Verbal engineering always precedes social engineering

Details: 21 February 2014

“The power of language to color one’s view of reality is profound. In many instances, the most significant factor determining how an object will be perceived is not the nature of the object itself, but the words employed to characterize it…Words can also act as a force for justice or a weapon of repression, an instrument of enlightenment or a source of darkness.”

These words come from the introduction to the book, “Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives,” by Dr. William Brennan. Dr. Brennan is a professor of social work in the Saint Louis University School of Social Work. According to his bio, Dr. Brennan “has written and spoken extensively on how euphemisms and dehumanizing language facilitate massive oppression.”
In this book, Dr. Brennan focuses on seven “victimized groups” that he selected for analysis because they are among the most extensively oppressed on record: the unborn, the dependent and/or disabled, women, Jews and others exterminated in the Nazi Holocaust, the targets of Soviet tyranny, African Americans, and Native Americans.
In his research on these victimized groups, Dr. Brennan found that despite the varying times in history, each group was subject to “a universal set of dehumanizing designations” that fell into eight categories: deficient human, non-human, animal, parasite, disease, inanimate object, waste product, and non-person.
Dr. Brennan includes in his book a quick reference chart providing a sample of each type of dehumanizing term for each victimized group. The chart, available online at www.issues4life.org/pdfs/languageofoppression.pdf, is a sobering glimpse at what he calls the “semantics of oppression.” Here is a sample of the dehumanizing terms (with sources) Dr. Brennan found applied to African Americans:
“A subordinate and inferior class of beings” (U.S. Supreme Court, 1857); “The negro is not a human being” (Bucknor Payne, Publisher, 1867); “the negro is one of the lower animals” (Professor Charles Caroll, 1900); “They are parasites”(Dr. E.T. Brady, 1909); “Free blacks in our country are… a contagion” (American Colonization Soc., 1815-30); “A negro of the African race was regarded… as an article of property” (U.S. Supreme Court, 1857); “The negro race is… a heritage of organic and psychic debris” (Dr. William English, 1903); “In the eyes of the law…the slave is not a person” (Virginia Supreme Court decision, 1858).

Disabled persons are described in equally vile terms:
“A life… devoid of those qualities which give it human dignity” (Assessment of a child with disability, Dr. Harry Hartzell, 1978); “No newborn human should be declared human until it has passed certain tests” (Dr. Francis Crick, 1978); “Until a living being can take conscious management of life… it remains an animal” (Prof. George Ball, 1981); “That’s a real parasite” (Medical staff characterization of a debilitated patient, 1989); “New-born humans are neither persons nor even quasi-persons” (Philospher Michael Tooley, 1983).

Dr. Brennan includes these quotes regarding the “unwanted unborn”: “
The fetus, at most, represents only the potentiality of life” (U.S. Supreme Court, 1973); “Like… a primitive animal that’s poked with a stick” (Dr. Hart Peterson on fetal movement, 1985); “The fetus is a parasite” (Professor Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, 1984); “Pregnancy when not wanted is a disease…in fact a venereal disease” (Professor Joseph Fletcher, 1979); “The word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn” (U.S. Supreme Court, 1973).

Dr. Brennan’s research exposes a consistent component of radical social change: verbal engineering always precedes social engineering. Referencing the familiar children’s adage, “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” Dr. Brennan points out that “[d]isparaging designations may inflict greater damage than physical blows and foster a climate of antagonism leading to the actual breaking of bones and other forms of violence.”