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dehumanization
The Duty to Grieve: On Dehumanization, War, and the Cost of Witnessing
Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows.
Apr 07, 2026
More than a month into a war with Iran, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation (perhaps appropriately) on April Fool's Day. It was his first televised speech to justify a war to the American people that he had promised would never happen. During that brief 19-minute speech, which mostly repeated his arguably unstable and unverified posts on social media, he said nothing new, closing with: "We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong."
Where they belong. To the stone age. Where THEY belong. While speaking to the nation in an effort to help us see the reason for the costs we are incurring, Trump placed an entire people outside of modernity, outside of civilization, outside of the category of the fully human. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, rhymes about ignoring basic moral obligations to our fellow humans every chance he gets: "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality"; "Violent effect, not politically correct." While Iranian neighborhoods burned and children in schools were bombed by US weapons, Trump was having this exchange on Fox News:
"Do you have any insight as to how they are doing? Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? It's upsetting," Dana Perino asked.
"I do, but first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower when it was a brand new building?" Trump continued… "You have not changed," he told the Fox News host before turning his attention to her looks: "Now, I'm not allowed to say this—it's the end of my political career—but you may be even better looking, okay?"
When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief.
The performance was grotesque in its banality. We are no longer surprised. The ridiculous rhymes, the dangerous dehumanizing language, the slimy sexism—all of it has become the grammar of power and the grammar of war under Trump 2.0.
No clarity was offered about why we are at war with Iran. Not to Dana Perino, not to the American people who tuned in during prime time to watch the president talk. No articulation of what the goal is. No naming of the dead. Instead, our daily content about the war is a cacophonous chatter of stock-market updates, defense-contractor earnings, and abstract references to "success." The human beings on the other end of our weapons have been evacuated from the language entirely.
I know we are all feeling this on some level. Because as Dana Perino rightly noted, the starvation of people is upsetting—but also because of what this dehumanization is doing to all of us.
What we are witnessing is not thoughtless language. It is the operation of a very old logic—one that critical psychologist Thomas Teo calls subhumanism: a way of thinking, feeling, and being that makes certain people disposable. The philosopher Achille Mbembe gives this logic its political name: necropolitics, which is the power to decide who may live, who must die, and the creation of what he calls "death-worlds," where entire populations are reduced to a kind of living dead. When Trump threatens to bomb a country "back to the stone ages," he is exercising necropolitical power in its most obvious form on prime time television. He is not merely threatening destruction but declaring that the people who live there already belong to a time before civilization, and therefore their annihilation is not a devastating event. It is not even, really, an event at all.
This is how dehumanization works. Steadily, without blinking an eye, looking straight into the cameras, evacuating humanity from the people we intend to harm.
And this has become the norm, not an aberration. We might even be experiencing numbness in the face of its routine relentlessness. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas "bloodthirsty monsters," he was laying the groundwork for the immoral destruction of Gaza and the families within it—a destruction that has, at the time of this writing, caused unspeakable harm to entire communities, and that the United Nations has unequivocally identified as genocide. As David Livingstone Smith has documented in On Inhumanity, the language of monstrosity has a horrific lineage. For centuries, European Christians represented Jews as monstrous beings, a trajectory that culminated in the Holocaust. During Jim Crow, Black men were cast as subhuman predators enabling the horrors of lynchings—and then the same language is used to justify our inhuman incarceration policies. First the language changes. Then the unquestioned permissions to eliminate communities follow.
The language used around the war in Iran follows this same pattern. And it is not separate from what has happened—and continues to happen—in Gaza. The pattern enacts the same story over and over again: that some lives are disposable, that some deaths do not count, and that the proper response to their destruction is not grief—not the acknowledgment of our shared humanity and brokenhearted-ness—but a market update.
