the normalization of dehumanization
#5SmartReads - June 25, 2025
#5SmartReads is a Webby-honored weekly news digest that amplifies underreported news and underrepresented perspectives. My goal is to help you stay informed without being overwhelmed, and to embrace nuance and reflection over picking a side.
How are you doing today?
How are you, really?
I feel like my brain is starting to crack from living in a hypernormalized state for months, and my heart continues to chip into pieces as I see our basic humanity evaporate.
In the midst of all this, there’s work meetings, taking my dad to various appointments, camp pickups and drop offs and making dinner, and staring numbly at a wall when it all gets too much.
I hate how little we’ve learned from our past. I’m exhausted of screaming my predictions into the void and watching them come to life. I have to jot down the most obvious habits (make the bed, meditate, take my vitamins) in my planner every day so I actually do them.
I’m drained, and deeply sad as I watch things go from bad to ‘even 24 wouldn’t have written this season’ worse.
And that’s how I know I haven’t lost my humanity.
It’s never been more important to identify and call out dehumanizing language and policy, and to fight to protect our own humanity. It is uncomfortable, hard, and constant work - and it’s never been more important.
Today’s 5SR is about just that - identifying dehumanizing language and its intended purpose, observing how it’s become normalized in our lives today, and how to strengthen and protect your own humanity.
It’s my birthday next week, and I’m running a 50% off sale on all paid subscriptions. If you upgrade your subscription now, you’ll lock in this price for life (and have my eternal gratitude).
Dehumanizing language used on America's enslaved is still spoken today (Chicago Sun-Times)
Words matter.
How you pronounce someone’s name - and if you deliberately mispronounce it. The words you use when you talk about others, or yourself.
The more you repeat a message or how you describe a group, the more it’s believed. And our country’s most oppressive leaders have used this playbook to their advantage.
The dehumanization of immigrants has been horrific to witness. The language the current president has used to describe them - murderers, drug lords, dangerous prisoners, mentally insane, wife beaters - is only second to the ICE raids and denial of due process they’ve encountered.
“This language corrupts our collective moral imagination. Cognitive scientists have discovered that dehumanizing language fundamentally alters how we perceive others, leading us to deny them complex mental capacities and ignore their ability to think and feel. When someone accepts bureaucratic terms for human displacement, they become desensitized, seeing figures instead of faces, cases instead of lives being upended.
Sound familiar?
I’m making a safe assumption that you’re well aware of this, and are probably exhausted with the mental gymnastics of recognizing and calling out these attacks. My advice to you is to read a romance novel when you need to log off, and keep calling these horrors out however you can.
Diane Guerrero: Why the Fourth of July Is a Time for Activism (Teen Vogue)
In The Country We Love should be mandatory reading right now.
Diane Guerrero - of Encanto and Orange Is The New Black fame - has lived a story that’s been persecuted and dehumanized for decades, but especially in the past 6 months.
Guerrero’s parents were deported while Diane was still in high school. With her family in Colombia, she finished her schooling and started her career with the support of family friends, unshakeable faith, and a patriotism that I originally thought was unearned, but is deeply humane.
“I still feel proud of all the things that this country is supposed to stand for, and what this country's definition of freedom is supposed to mean. I look at my experiences as an opportunity to see all the good things that I have, and then also look at the negative things where I can maybe be a part of the change.”
Guerrero challenges each of us to ask ourself “what can I do?” (words she wrote well before she sang them in Encanto).
Aside from this series, I plan to do more in-person volunteering, be braver and publish more news and political content on social media and on Substack, and to raise my sons to be good men.
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