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This disturbing pattern of disputing someone' s humanity to weaken his claims to rights of personhood repeats itself again and again in U.S. history. Frank Tannenbaum, in his book Slave and Citizen, Knopf (1947), estimates that there were 13 to 20 million blacks captured for shipment to the New World from the 16th century to the middle of the 19th. Of this total, he says 1/3rd died inland on their way to the African coast, 1/3rd died crossing the Atlantic and 1/3rd reached the New World more or less alive. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court declared blacks "... a subordinate and inferior class of beings ..." in its decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393, 1856. It was then broadly legal to kill slaves.

The type of propaganda which made the Court' s ruling inevitable is described in the book Ota Benga: The Pygmy In The Zoo, Phillips Bradford and Harvey Blume, Delta, 1992. The authors quote an appalling New York Times description of a black African man brought to America and displayed in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in New York in 1906. "... [T]he pygmy was not much taller than the orangutan and one had a good opportunity to study their points of resemblance. Their heads are much alike and both grin in the same way when pleased." When powerful majorities use perverse form and function comparisons to dehumanize powerless minorities, genocide often follows.

Eager to rationalize his ownership of slaves, even Thomas Jefferson questioned their humanity. Concerning black intelligence, Virginius Dabney quotes in The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal, supra, from Thomas Jefferson' s Notes on Virginia: "...[I]t appears to me that ... in reason [blacks are] much inferior [to whites] ... and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous ...." Merrill D. Peterson adds in Thomas Jefferson And The New Nation, supra, that Jefferson also compared blacks to orangutans (page 262).

POSTHUMOUS DEHUMANIZATION

The campaign to impugn the humanity of both the "unwhite" and "unborn" can follow its victims even into their graves. On August 4, 1964, the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were unearthed near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The parents of the white activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner wanted their sons buried beside their black co-worker James Chaney. That, however, was forbidden by Mississippi' s segregation laws. According to the book Eyes On The Prize, Juan Williams, Penguin, 1988, page 235, Chaney was buried alone in a black cemetery.

Virtually the same thing happened to the unborn children, more than twenty years later. The July 3, 1984 Los Angeles Times reported:

More than 16,000 fetuses stored by Los Angeles County since they were found in a repossessed shipping bin in 1982 cannot be given burial as human remains, the state Court of Appeals has ruled.

The Los Angeles Herald, on July 10, 1984, editorialized:

Truth is, the pro-abortion litigants -- and the Court of Appeals -- wouldn' t be satisfied with even a non-sectarian burial. They object to the fetuses being buried at all [favoring instead, incineration as medical waste], because that would seem to support anti-abortionists' claims that the fetuses are, or were, human beings.

HATE LANGUAGE TO DEHUMANIZE NATIVE AMERICANS

This practice of dehumanizing disfavored minorities also helped facilitate genocide against Native Americans. According to Donald Slotkin' s Regeneration Through Violence, Wesleyan University Press, 1973, William Bradford, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, set the tone for countless whites who would denounce the Indian as "a wild beast ...." In 1881, writing in The American Law Review, 15 (January):21-37, legal scholar George F. Canfield opined that "an Indian is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution." He added that:

Congress may prevent an Indian leaving his reservation, and while he is on a reservation it may deprive him of his liberty, his property, his life .... Congress may break its treaties with him as it may repeal a statute.

It was then broadly legal to kill Native Americans.

According to Parade magazine, Sunday, July 18, 1999, American Indians are "... the country' s poorest, sickest and least-educated minority. They have the highest suicide rate and lowest life expectancy. Alcohol addiction is rampant." Their plight is no doubt a product of their terrible mistreatment by the dominant culture.

The Orange County Register (CA) carried a Boston Globe story on August 8th, 1999, headlined "Records detail Vermont sterilization project," with a subhead which read "Social scientists in the '20s and 30s hoped to weed out ' degenerate' bloodlines." The story reported:

... the Vermont Eugenics Survey' s 12 year study of ' good' families and ' bad' families, which was widely circulated among policy-makers and culminated in a law providing for the sterilization of several hundred poor, rural Vermonters, Abenaki Indians and other people deemed unfit to reproduce [emphasis added].

More recently, The Orange County Register (CA), May 31, 1999, reported death threats (" Save a whale, harpoon a Makah" ) against members of the Makah Native American tribe who killed a gray whale off the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. The article quotes David T. Wellman, a research sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the book Portraits of White Racism, Cambridge University Press, 1993:

'When you start hearing language that it' s time to hunt Indians again, you have to realize that' s the language of genocide,' Wellman said. A necessary presupposition is that Indians are subhuman, ' huntable' like animals .... 'Violent racism is almost never recognized as racism while it's happening; it's called something else,'

Wellman said.

That's why the violence of abortion is called "choice" instead of "baby-killing." And violence against Indians is still happening at shocking levels. A New York Times News Service story dated February 15, 1999, is headlined "Study: Violent crimes against Indians twice U.S. average:"

American Indians are victims of violent crimes at more than twice the national average and, unlike the situation among whites and blacks where the large majority of crime victims are of the same race as the perpetrators, 70% of those committing crimes against Indians are of a different race, according to the first comprehensive study of crimes involving Indians, which was released ... [recently] by the Justice Department.

HATE LANGUAGE TO DEHUMANIZE JEWS

In his medical textbook Abortion Practice, Alpenglo Graphics, 1990, Warren Hern, M.D., compares the unborn child to a "parasite." "Parasite" was the exact word Hitler used to dehumanize Jews in his grotesquely anti-Semitic Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin (1971). Slurs of this sort paved the way for Hitler, IN 1935, to sign The Nuremberg Laws which codified the exclusion of Jews from German society. The next year the Reichsgericht, Germany' s highest court would legalize the Holocaust. It was then broadly legal to kill Jews. The U.S. Supreme Court' s decision in Roe did the same to the unborn in 1973, ruling that "the word person ... does not include the unborn." It was then broadly legal to kill unborn children.