Sticks and stones may break my bones,
But words will never hurt me.
~ Playground idiom
As much as we would like to believe this, it simply isn’t true. Words have the power to do tremendous damage. The Bible says “The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” (Jas. 3:5,6). The same tongue that utters words that hurt the speaker can also do devastating harm to the hearer.
One way words bring harm is the way they can be used to dehumanize people. By representing people as lesser, non-human creatures, we are decommissioned from having moral inhibitions that would keep us from mistreating our fellow human beings. This is the assertion of philosopher David Livingstone Smith in Less Than Human. Subtitled “Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others” Smith illustrates how calling people names has often licensed slavery, genocide and other inhumane cruelties throughout history, such as:
Pharaoh Amenemhet, who ruled 4,000 years ago, described his conquests: “I subdued lions, I captured crocodiles I made the Asiatics do the dog walk.”
Slaveholders from ancient Greece to antebellum America spoke of their human property as livestock.
George Washington wrote that both wolves and Indians were “beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
Nazis portrayed the Jews as germs, rats, leeches and rags.
Stalin’s henchmen called the Kulaks (successful peasant farmers) snakes and vermin.
During Rwanda’s genocide the Tutsis were referred to as cockroaches and rats.
The Janjaweed of Sudan spoke of the victims of their massacres as dogs, donkeys and monkeys.
Qaddafi calls his Libyan critics “stray dogs.”
Some police officers label crimes against criminals “N.H.I.” (“No Humans Involved”).
Smith argues that dehumanization comes easily to the human mind because of our propensity to accept that someone can look human but still have a subhuman essence. He writes, “When we dehumanize people, we think of them as counterfeit human being.” The Bible reminds us that there is no such thing:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
~ Gen. 1:27
For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.” But there is a place where someone has testified:
“What is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the angels; you crowned him with glory and honor
and put everything under his feet”.
In putting everything under him, God left nothing that is not subject to him. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him.
~ Heb. 2:6-8
Remember that the next time you think about calling one created in God’s image a dehumanizing name.
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