There is a concept in psychology called moral injury: the harm that comes from witnessing, participating in, or being forced to live inside systems that violate one's deepest commitments. It describes what happens to us—educators, clinicians, organizers, parents, ordinary citizens—as we watch atrocity become normalized. It names what we feel when the excruciating recognition of lives lost to senseless violence gets replaced by financial indicators, and we are expected to go on as though nothing has happened. This is the crisis many of us are living through right now. Not the crisis of war alone, but the crisis of witnessing. The demand is not simply that we tolerate violence. The demand is that we stop feeling it.
And yet, feeling persists. It persists because we know that we belong to each other, we are responsible for each other. And this is what motivates acts of incredibly courageous resistance.
The people of Iran have been resisting—through art, through protest, through organizing—often at devastating personal cost. The Women, Life, Freedom movement is among the most courageous uprisings of our time. Women refused to be silent even when the consequences included imprisonment and death. It was not Trump who advanced liberation in Iran. It was Iranian women, students, workers, artists. What the current war has done is undermine those very movements and murder the very people who have been fighting for their own freedom.
We must hold both of these realities at once: the machinery of dehumanization, and the stubborn, courageous insistence on humanity by those targeted by it. The moral injury is real. And so is the resistance. Both require us to refuse numbness and keep feeling.
Poet and scholar Audre Lorde wrote that to resist, to survive, requires feeling. To grieve is to insist that a life mattered. When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief. To insist that what has been done to them is a wound in the fabric of all of our humanity. You cannot organize on behalf of people whose deaths you have not allowed yourself to feel. You cannot resist a logic of disposability if you have internalized the numbness it requires.
And we owe each other the right to feel. In a culture that rewards numbness and calls it professionalism, that treats emotional response as naivety, that measures the success of a war by the Dow Jones—the most radical thing we can do is refuse to stop feeling. To insist that the people being bombed are people. To feel our hearts shatter when we think about the kids in the school who were annihilated by a bomb paid for by us, as taxpayers. To let that shatter us. To not move on.
And, importantly, this grief must be a shared grief. Isolation is a tool of the authoritarian. Our grief points us toward the injustices that we can no longer tolerate and enable. It allows us to trace the wounds—to feel where our humanity is being carved away by the witnessing of this brutality. So grieve in community. Grieve alongside the Iranian people. Grieve with our neighbors who are being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Grieve with our trans siblings. And let that shared grief become the foundation for what we do next, because grief that is felt together demands action.
Yes, we must march and allow for spaces where resistance can be joyful and defiant and absurd, because joy in the face of a regime that demands despair is its own form of refusal. And we must show up for our communities, organize alongside them, and hold the pain in our souls together as we feel the immeasurable loss of human lives. Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows and is the place where we refuse to let the necropolitical grammar of war, of subhumanism, become the grammar of our souls.
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Will We Give Birth to a Loving or Shackled Future?
A tale of two births challenges us to consider what kind of world we want to create.
Nov 17, 2025
It occurs to me that “giving birth to the future” isn’t simply a metaphor.
I say this as I continue wrestling with infinity—that is to say, working on the book project I began a decade ago: a book about creating peace. My exploration into all this goes beyond politics, global or otherwise. There are countless ways that humanity needs to change and, indeed, is changing. For instance:
For much of the 20th century, the childbirth process in this country didn’t invite a lot of active participation from parents. Mothers in labor were given heavy doses of drugs, and fathers were banished to waiting rooms.
So wrote David Colker in the Los Angeles Times in 2015, shortly after the death of Elisabeth Bing (at age at 100!), the German-born woman who cofounded Lamaze International in 1960 and helped profoundly change the way we birth the future. When she was a young woman, Bing, then living in England, began working as a physical therapist in a hospital. This, Colker wrote, was “when she first viewed childbirth. It was being treated more like a disease, she thought, than a joyous occasion.”
I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am that I was present at my daughter’s birth nearly 40 years ago—not just present but, oh God, part of it.
