"Through high school, as a straight Black guy, I had no sense of myself as someone girls might be attracted to. I didn’t think I was unattractive, exactly. More that I didn’t see myself registering romantically with the girls and young women around me. It wasn’t that they graded me poorly; it seemed that they didn’t grade me at all.
In retrospect, I felt the way I imagine “black girls” might have felt in a world chockfull of Bobs...
Dehumanization isn’t just perceptual fluff. Participants who saw an evolutionary gap between Muslim Americans and themselves preferred funding greater surveillance and more policing over more schools and libraries in those communities. The belief that target groups were subhuman also predicted less concern about African American and Arab victims of injustice, less support for Hispanic immigration, lower donations to a Chinese charity, and more.
Not registering at all is exactly what it is.
FB: "In high school I felt dehumanized. Later, like the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who had been turned into a newt, I got better. But it took a lot of love and friendship to convince me that I wasn’t a newt. All the people complicit in my dehumanization were ordinary people — peers mostly, but also teachers, friends’ parents, coaches — not avowed racists or Neo-Nazis. So, too, were the people who helped restore my humanity."
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