group, Goff et al. (2008) use implicit association testing to demonstrate that the association of Blacks with apes results in over-estimation of Black children’s criminal status, as well as harsher sentencing, including the death penalty. Furthermore, Mekawi et al. (2016) show that shooting bias is higher among whites who fears Blacks.

This animalistic dehumanization is the focus of this study as well. Because of the type of narratives and assumptions that go into this type of dehumanization – that the group is wild, savage, beast-like, aggressive – I argue that it begets a certain type of reaction, which is punitive in nature. Wild beasts need taming, punishing, and at worst extermination, and this will inform that type of policy preferences subjects will have when asked about an animalized target group.

Within the literature, the studies above-mentioned focus on dehumanization at the individual level of the subject – the dehumanizer, not the dehumanized. Looking at this individual level, three major factors emerge from the literature as influencing dehumanizing tendencies. These are stable, enduring personality traits such as social dominance orientation (SDO), right wing authoritarianism (RWA), and disgust sensitivity. Hodson and Costello (2007) find that Canadians who score higher on interpersonal disgust sensitivity are more likely to dehumanize immigrants, while several studies note the association between the so-called “dark triad” traits and dehumanizing tendencies. Thus, narcissistic individuals tend to consistently rate others as less than human (Locke 2009), higher levels of psychopathy are associated with denial of HN traits to others (Gray et al. 2011), and individuals who score higher of hostile sexism scales are more likely to dehumanize females (Viki & Abrams 2003). As Haslam and Loughnan note,

SDO correlates most strongly with dehumanization, more so than with RWA, “implying that dehumanization of the groups in question rests on a tough-minded striving for dominance rather than on social conformity and an exaggerated perception of threat

(Haslam and Loughnan 2014, 410).” Thus Esses et al. (2008) found it to be associated with dehumanization of refugees, Jackson & Gaertner (2010) showed it to correlate with dehumanization of enemy war victims, and Hodson & Costello (2007) found SDO to be their strongest predictor of dehumanization of immigrants, while Costello & Hodson

(2013) found that white parents’ levels of SDO predict their children’s tendencies to dehumanize Black children.

This is all to say that some individuals may be more likely to dehumanize than other based on some personal traits. But what does engaging in dehumanizing thinking

57 actually result in for the average, non-genocidal, non-power figure person? That is the overarching question of this study. To this end, some scholars have found empirical evidence that dehumanization predicts support for anti-immigration policy in the U.S. context (Kteily & Bruneau 2016, Utych 2018). Yet the former relies on the Ascent of Man scale (asking subjects to rate a target group’s humanness according to the evolution of man graphic) ratings for various ethnic groups and includes no manipulation to find that blatant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexicans correlates with support for anti- immigrant policies, while the latter focuses on inducing bodily threat through a

“immigrant as pathogen” metaphor, in order to look at the mediating effects of anger and disgust. This article aims to expand this literature by including measures of blatant and subtle dehumanization beyond the Ascent of Man scale, which assumes a type of evolutionary thinking that does not map onto prejudice directed at immigrants particularly well, by looking at an index of punitive policy measures.

Public Opinion on Immigration:

Dehumanization plays an important role in shaping immigration attitudes and opinions, yet its covert forms are rarely given primacy, even in scholarly studies on the topic. The content of language and political rhetoric shapes political attitudes, and immigration is a curious policy domain for one specific reason. It is a topic where across the political spectrum and public and legal arenas, the words used to describe immigrants as “illegal,” “unauthorized,” “alien” is a form of identity-first (as opposed to person-first) language that is, at its core, dehumanizing. Perez (2016) and Perez and Tavits (2017) show that the language one speaks, and in which one is interviewed impact political attitudes, respectively. Moreover, a recent study (Fasolli et al. 2017) shows that subjects primed

58 with LGBTQ slurs are more likely to hold negative opinions of LGTBQ individuals. What happens then when immigrants are described as savage animals infesting the country?

That is the puzzle of this study.

Currently, there are two main sets of factors in the scholarly literature used to account for what affects public opinion on immigration – economic factors, and cultural ones – and, in varying degrees, some combination of the two. In terms of the former, early rational choice works supported the homo economic model, such as Scheve and

Slaughter’s (2001) model of market labor competition. According to their study, low- skilled workers were more likely to support restrictive immigration measures, rooting anti-immigrant sentiment in economic self-interest in the literature. Mayda builds on this model, finding that “fears about labor market competition play a key and robust role in preference formation over immigration policy” (Mayda 2006, p. 526). Indeed, in a targeted study of workers for which economic threat is pronounced (high-tech industry),

Malhotra et al. (2013) find support for this model.

Yet, these widely cited studies rest on a theoretical assumption of individuals differentiating between low-skill and high-skill immigrants and perceiving them as economic threats. In a survey experiment, Hainmueller and Hiscox (2010) do not find any significant support for the hypothesis that Americans are more likely to oppose similarly skilled immigrants; moreover, they find that education plays a defining role in out-group attitudes. Education is directly correlated with support for immigration, a factor that the authors link to cultural and ideological explanations, thus opening the door for consideration of other socio-psychological factors in combination with economic ones.

Thus, Burns and Gimpel (2000) find that negative outlook on the economy increases

59 prejudice towards immigrants, while others find that general feelings towards an ethnic/racial group in combination with economic outlook can negatively impact immigration attitudes (Citrin et al. 1997, Dustman and Preston 2007).

Under socio-psychological/cultural factors, a growing body of recent literature focuses on ethnocentrism, racial and ethnic prejudice, and the role emotions play in moderating it. Here we find a similar “threat” explanatory narrative, but this time it is cultural, ranging on a spectrum from rigid in-and-out-group aversion, to more nuanced conceptions of national identity politics. An example of the former end of the spectrum, an early study by Kinder and Kam (2009) finds that “what whites think about one out- group is quite consistent with what they think about another – just as ethnocentrism requires” (p.54).

However, evidence to the contrary suggests that out-group attitudes vary based on group-specific (any even time-specific) stereotypes. For example, Branton et al. (2011) and Valentino et al. (2013) show that media exposure and feelings towards Latinos predict immigration attitudes post 9/11 and California’s 1994 proposition 187, respectively.

Negative stereotypes are group-centric, and the content of these stereotypes can change under the influence of exogeneous events.