She helped bring caring and sanity—and love—into the birth process for many (though not all) women, and for men as well, for which I cry hallelujah. Suddenly dads could now be part of the birth process beyond passing out cigars. That’s not even a joke anymore; men, if they’re involved in their child’s birth, have a role larger than sitting in a room with the other soon-to-be dads, waiting for the doc to come in and cry, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy.”
Empowering both women and men—and partnering them—has helped launch a social shift that’s still in progress, bringing men into the core of nurturing, the family’s loving center. I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am that I was present at my daughter’s birth nearly 40 years ago—not just present but, oh God, part of it.
I came home for lunch that day in July and there was Barbara out in the backyard, radiant and excited, weeding the coleus bed. She told me that her water had just broken. She also was feeling slight contractions—light, easy things that mainly seemed to amuse her. They were delightful curiosities. Neither of us was really sure this was true labor, but there was all that fluid leaking all over her panties. We went to the hospital. Almost immediately, Barbara’s contractions turned serious. She went into active labor, and I went into my role as breath-and-contraction helper. Her back pain was severe, but I was always with her, pressing my hand as hard as possible against her back, giving her relief with my counterpressure and breathing—“ahee, ahoo!”—along with her. This lasted about six hours. It was the longest six hours of both our lives.
The only time it got close to desperate was well into the evening. “Talk me out of using drugs,” she begged me. I knew she could make it and gave her all the encouragement I could muster. Turns out she was moving along beautifully. By 8:30 pm she was fully dilated.
Then came the most intense part of the process, the pushing. She was at this for nearly two and a half hours, from 8:30 till the birth at 10:50. In this phase, I added a new duty to the man’s role. I was the guy who counted to 10 during each push. She usually got three pushes in per contraction at this stage. Later—as I saw the hair on the baby’s head appear at the vaginal opening—my role became more than just counter. My encouragement became intense, and linked to the rhythm of Barbara’s pushing. “Come on, Barbara, down and out. Down and out! DOWN AND OUT! COME ON, BARBARA!”
When our daughter finally arrived, I cut the umbilical cord. The nurse put the baby up on Barbara’s stomach, and later I held her, danced around with her. We had brought a radio with us, as our Lamaze teacher had advised: Bring music! As I held Alison Grace, Ravi Shankar began playing the sitar. And our squalling newborn became silent in my arms.
“A gentle birth,” writes Barbara Harper, “takes place when a woman is supported by the people she chooses to be with her during this most intimate time. She needs to be loved and nurtured by those around her.”
But there’s also another type of future we also continue to birth: “My feet were still shackled together, and I couldn’t get my legs apart.”
Beyond the intense torture inflicted on the mother, what in God’s name have we just done to the child?
The words are those of a woman, given the pseudonym Maria Jones, quoted some years ago in an Amnesty International report. She was pregnant and had been arrested for violating a drug law. She was in jail in Cook County, Illinois. When she went into labor, she was handcuffed and shackled to her bed.
“The doctor came and said that yes, this baby is coming right now,” she said, “and started to prepare the bed for delivery. Because I was shackled to the bed, they couldn't remove the lower part of the bed for the delivery, and they couldn't put my feet in the stirrups. My feet were still shackled together, and I couldn't get my legs apart. The doctor called for the officer, but the officer had gone down the hall. No one else could unlock the shackles, and my baby was coming but I couldn't open my legs.”
“Finally, the officer came and unlocked the shackles from my ankles. My baby was born then. I stayed in the delivery room with my baby for a little while, but then the officer put the leg shackles and handcuffs back on me and I was taken out of the delivery room.”
No bonding. No nurturing at the breast. The traumatized infant is whisked off to some antiseptic holding pen to lie alone in its cold new world. This isn’t rational. It’s not even sane. Beyond the intense torture inflicted on the mother, what in God’s name have we just done to the child?
Shackled births were banned in Cook County some years ago, shortly after the Amnesty report was made public. But they were only allowed—indeed, the norm—in the first place because the prisoner-mom, as well as the child, had been dehumanized, in the name of the law, no less. This is the legacy we still must transcend. We owe it to the future.
