Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – Why were some citizens so quick to believe false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, forcing them to isolate themselves and schools and city hall to evacuate, amid bomb threats and flyers of hate?
Dehumanization is a pillar of caste, a standard component in the manufacture of an out-group against which to pit an in-group. It is a war against truth, against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do so on its own.
Dehumanization is a process, a programming.
And the last week has shown us how readily that programming can be activated.
The rumors, which have now spread across the world, began, according to NBC News, when a woman in Springfield posted on Facebook that “a neighbor’s cat” had gone missing, and that the neighbor “thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.”
It turned out, as reported by the news site Newsguard and NBC, that the neighbor had “heard about the attack from a third party” and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend.”
The woman who made the original post on Facebook told NBC she had pulled her daughter out of school and feared for her own safety. She made a point of telling NBC News: “I’m not a racist.”
What she posted did not take long to catch on, in part because enough people were ready to believe almost anything about immigrant people of color. A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable, a karmic theft beyond accounting.
— From Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents | Posted on 19/Sep/2024 02:45:39