Elsewhere in the literature, it becomes evident that public and media narratives matter, both in the way they shape immigration attitudes as well as which immigrant groups they focus on. Schildkraut (2011) develops a measure of “immigrant resentment” that corelates 48% with the racial resentment scale, suggesting that the two concepts are distinct psychological phenomena. Abrajano and Singh (2009) find that Spanish-

60 language media have an overall pro-immigrant tone and that Latinos who consume this media have a higher support for pro-immigration measures. Elsewhere in the literature,

Dunaway et al. (2010) show that immigration as a topic gets more coverage in border states, and subjects in those states are more likely to rank immigration as their top national concern.

Yet differences in intergroup attitudes are not the only finding from this line of inquiry on the role of emotions in shaping policy attitudes. Brader et al. (2008) focus on anxiety as an explanatory variable. Using an experiment on a white, non-Latinx sample where they varied target group ethnicity (white European or Latinx), the authors find that subjects’ anxiety increased when presented with a negative story about Latinx immigrants. Similarly, Gadarian and Albertson’s 2013 study builds on Brader et al.

(2008), finding that anxious subjects are more likely to engage in biased information- seeking, prominently recalling threat-inducing information about immigrants. More recent work focuses on the role of disgust activation in shaping attitudes towards others

(Kam and Estes 2016).

Essentially, the literature on public attitudes towards immigration and immigrants overwhelmingly revolves around a threat narrative – either economic, or cultural. For the latter, norms of who gets to belong to a national identity become the defining variable.

Within the literature on U.S. nationalism, scholars subscribe to three major models of national identity - civic, ethnic or ethno-civic nationalism, where ethnic rationales are embedded within civic ones (Barreto 2016). Language here becomes a prominent cultural norm that immigrants can be perceived as transgressing if they do not assimilate and speak the native language fluently, whit more than 90% of Americans arguing that one

61 must speak English to be American, regardless of citizenship status (Schildkraut 2005,

Theiss-Morse 2009), and that exposure to incidental use of Spanish words induces cultural threat in white undergrads (Newman et al. 2012) and those scoring higher on the social dominance orientation scale (Newman et al. 2014). Similarly, Hopkins (2015) shows that subjects support a granting citizenship to a Latinx individual speaking with an accent more so than for a fluent English speaker, something that the author hypothesizes taps into pro-assimilation feelings.

To conclude, several hypotheses emerge based on the gaps in the literature. Firstly,

I anticipate exposure to animalistic dehumanizing language will not only increase support for restrictive immigration policies overall, but for punitive ones as well. Dehumanization in general will favor avoidance behavior, but animalistic dehumanization will favor punitive measures. As discussed above, language that depicts a target group as violent animals begets taming and punishment, on a spectrum that ranges from separation to extermination. Secondly, put bluntly, this kind of language matters. I hypothesize that exposure to this kind of language is easily internalized (for how long is a different matter entirely), and individuals will be more likely dehumanize members of the target group, both blatantly and subtlety. Lastly, I expect this effect to be significant in the population at large, and my study is not limiting the analysis to whites or citizens as other studies have done. The literature analysis above captured the scholarship on who is more likely to dehumanize, but one of the main assumptions in these studies is that a dominant group will dehumanize a non-dominant one (i.e. whites dehumanizing Blacks).

While dehumanization presupposes ascribing a hierarchy to other, individuals that identify with a “non-dominant” group can also engage in the phenomenon. Not only can

62 they dehumanize members of other groups, but they can also internalize self- dehumanizing attitudes (Fannon 1952). More detailed hypotheses emerge from the research design described below.

III. Data & Methodology:

Participants:

The data for this study consists of a survey experiment fielded nation-wide through

Qualtrics, in late March- early April 2019. A sample of 573 subjects took part in the survey, and were randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions, a “control” condition

(N= 301), and an “animal” one (N=272). The majority of respondents where white (359), followed by Latinx (69), Black (66) and Asian (51). The sample is predominantly female

(418). 229 respondents reported an income level lower than $50,000 while 186 reports an income lower than $100,000. 235 voted for Clinton in 2016, while 167 voted for

Trump. On a Likert scale of 1-7, where 1=strong Democrat, 4=Independent, and 7=strong

Republican, the sample skews somewhat Democrat overall (mean score for control is 3.6 and for animal is 3.56).

Procedure:

In the control condition, subjects were presented with a real news story describing the rescue of a hiker in Maine, while in the animal condition, subjects were presented with an AP news story on immigration, altered to include animalistic dehumanization, based on animalistic language identified by O’Brien (2003). Specifically, immigrants are

63 described as a “swarm,” “packs,” and “violent animals” that “infest” the U.S. (see Figure 1 for full text of conditions including animalistic language, highlighted here for emphasis).

Figure 1. Wording in Control and Animal Conditions

Measures:

Immediately after the vignette, subjects were asked to rate their agreement with

12 immigration policy statements, on a seven-point Likert scale. The content of these statements can be found below, with a those that are included in a punitive policy index measure bolded.

Table 1. Policy Statements*

S1 On the whole, immigration is a good thing for this country today. S2 Undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens. S3 Immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children should be given the chance to become citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time. S4 We should build a wall along the border with Mexico. S5 When immigrants and their children are detained at the U.S. border for coming into the country illegally, the U.S. should do everything it can to prosecute immigrants entering illegally, even if it means their families are separated. S6 Before anyone receives local, state or federal government services, they should be required to prove they are legally allowed to be in the United States S7 Local and state police should be empowered to detain and deport anyone who cannot prove their immigration status. S8 Children of unauthorized immigrants should automatically get citizenship if they are born in this country. S9 The U.S. has a responsibility to accept refugees. S10 Immigrants apprehended crossing the border must be detained until they are sent home, no more catch-and-release. S11 Immigrants already in the country should be provided with a path to citizenship provided that they become fluent in English. S12 Immigrants need to assimilate into the American style of life. *Bolded statements are part of punitive index variable.

Combining these five measures above into an index of punitive policies, the hypothesis that emerges is:

H1: Subjects in the animal condition are significantly more likely to support punitive immigration measures than subjects in the control condition.

