As ever, then-Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin had to dehumanize George Floyd before he could kill him. Chauvin placed Floyd first figuratively, then literally, beneath him. Prior to jamming his knee into Floyd’s neck in an act of brutal subjugation, the toxic lie of his own superiority was already established in his heart. And because every man knows deep down that he is merely human, if Floyd was below him then Chauvin could only believe that Floyd was sub-human, a mere animal. This dehumanization is a very old story, as old as Cain slaying his brother Abel, whose blood cried out from the ground.
Citing the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that racial segregation replaces an “I — thou” relationship with an “I — it” relationship, and thus relegates persons to the status of things. James Baldwin went even further, pointing out that the racism’s dehumanization of African-Americans did not stop with its victims: this ideology not only denies the humanity of blacks, the racist also dehumanizes himself. A police officer cannot willfully ignore a black man’s humanity without thereby lowering himself, morally speaking, to the level of a beast. As Baldwin wrote, “If I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.”
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