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Words Are the First Weapon of War
The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized.
Oct 18, 2025
I sit here at my desk, looking out the window—and see someone walking through the parking lot. This is the most ordinary of moments. I shrug quietly. Life goes on.
My impulse is to stop writing the column here. That’s it. Nothing more to say. Life is totally fine and civilized and I’m here in the middle of it, growing old but giving no thought whatsoever to the darkness that lurks at humanity’s margins. Sure, the news covers that stuff, but what do I care? Things are fine where I live.
But the darkness tugs. I read the news. I know that hell consumes parts of the planet and certain lives have no safety—no value—whatsoever. Here’s a recent New York Times headline, as ordinary as the fact that someone was walking through the parking lot outside my window:
“U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says.”
Well, so what? They were transporting drugs. “The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects...”
To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them.
Minor news, right? But consider the complexity of the context that emerges from these words. The story is critical of President Donald Trump for bombing boats and claiming without evidence that they were transporting drugs meant to be sold to Americans. But there’s a quiet assumption here. By making the point that this was not a war zone, the story quietly leaves the assumption hanging that if it were a war zone—and the boat had been carrying officially declared American enemies—well, that would be a different matter.
War itself is unchallenged and accepted—certainly by the mainstream media (whatever is left of it). And also by the collective American, and perhaps global, norm. And here’s the problem. War is a 50-50 deal: There’s a good side and a bad side. And if you’re on the good side, the war you wage is just. That means you have the moral leeway to kill whomever you want... excuse me, “must.” This includes children.
But “permission to kill” is psychologically—indeed, spiritually—complex. It requires a further step, one that lets us off the hook from our own inner moral sensibility: We’re all humans. We are deeply alike. We are one.
The way around this emotional difficulty is simple: Dehumanize the enemy! It happens virtually automatically, as soon as a particular group is declared the enemy, i.e., “them.” But it requires linguistic assistance: The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Now it’s a weapon. Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized. Language is the initial weapon of war, and is an indispensable tool of those who wage it.
Indeed, dehumanization exists almost as though it’s part of who we are. I believe with all my heart that it is not part of the human DNA, but it sure seems to act like it is. To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them. We can just dismiss them.
Welcome to racism. Welcome to ethnicity. Welcome to borders, both political and religious. Welcome to us vs. them—the hole in the human heart.
In my lifetime, here in the USA—in the wake of World War II—the primary way to dehumanize someone, at home as well as abroad, was to declare them a communist. The term had instant power. Every leftist was a commie. They were taking over Hollywood, not to mention Washington. They were under our beds! Because of the existence of nuclear weapons, America’s powers-that-be wisely avoided going to war with the Soviet Union or China, but we nonetheless had the wherewithal to create the military-industrial complex here at home and engage in proxy wars, killing a few million people and, oh yeah, intensifying our long-term, unacknowledged war on Planet Earth itself.
Another dehumanization term that emerged from those wars was “collateral damage”—a unique form of dehumanization. Those who were collateral damage were not necessarily our enemies, just people in the vicinity of the just war we were waging. They were merely in the way. But the term did its job. It took the humanity away from anyone our bombs unintentionally eliminated and turned them into scrap metal at a junkyard.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, however... uh oh, now what? The communists were done with, but we still needed an enemy! Governing is so much harder without one. Enter the terrorists, our primo enemy of the last couple decades and a word with enormous potency. For instance, anyone who criticizes Israel for killing 70,000 Palestinians (or far, far more than that) is both pro-terrorist and antisemitic. The flotilla trying to bring food to Gaza is a terrorist operation.
And then, closer to home, we have the “illegals”—aliens, wetbacks—who are not just fleeing poverty and crossing the border into the USA, but invading it. Looks like we’ve got another war on our hands, folks.
I’m not worried about the guy I saw walking through the parking lot a little while ago, but what if he looked like an invader? Hey, ICE...
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