Following the policy statements, the survey includes the standard ANES question which reads “Do you think the number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States should be increased, left the same, or decreased?” giving us

H2: Subjects in the animal condition are significantly more likely to oppose increasing the number of immigrants admitted in the U.S. than subjects in the control condition.

Subjects then rated how likely they are to describe Americans and immigrants in humanizing (“refined, cultured,” “mature, responsible”, “capable of self-control”) or dehumanizing (“backward, primitive”, “savage, aggressive,” “lacking morals”) terms

(Bruneau et al. 2015), rated on a seven-point Likert scale (where 1=Not at all, and

7=Extremely so). By creating two indices, one consisting of the three negative characteristics and one of the three positive ones, our third hypothesis emerges:

H3: Subjects in the animal condition are significantly more likely to describe immigrants in negative terms and significantly less like to describe immigrants in positive terms than subjects in the control condition.

Yet, immigrant, as an out-group category, does not exist in a vacuum. Thus, I follow several other scholars’ lead, and construct a difference measure for these negative, positive, and their respective indices by subtracting the score given by each subject on each characteristic for immigrants from its corollary for Americans. As such,

H4: Subjects in the animal condition are significantly more likely to describe immigrants in negative terms relative to Americans than subjects in the control condition.

Lastly, subjects are asked to rate whites, Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants of the

Ascent of Man scale. Modeled after Bruneau et al. (2015), the scale features a depiction of the folk-theory, oversimplified view of evolution, with five figures and a slider, ranging from 0=quadrupedal mammal to 100=Homo Sapiens. It is a measure of blatant dehumanization, where subjects place members of various groups on this spectrum of

66 humanness (Kteily et al 2015). This measure of dehumanization, which I also employ in this study, has predominantly been used to study racial attitudes (Kteily et al. 2015;

Jardina et al. 2017), immigrant attitudes (Esses et al. 2013; Utych 2018); and partisan attitudes (Cassese 2019; Martherus et al. 2018; Cassese 2020). In order to disaggregate whether subjects are conflating immigrants with Latinos, given the political rhetoric linking immigration policy discourse to Latinos specifically, it is worth looking at how the latter’s humanness is rated, separate from immigrants. Moreover, by constructing a similar difference measure as above for the Ascent of man Scores – subtracting immigrants’ and Latinos’ scores, respectively from Americans’ scores, the final hypothesis becomes

H5: Subjects in the animal condition are significantly more likely to score immigrants and Latinos as lower, in general and relative to Americans, on the Ascent of Man scale than subjects in the control condition.

IV. Results and Discussion:

Figure 2 illustrates the results of the OLS regression (α=0.05) for the main dependent variable, the overall punitive index. I have also included the results for each of the five individual policy statements that make up the index. The general trend is as expected – subjects who received the “animal” treatment report higher levels of support for punitive policy measures than subjects who received the “control” treatment about the rescued hiker. However, support for only two of the five policies is statistically significant

– support for family separation, and support for detain & deport-type policies. While support for family separation, specifically worded to reference children (see Table 1 above), is surprisingly high, given the public outrage reported in the media, it’s interesting to see that support for empowering local police to detain and deport is significant and

67 higher than for detention at the border over catch & release-type policies. Subject may very well differentiate between inability to prove one’s legal status in S7 and the lack of any explicit mention of illegal border crossings in S10, or they are expressing support for empowering local authorities to enforce immigration policy, which has implications for future research on federalism. The results for the punitive index overall are also statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence interval. Following the lead of other works which limit the sample to a dominant group, I exclude Latino respondents from the sample in order to control for any outliers, as the ethnic identity is conflated with the legal one in public discourse in the US. For this reason, Latinos in this study could be responding based on internalized dehumanization and/or overcompensating in their ratings. With this exclusion, the sample (N total=504, N animal=243, N control=261) maintains the positive correlation across is the board but drives a loss of all statistical significance. Superficially this seems to support this work’s assumption that internalizing and expressing dehumanizing attitudes is universal phenomenon, regardless of the out- group specific content, but realistically it is more likely a matter of statistical power (see

Figure 2, Appendix A). Subjects in the animal condition were also significantly more likely to oppose increasing the number of immigrants (Figure 2a, see also Table 5, Appendix B).

Figure 2. Support for Punitive Measures

Figure 2a. No. of Immigrants Should be Decreased, Left the Same or Increased

Animal Control

Of course, the counterfactual for the results described above is that they may very well be due to galvanizing immigrant resentment, and not any treatment effect. This begs the question – did the treatment work? The analysis then must turn to subjects’ responses on three dehumanization measures – rating immigrants and Americans on three positive

(humanizing) and three negative (dehumanizing) characteristics, as well as the Ascent of

Man ratings for immigrants, Latinos, and Americans.

Starting with the first dehumanization measures, Figure 3a depicts the expected negative trend for positive characteristics. Thus, subjects in the animal condition were less likely to rate immigrants as “refined, cultured,” “mature, responsible,” and “capable of self-control,” than those in the control condition. Yet, neither the OLS results for the composite index, or any of the three statements are significant at the alpha level of 0.05

(subjects unlikeliness to rate immigrants as “refined, cultured” is however significant at the 0.09 alpha level). When limiting the sample to non-Latinos to control for internalized dehumanization, the regression results for the “refined, cultured item” become significant at a 95% confidence interval (see Figure 3a, Appendix A).

Figure 3a. Positive Characteristics Ratings for Immigrants

The same non-significant trend holds up for the positive characteristic ratings and the positive index overall when measured as a difference between Americans’ ratings and immigrants,’ although the difference in ratings for the two target-groups for the “mature, responsible” item is significant at the 0.09 level (Figure 3a’). The direction of the relationship holds when excluding Latinos from the sample (see Figure 3a’, Appendix A).

Figure 3a’. Positive Characteristics Ratings for Difference Measure (Americans -

Immigrants)

In terms of negative or dehumanizing characteristics, subjects in the treatment group are more likely to describe immigrants as “backward, primitive” and “savage, aggressive,” (and more negatively overall as per the index) but not as “lacking morals”

(Figure 3b). This is an interesting tension here between behavioral traits – seeming or acting aggressive, primitive – and cognitive ones – a sense of morality. Do subjects believe that immigrants are capable of morality, yet they choose to act savagely (demonstrating agency), thus offering a moral license for committing violence against them (Haslam

2006, Smith and Panaitiu 2016a)? To what degree do affective, cognitive and behavioral agency define the humanity we project onto others, and which ones (if any) satisfy a necessary but not sufficient clause? The same pattern of results holds for the difference measure (subtracting immigrants’ scores from those of Americans), where the results for

“backwards, primitive” become significant (Figure 3b’), and remain significant when eliminating Latinos from the sample (Figure 3b’, Appendix A).

