less than human book review

David Livingstone Smith’s book, less than human, is about dehumanization, or rather bringing more light to what dehumanization really is and how it has been embedded in our history for years, and rages on even in today’s world, with little sign of therapeutic changes. Smith argues that we have become increasingly unaware of our own dehumanizing ways and attempts to separate ourselves from those who are different, either by actions or by skin color, especially white folks. They have become so comfortable with the world they have created due to their own dehumanizing ways but have become blind to the idea that it is their fault – they simply put those people at fault into a different category of human. Smith’s argument is clear that we focus so much on the fear of being separated from what is familiar to us, that we ignore the fact that we are all human and can become the dehumanizer ourselves.

The main strength of Smith’s book is continuing to identify the imperfect mindset we have adopted into our lives that aid in dehumanization. There is a selfishness among humanity, “the raw fact that we tend to favor ourselves over others, and our friends and family over strangers.” (51). It is some kind of unconscious logic that we favor those we know better, seemingly knowing their entire human as a whole, that they are incapable of such selfishness and evil as the Nazis were for instance. We separate ourselves and our close relations from strangers, placing them into this judgmental stage, a ‘holier than thou’ type of mindset as if to differentiate between each individual seeming to say that they are the least imperfect and the strangers will be considered evil until proven otherwise – this gives anyone but the stranger a sense of false power, that they are doing something right by being ‘cautious’ about the stranger. Smith says that “chaos will reign if we all were left to our own devices, so we adopt rules that ‘bestow stability on the possession.’” (52). The main weakness or limitation to Smith’s book is that he does not seem to understand his own white privilege within his writing. He says, “thinking of a person as a member of the same species as yourself, as sharing the same essence, automatically evokes a sense of oneness with them.” (247). In this sense, he appears to whitewash the book, demeaning people of color by stating that we should think of people as having the same essence, as being a member of the same kind of species. While we are all human, to me, this quote spoke to me more like “only if a person of color is in our immediate circle, will I accept them.” Where Smith impacted me, most was when he stated he hoped by the end of the book I will have “embraced a more realistic assessment of the capacity of [my] evil.” (131). It directly ties in with another explanation of this a few pages later where he says, “Why [do we become more afraid of thinking anyone can become evil]? This is because the consequences are more serious than if they were monsters. If ordinary people committed war crimes, it means that any of us could commit them.” (135). It was so easy of me to look at people like the Nazis that he discussed so early on in the beginning of the book, that I had always thought of them as monsters, and people who were simply just different in the most terrible way. But in reality, they were all ordinary humans, and that is what impacted me most. Because after reading that before getting to this part of the explanation in the book did I finally understand that I, too, have a capacity for such a gruesome evil, because I am simply a human and nothing more. But we, as a society, are so afraid of becoming that kind of terrifying evil that we are all capable of feeling, that put these other evil people into boxes and shut them away, so we do not have to think about our own kind of power to do similar kinds of things in the world. We wash our blood-stained hands and preach about goodness and innocence, when all the while that same beast paces back and forth in our mind.

Less than human allowed me to open my eyes on the kind of severity our world lives in and how aggressively racism still shows today. “Dehumanization feeds on racism; without racism, it probably couldn’t exist.” (8). It never occurred to me how often people of color have to fight for simple pleasures in life, and how aggressively they are looked down upon. My own privilege cast a tinted film over the world, and I could not see just how fortunate I really was, and how others were not. Racism is very much a generational thing that is learned, and it showed me that while I am not one to judge an individual based solely on the color of their skin, I am still human and have that evil ability and even may do it unconsciously because of my white privilege and the attitude I grew up around. And that is what scares me. White individuals are so accustomed to sticking people of color into categories, but never think about being a part of those categories ourselves.