Figure 3b. Negative Characteristics Ratings for Immigrants

Figure 3b’. Negative Characteristics Ratings for Difference Measure (Americans – Immigrants)

For the second measure of dehumanization, I employ the (in)famous Ascent of

Man scale, developed in social psychology by Bruneau et al. (2015). The scale asks subjects to rate a target group’s humanity level from zero to 100, where zero corresponds to a quadrupedal mammal (non-human primate), whereas 100 corresponds to modern man.

The scale makes two assumptions worth noting. First, it presupposes subjects believe in evolution. Second, given its graphical nature, the scale can prime subjects to discriminate based of physiognomic traits, something that does not necessarily map well onto social groups (such as immigrants) not necessarily defined by any distinguishing physical traits.

Related to this, there is a significant body of scholarly works in the philosophy of psychology and that of biology on the topic of essentialism (including human) which contradicts the notion of that things may appear to be X without their essence being X.

For example, vampires, fairies, and all sorts of monsters may appear human, but they are fundamentally not, a tension first identified by Freud (1919) which in robotics is called the “valley of the uncanny” (Carroll 1990).

This being said, the Ascent of Man scale has become a standard of measuring blatant dehumanization in social psychology, and for that reason I incorporate it in this study. The negative (non-significant) hierarchical trend of rating Latinos as less human than whites comes to no surprise to scholars of race and ethnicity, yet immigrants’ rating in between these two signifies that subjects do not simply equate immigrants and Latinos, supporting the notion that racial resentment and immigrant resentment are distinct phenomena (Figure 3c). In order to account for the relative and hierarchical nature of dehumanizing thinking, I construct a difference scale, subtracting immigrants’ and

Latinos’ scores from those of whites (AOM_whites – AOM_Latinos; AOM_whites –

AOM_immigrants, respectively). Only the AOM_whites – AOM_Latinos becomes

74 significant – and then loses its significance when excluding Latinos’ responses from the analysis (see Figure 3c, Appendix A).

Figure 3c. Ascent of Man Ratings

This research carries implications for scholars of political psychology and the politics of language. Firstly, this study supports the notion that media portrayals and language matters. Using animalistic, dehumanizing language leads to an increased support for punitive anti-immigrant policies, encouraging political intolerance.

Moreover, describing a target group as violent, savage beasts correlates with rating target- group members as less than human across several dehumanization measures.

There are also implications for scholarship on race and ethnicity, given that dehumanization is a staple tactic of “othering” racial and ethnic minorities more often than not, which tie into a couple of limitations of this study. Future research may look into what exactly do people think of when they think of “immigrant,” a political/legal category that may or may not overlap with ethno-racial ones. Likewise, a future study that

75 builds on this one could ask subjects to report their social proximity to immigrants (i.e. they themselves are one, an immediate family member, etc).

Another limitation of this study applies to all survey experiments. It is simply unrealistic to assume the treatment is the subjects’ first and only exposure to dehumanization, or negative stereotyping about immigrants. Their degree of exposure, and how much they have internalized remains unknown. Simply mentioning immigration may be enough to induce aversion in individuals, consistent with the galvanizing model of immigrant resentment. Moreover, these attitudes do not exist in a vacuum – partisan and ideological cues can interact and mitigate with the information that shapes subjects’ existing attitudes. Yet, given the current political climate in which some political figures actively use dehumanizing language to vilify immigrants, the implication of this one-time treatment effect should not be taken lightly.

This being said, animalistic dehumanization is not the latter’s only subcategory, particularly in the case of immigration and how it has been historically framed in public discourse. While the immigrant as pathogen has been already studied once (Utych 2018), there are several other metaphors used to characterize immigrants in the U.S., most commonly those evocative of natural disasters – “waves,” “tides,” “floods.” Future research should look into the effects of less extreme, perhaps more insidious dehumanizing narratives in conjuncture with which psychological dimensions they project onto immigrants – agency, cognition, and behavioral agency – if any.

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Appendix A: Analysis excluding Latinos from Sample

Figure 2. Support for Punitive Measures

Figure 2a. No. of Immigrants Should be Decreased, Left the Same or Increased

Animal Control

Figure 3a. Positive Characteristics Ratings for Immigrants

Figure 3a’. Positive Characteristics Ratings for Difference Measure (Americans - Immigrants)

Figure 3b. Negative Characteristics Ratings for Immigrants

Figure 3b’. Negative Characteristics Ratings for Difference Measure (Americans - Immigrants)

Figure 3c. Ascent of Man Ratings

Appendix B – OLS Regression Tables

Containment and Contagion

- Dehumanizing Rhetoric and Immigration Policy Attitudes-

Ioana G. Hulbert

Department of Political Science, Northeastern University

ABSTRACT:

Within the political science literature, studies on dehumanization have overwhelmingly focused either on race relations and attitudes, and/or a blatant form of the phenomenon – the animalistic type. By virtue of this, immigration offers a unique policy domain where ethno-racial considerations of a target group lead to the group being openly characterized in objectifying, less than human terms, regardless of ideological or partisan background. The main question this study explores is to what extent does the type of dehumanization matter. To address this, the study employs a large-N survey experiment using an immigrant-as-disease and immigrant-as-natural disaster metaphors to find that exposure to both leads to an increased support for restrictive immigration policies, for the former more than the latter.

Keywords: Dehumanization; survey experiment; public opinion; immigration; political psychology; political attitudes.

I. Introduction

Historically, the United States have been described as a “melting pot” or, more recently, a “salad spinner.” At a superficial look, these apparently innocuous metaphors have been staples of (proudly) describing the immigrant-dominant character of the nation, even as other countries have notably “othered” immigrant minorities. While racism has always lurked behind the surface, how it is socially acceptable to display and frame it has changed throughout the country’s history. In recent years, scores of immigrant-phobic incidents and rhetoric have become prominent in the public sphere, with (predominantly non-European, non-white) immigrants being openly disparaged and slured. These incidents represent a specific form of blatant dehumanization, called animalistic dehumanization, where members of a target group are described or conceptualized as non-human animals, as a means to deny them agency, dignity, and autonomy.

Within the political science literature, studies on dehumanization have overwhelmingly focused either on race relations and attitudes, and/or this animalistic form of it. Yet, immigration offers a unique policy domain where a target group is openly characterized in objectifying, less than human terms, regardless of ideological or partisan background. In the press and in the public sphere more broadly, immigration has frequently been likened to a “wave,” a “tide,” or a “flood.” These routinely used terms harken back to a natural calamity evocative of a biblical curse – and are much more pervasive and likely to fly under the radar. Another way of describing immigrants is in terms of a pathogen-metaphor, where they detract from the nation-as-body’s purity. After

93 all, so-called neutral legal jargon labels immigrants as “aliens,” whether they are residents, legal, or authorized.

Because of the broad spectrum of ideological attitudes and issue framing angles that pertain to immigration (framing it as a matter of economic growth, cultural diversity, and national security, to name a few), and racial, religious, linguistic, and class diversity at the core of immigration, the policy domain is ripe for dehumanization – both blatant and subtle. This research’s goal is to look into subtle, yet more common forms of dehumanizing rhetoric that have a high incidence in the domain of immigration rhetoric.

Thus, this paper argues that the content and affective dimension of dehumanizing language matters. Employing a survey experiment administered to a national sample, its specific goal is to explore the effects of the metaphor of immigrant as either natural disaster or the immigrant as disease pathogen on a number of policy attitudes, as well as subjects’ rating of the level of humanness immigrants possess.

This article makes several contributions to the literature on public opinion and dehumanization. First, it moves past animalistic dehumanization by including treatments and measures not limited to the Ascent of Man scale, which is the staple measure of blatant dehumanization in social psychology. The scale depicts the evolution of man from ape alongside a slider and is meant to rate how human or evolved subjects are. However, the scale is designed to study animalistic dehumanization alone. Second, the study tests the effects of exposure to the immigrant as disease and immigrant as natural disaster metaphors of timely policy attitudes. Third, it takes other insights from social psychology

(Tippler and Ruscher 2014) in order to build treatments that vary the cognitive, affective,

94 and behavioral dimensions attributed to the target group, while incorporating real-life narratives that have historically been used to describe immigrants (O’Brien 2003).

II. The Literature and Theory on Immigrant Dehumanization

Immigrant Dehumanization and Public Opinion

Dehumanization represents the process of treating or conceiving of other human beings as less than human, as a means of denying them agency, dignity and integrity

(Haslam 2006). There are two main issues with the literature on dehumanization in political science. For one, the focus is overwhelmingly on animalistic dehumanization, following Brunneau et al. (2015)’s Ascent of Man scale, which depicts humanity on a spectrum that maps onto the evolution of man graphic. According to this scale, humanity ranges from full bipedal modern man, regressing all the way to an ape-like quadruped primate. This scale has become a standard blatant dehumanization measure in social psychology and from there, political science. However, the problem with the scale is that it lends itself to a physiological account of dehumanization. More specifically, the scale assumes people think along the lines of an account evocative of Johann Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, according to which you can infer a person’s inner traits and personality based on their outward appearance (Lavater 1788). Thus, the Ascent of Man plays into notions of scientific racism, particularly in the North American context, where the trope of depicting Blacks as apes has a long history. In the literature, Palestinians are the target group of such dehumanization in McDonald et al. (2015), Nagar and Maoz (2015) and

Saguy et al. (2015), Arabs in Prati et al. (2016) and Kteily et al. (2016), while Miranda et al. (2014)’s target group is the Roma. The scale then is poorly suited for measuring

95 dehumanization where physical traits are not available as othering tools or are not part of the content of the negative stereotype.

Second, by using the Ascent of Man scale, recent empirical dehumanization studies have overwhelmingly focused on animalistic dehumanization of Blacks (Kteily et al 2015;

Jardina et al 2017), presidential candidates (Cassesse 2019), and partisan attitudes

(Martherus et al. 2018; Casesse 2020). This is not to say that animalistic dehumanization is the only type. In fact, the very goal of this article is to study the policy effects of less blatant forms of dehumanization. For Leyens et al. (2001), dehumanization represents the tendency to deny others uniquely human traits, while for Haslam (2006) the phenomenon occurs when we deny others uniquely human (UH) or human nature (HN) traits. Denial of UH traits, such as cognition, expressive language, a sense of morality, leads to animalistic dehumanization, while denial of HN traits such as emotion, warmth leads to mechanistic dehumanization, thus offering the first typology of dehumanization.

On the topic of dehumanization’s effect on anti-immigrant sentiment proper, a handful of scholars have found empirical evidence that dehumanization predicts support for anti-immigration policy in the U.S. context (DeLuca-McLean & Castano 2009; Kteily and Bruneau 2016, Utych 2018). While the first study found partisan differences between liberals and conservatives, with the latter more likely to dehumanize Latino hurricane victims, the other two studies test the experimental effect of dehumanization. Yet the

Bruneau study relies on the Ascent of Man scale ratings for various ethnic groups and includes no manipulation, to find that blatant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexicans correlates with support for anti-immigrant policies. Meanwhile, Utych moves past animalistic dehumanization to explore inducing bodily threat through a “immigrant as

96 pathogen” metaphor. Yet his focus is overwhelmingly on anger and disgust’s role in mediating dehumanization with his dependent variable being if the number of immigrants allowed in the country should be decreased, left the same, or increased. While studying the actual mechanism of dehumanization is important – is dehumanization simply disgust or fear-inducement? Is it some combination of disgust and empathy? – my focus here is less of the affective dimension of dehumanization and on its policy effects, depending on the type of dehumanization.

As such, this article aims to expand this literature by including measures of blatant and subtle dehumanization beyond the Ascent of Man scale, which assumes a type of evolutionary thinking that does not map onto prejudice directed at immigrants well, particularly on forms of dehumanization other than animalistic. I will focus on two types of dehumanizing metaphors: the first one is that of the immigrant-as-pathogen, following

Utych, and the second one is that of immigrant-as-natural-disaster, based common language used to describe immigrants using terms such as “waves,” “tides,” and “floods.”

I anticipate exposure to dehumanizing language through the two metaphors of immigrant-as-disease and immigrant-as-natural-disaster of this study will not only increase support for restricting immigration but will do so at different levels. After all, the disease metaphor induces a sense of disgust or bodily harm that may trigger a higher level of disgust or anxiety than the natural disaster one.

Immigrant as Disease and Immigrant as Natural Disaster:

As Gerald O’Brien notes, “a prime example of metaphor use is to denigrate marginalized populations as a means of supporting adverse social policies against group members.” (O’Brien 2003, p 33). Questions of framing, priming, and word choice and order have spawned numerous studies in public opinion and survey design. Problem definition may very well be a more important policy issue than problem solving, and metaphors are essential to the former (Schön 1979). Simply put, language matters, and several studies on the role of language inform the discussion here.

After all, language is a key signifier or cultural belonging – as evidenced by the fact that 90% of Americans believe that one must speak English to be American, regardless of citizenship status (Schildkraut 2005; Theiss-Morse 2009), and that individuals are more likely to think individuals with a thicker accent are not/do not deserve citizenship

(Hopkins 2015). Similarly, exposure to incidental use of Spanish induces cultural threat

(Newman et al. 2012), while the priming subjects with slurs directed at a target group makes them more likely to report negative attitudes towards the target group (Fasolli et al. 2017). As mentioned in the introduction, immigration is an interesting policy case, where the very key legal words used to describe immigrants (“illegal,” “unauthorized,”

“alien”) is a form of dehumanizing identity-first (as opposed to person-first) language, and the U.S. has a rich history of rhetoric centered around ways to protect and enrich the

“body of the nation.”

In terms of the specific immigrant-as-disease metaphor used in this study, scholars have noted that humans developed disease-avoidance mechanisms and instincts, both

98 physical and psychological, as pathogens of all sorts have consistently played a role in shaping human survival (Huang et al. 2011; Gangestad and Buss 1993). Thus, from the literature, we know that perception of exposure to a pathogen can focus attention, negatively impact assessments, affect personality, and trigger avoidance behaviors

(Houston and Bull 1994; Schaller and Murray 2008; Ackerman et al. 2009; Mortensen et al. 2010). But we also know that anxiety over pathogen risk predicts attitudes towards individuals with non-infectious conditions such as obesity (Park Schaller and Crandall

2007), immigrants and LGBTQ males (Cottrell and Neuberg 2005; Kam and Estes 2016;

Utych 2018).

Elsewhere, Navarrete, Fessler and Eng (2007) show that women display heightened levels of xenophobic attitudes more so in the first trimester of a pregnancy, when the fetus is most susceptible to disease. Landau, Sullivan and Greenberg (2009) find support for contamination threat activating anti-immigrant sentiment when the U.S. is metaphorically framed as a living body that “grows” and “digests” (p. 1422). Yet these studies (apart from Utych 2018) induced subjects with a disease threat separate of the target group. In this study, I use language evocative of a disease threat to specifically describe immigrants, thus linking them explicitly to a pathogen risk, anticipating a significant negative effect on immigration policy attitudes when immigration is framed as raising fears of spread, contamination, and decomposition.

On the other hand, the immigrant-as-disaster metaphor is arguably less “extreme”

(or openly prejudiced), and therefore more widespread throughout the country’s history and even today. Floods, tides, waves, and surges have been frequently used to characterize immigration trends throughout the 20th and 21st century. Writing in the North American

Review in 1906, Thomas Darlington argues that “the incoming tide threatened to overwhelm us with the magnitude and ceaseless oncoming of its flood” (p. 1266). After the passage of the 1921 Immigration Restriction Act, which established national origin quotas, James Davis noted that the act “effectively dammed a rising tide of immigration from Europe” (1923, p. 134). One House member worried that now that “trying to partially dam the stream” only led to “pressure at the weak points” being greater (Congressional

Record 1921, p. 1436). Perhaps most disturbingly eloquent, Elizabeth Frazer (1923) argued that immigration “it’s a ceaseless ebb and flow, a vast tidal river or labor, of homeless peasantry, surging in, surging out, backing up a bit in winters and slack seasons, and boiling out again like a massive sheet of water over a dam at the onset of prosperity in spring” (p.14).

Lastly, this study’s theoretical framework builds upon insights from Tipler and

Ruscher’s 2014 study on the role of non-human metaphors in the dehumanization of outgroups. The two create a typology of metaphors that vary according to three types of agency attributed to members of a target group. The three dimensions are affective agency

(“the ability of the target to experience emotion and possess desires”), behavioral (“ability of the target to produce a behavior and exhibit activity”), and cognitive (“ability of the target to hold beliefs and think rationally”) (Tipler and Ruscher 2014, p. 219).

In animalistic dehumanization, most widely studied in the literature, the target group is ascribed both affective and behavioral agency, while I argue that in the immigrant-as-disease and that as-disaster types of dehumanization, the target group is only ascribed behavioral agency, as defined above. Wild predators can exhibit basic emotions (fear, anger, hunger) and act according to a desire (in these narratives, most

100 likely a desire to kill), while pathogens and natural calamities cannot help their own behavior, nor are they tied to any emotion (unless one evokes them as part of a divine punishment metaphor, where their role is instrumental regardless).

For this reason, this study anticipates that while animalistic dehumanization may induce a preference for punitive anti-immigration measures, the disaster and disease metaphors will induce support for restrictive immigration policy in general, particularly those that offer a physical barrier or number-reduction schema. What sets the two apart from each other, then, is the fact the disease metaphor induces disgust, while the disaster one does not, opening the door for an exploratory study of dehumanization that is not equivalent or mediated by disgust. More concrete hypotheses, as well as the exact wording of these metaphors are described in part III below.

III. Data & Methodology

Participants:

The survey experiment was fielded to a sample of subjects through Qualtrics, in late

March/early April 2019. A total of 871 English-speaking adults living in the U.S. participated. In terms of racial make-up, most of respondents were white (520), followed by Latinx (123), Black (100) and Asian (86). The sample is predominantly female (619), and skews towards having some higher education (305). 342 respondents reported an income level lower than $50,000 while 307 reports an income between $51,000 and

$100,000. 351 voted for Clinton in 2016, while 264 voted for Trump. On a Likert scale of

1-7, where 1=strong Democrat, 4=Independent, and 7=strong Republican, the sample

101 skews somewhat Democrat overall (mean score for control is 3.6, for disaster 3.69, and

3.73 for disease).

Procedure:

Following a number of demographic questions, subjects were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions, a “control” one (N=301), a “disaster” one (N=294), or a “disease” one (N=276). Wording for the three conditions can be found in Figure 1 below.

While the control condition presented the subjects with a genuine news story of a hiker rescue in the state of Maine (with no mention of immigration), the immigrant-as-disease and immigrant-as-disaster conditions both were adapted from a real-life Associated Press news story on an immigration influx at the southern border, with key language varied to reflect the two metaphors (based on O’Brien 2003; see Figure 1 for full text of conditions including disease/disaster language, highlighted here for emphasis).

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Figure 1. Word choice in the three conditions

1a. Control Treatment Wording

1b. Disaster Treatment Wording

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1c. Disease Treatment Wording

Measures and Hypotheses:

Following the news story vignette, subjects were presented with 9 immigration policy statements, for which they were asked to rate their agreement with on a seven- point Likert scale. The wording of these policy statements can be found in Table 1 below.

Based on the theory outlined above, several hypotheses emerge. Firstly, this paper argues that both

H1: Subjects in the disease and those in the disaster condition are significantly

more likely to support anti- immigration measures than subjects in the control

condition, the former more so than the latter.

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Table 1. Policy Statements*

S1 On the whole, immigration is a good thing for this country today. S2 Undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens. S3 We should build a wall along the border with Mexico. S4 When immigrants and their children are detained at the U.S. border for coming into the country illegally, the U.S. should do everything it can to prosecute immigrants entering illegally, even if it means their families are separated. S5 Before anyone receives local, state or federal government services, they should be required to prove they are legally allowed to be in the United States S6 Local and state police should be empowered to detain and deport anyone who cannot prove their immigration status. S7 Children of unauthorized immigrants should automatically get citizenship if they are born in this country. S8 The U.S. has a responsibility to accept refugees. S9 Immigrants apprehended crossing the border must be detained until they are sent home, no more catch-and-release. *Bolded statements are part of an index variable, discussed below.

Given that it is one of the few immigrant-as-pathogen of disease studies in political science, this study also tests Utych’s (2018) dependent variable question, which reads “Do you think the number of immigrants from foreign countries who are permitted to come to the United States should be increased, left the same, or decreased?” Thus,

H2: Subjects in the disease and disaster conditions are significantly more likely

to oppose increasing the number of immigrants admitted in the U.S. than subjects

in the control condition.

Borrowing from Bruneau et al. 2015, subjects then rated how likely they are to describe Americans and immigrants on a set of three humanizing terms (“refined, cultured,” “mature, responsible”, “capable of self-control”) and three dehumanizing ones

(“backward, primitive”, “savage, aggressive,” “lacking morals”), rated on a seven-point

105

Likert scale (where 1=Not at all, and 7=Extremely so; Bruneau et al. 2015).I construct each of the three terms into two composite indices, one “positive,” one “negative,” and expect that

H3: Subjects in the disease and disaster conditions are significantly more likely

to describe immigrants in negative terms and significantly less likely to describe

them in positive terms than subjects in the control condition.

Following other scholars in the field, I construct a difference measure for these negative, positive, and their respective indices by subtracting the score given by each subject on each characteristic for immigrants from respective score given to Americans.

Subjects were then presented with the classic Ascent of Man scale (Bruneau et al.

2015), which asked them to rate three groups (Americans, immigrants and Latinos) on a graphical scale from 0 to 100, where 0 corresponds to a quadrupedal mammal, and 100 to modern man. Here I expect that

H4: Subjects in the disease and disaster conditions are significantly more likely

to score immigrants and Latinos as lower on the Ascent of Man scale than

subjects in the control condition.

Here it is worth measuring the scoring assigned to Latinos as a separate category, given the overlap nearing a full equation of Latinos and immigrants in some public discourse.

106

Moreover, I construct a difference measure as above, by subtracting each of immigrants’ and Latinos’ Ascent of Man scores, respectively, from the Ascent of Man scores for Americans.

Lastly, subjects were asked to rate on a Likert scale of 1-5 how likely they are to feel four emotions (disgust, fear, admiration, and empathy) towards Americans and immigrants, respectively. Here too I construct a difference measure, subtracting immigrants’ scores from those of Americans. Thus, the final hypothesis becomes

H5: Subjects in the disease and disaster conditions are significantly more likely

to report feeling more disgust and fear, and less admiration and empathy

towards immigrants (compared to feelings towards Americans) than subjects in

the control condition.

IV. Results and Discussion:

Figure 2 below illustrates the results of the OLS regression (confidence interval is

95%, with inner confidence interval – thicker line- representing 90%) for four of the policy statements subjects were asked about. The general trend is as expected, with subjects in both the disease and disaster groups exhibiting higher anti-immigrant sentiment than subjects in the control group. However, the difference between the two groups is mixed. While both sets of subjects are equally likely to believe immigrants are more likely to commit crimes, subjects in the disease group are more supportive of granting automatic citizenship. This result is not significant, unlike that of the corresponding coefficient for the disaster group, which is significant at the .05 level.

However, the disease coefficient for a duty to accept refugees, becomes significant at the

107

.1 level (and more negative) than that of the disaster one, while that for immigration being a good thing overall is significant at the .1 level in both groups, but trends more negative for the disease group.

Figure 2. Policy Attitudes

Figure 3 depicts the regression coefficient estimates for the five restrictive immigration policy measures, as well as their composite index (where the control is the omitted category). The general trend is as expected - subjects who received the “disease” or “disaster” treatments report higher levels of support for policy measures restricting immigration than subjects in the “control” group. As the previous figure, the confidence level corresponds to alpha=.1 (inner) and .05 (outer). While neither groups’ subjects significantly support family separation at the border, it’s worth noting that subjects in the disease condition are less likely to support immigrants having to prove legal status in

108 order to receive services, but that very well could be because they simply do not want any immigrants to receive services.

The biggest shift also occurs in the disease condition for support for the wall, in accordance with our theoretical expectation of pathogen-threat eliciting a desire for physical containment/disease avoidance strategies. Most notable though is the fact that while results were mixed for the policy measures in Figure 2, overall disease and disaster metaphors do drive support for restrictive immigration measures, with overall support for the index measures being significant at the 95 percent confidence interval for both groups.

Figure 3. Restrictive Immigration Policy Attitudes

Figures 4 and 5 offer further support for the treatments’ effects. The first figure illustrates that subjects in both conditions favor reducing the number of immigrants to

109 the U.S. (90 percent confidence interval), with disease condition subjects more opposed than disaster ones.

Figure 4. The Number of Immigrants Should be Increased

Meanwhile, figure 5 shows that subjects in the disaster condition are significantly more likely to use positive characteristics to describe immigrants, while both groups of subjects are significantly more likely to characterize immigrants negatively. This is a strange result – subjects in both dehumanizing treatment groups are more likely to describe immigrants both more negatively and more positively. The immediate conclusion would be that (a) the treatments are not working, or (b) the measure is not working. The results in figure 3 above seem to contradict (a). As for (b), I argue it makes sense. Describing immigrants (here, but any target group) in ways that does not ascribe them agency means that subjects do not really engage with the target group on an emotional/intellectual/inner life level. After all, no one has positive or negative feelings

110 towards a hurricane in an anthropomorphic way. We can ascribe some such agency to animals – they can be savage, aggressive, smart, or cunning, but we can’t really say that about natural phenomena. Storms are not out to get us, and pandemics do not have agendas.

Figure 5. Positive and Negative Characteristics

Figure 6 below presents the Ascent of Man scores. At first glance, we see the expected overall trend for the two difference measures (lower humanity scores in the disease condition), and a much higher, significant humanity rating for whites in the same condition. While I have raised objections to the internal validity of using this scale for a, immigrants, and b, non-animalistic dehumanization, one thing is worth noting here.

While statistically insignificant, subjects in the disease condition give higher humanity scores than those in the control group and the disaster one. This could be due to the fact that subjects in the disease condition may very well recognize immigrants and Latinos’

111 humanness (less than that of whites) but still see them as agents of disease and therefore threats.

Figure 6. Ascent of Man Scores

Figure 7 depicts the OLS estimates for how likely subjects are to report feeling four emotions towards a difference measure constructed by subtracting immigrants’ scores from whites.’ Disease subjects are significantly more likely to report disgust (.05 level) and fear (.1 level). For the estimates solely for immigrants, see figure 7 in the appendix.

This being said, while I have presented here (in figures 5, 6, and 7) the results for the commonly used measures of dehumanization in social psychology, I did not expect them to produce any significant or consistent results. As discussed above, the Ascent of Man scale is a physiognomic one that lends itself to animalistic dehumanization best, if not solely. Non-human animals, brutes and beasts are all on the same spectrum of beings;

112 disasters and diseases are not, so the measure does not capture the same type of dehumanization.

Figure 7. Emotions Difference Score (White - Immigrants)

Based on the results presented above, the current study makes several contributions to the literature on political psychology and that on public opinion. Most importantly, the study expands the range of dehumanization studies by focusing on two types other than animalistic dehumanization. Animalistic dehumanization is pervasive and well-documented historically, and empirically studied as of recently. Jews were vermin, Arabs were dogs, Persians were rats, Tutsis were snakes, Black people were coons and apes. But being some sort of animal is not the only shade of non-humanity. People can be dehumanized in other, less “extreme” ways that are less likely to result in social sanctions for the dehumanizer. Immigration is a perfect example of this type of dog-

113 whistle politics. It is one thing to label immigrants as violent animals and savage beasts – and these types of labels no doubt get a lot of publicity and generate a lot of outcry when they occur. Meanwhile language framing immigration as a natural calamity or pathogen is much more pervasive and socially sanctioned. Immigrants are legally “aliens” who

“pour” into the country like a “wave,” threatening its “purity,” as if the country is a vulnerable body in need of either a vaccine or a wall meant to stop the floodgates.

By using Tippler and Ruscher’s typology of agency to ground O’Brien’s historical arguments into an empirical analysis of the disease and disaster metaphors, this article offers an exploratory account that shows that not all dehumanization is made equal.

Moreover, this article continues work started by Kam and Estes (2016) and Utych (2018), but focuses on the policy effects of dehumanization, instead of its affective mechanism in order to support the fact that denying agency and/or cognitive dimensions to the dehumanized group results in different attitudes – you tame, punish and exterminate savage beasts, but you protect yourself from disasters and diseases through (physical) barriers and ensuring the integrity of your community.

Lastly, the study does not rely solely on the Ascent of Man scale to measure dehumanization, particularly since not all types of objectifying and denigrating types of rhetoric are created equal, neither are the contents of various group stereotypes. As discussed above, some of the established measures of blatant dehumanization do not lend themselves to measuring non-animalistic types of dehumanization, such as the two types presented in this article.

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That being said, there are limitations to this study. For one, as detailed in the theory section of this paper, there is a rich history of dehumanizing immigrants in the

U.S., and it would be naïve to assume that this is the first exposure to the type of metaphors used in the treatments. Simply mentioning immigration may be enough to induce aversion in individuals, consistent with the galvanizing model of immigrant resentment. For this reason, the control group itself is really a placebo, and not a

“sanitized” immigration news story, stripped of any dehumanizing language. A future study would use such a control group as the omitted category instead of a placebo (or no treatment).

Yet, even if this the thousandth exposure to pathogen-threat rhetoric, in the real world these discourses do not exist in a vacuum. However randomized the study may be, individuals do not come in as blank slates – and they may very well be aware of either what is being studied or simply do not want to be perceived in a negative light based on their answers. I can only speculate how different the disease treatment effects might look if this survey experiment ran today, in the midst of a COVID-19 panic, with or without explicitly mentioning it in the treatment wording. It is also not clear what exactly people have in mind when they are presented with the concept of “immigrant.” While it is a legal category, subjects may very well define it in ethno-racial, religious, or linguistic terms.

After all, being American means different things to different people – it can be a matter of citizenship, of culture, of linguistic identity, or of some ethnic/racial/religious considerations.

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