“It is only within the terms of our present local culture, in which the earlier feudal-Christian religious ethic and its goal of Spiritual Redemption and Eternal Salvation has been inverted and replaced by the goal of Material Redemption, and, therefore, by the transcendental imperative of securing the economic well being, of the now biologized body of the Nation (and of national security!), that the human can at all be conceived of as if it were a mode of being which exists in a relation of pure continuity with that of organic life.” — Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues”
“Western humanism was born in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and racial slavery. It became apparent that being a subject was not the antidote to being a slave, but rather that these figures were intimate, twinned.”— Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
For disclosure: this essay will not be a work that necessarily chronicles or recapitulates on the extensive histories in which the development of humanism as a political and emancipatory project has developed over time, but rather, how humanism, the Human, and sweeping notions of inhumanity, have more or less drastically become erroneously mischaracterized, emotional dispensations that attempt to inadvertently and purposefully decouple the structural violence that incarnates the Human being. By human, I do not refer to biology or anatomical structures, but rather how the onto-epistemological ways in which the creation of the Human is a quintessential byproduct of the white State. Humanism dates back to Africa, China, India and ancient Greece, though we colloquially agreed it had set in 13th-14th century Italy. It was first introduced as the word humanismus by 19th century German scholars who primarily broached a variety of subjects that ranged from poetry, rhetoric, grammar, history, and moral philosophy and had gradually has spread throughout England during and after the Renaissance period in the 14th century.
Humanism, in essence, is both a political movement (in reference to Renaissance Humanism, and later on The Enlightenment) and more to the crux of what I will be examining here, is the political system of thought, although—both terms are not entirely unrelated from each other. Of course, Humanism had broadened, philosophically, ideologically, and politically all across the world while retaining its central its emphasis was human possibility and potential. A majority of people, if not everyone, subconsciously subscribes to humanist thinking at rudimentarily individual and collective levels. Many thinkers, philosophers, radicals, poets, novelists, and artists have viewed themselves in this way: Cicero, Democritus, Mencius, Niccolò Machiavelli, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frantz Fanon are to name a few. Those who I have named differ drastically in their ideological, political distinctions of humanism from one another; nonetheless, what is important here are the marginal overlaps in which they more or less explicate the vices (of the innumerable calamities human beings have committed), be it racial slavery, sanism, pedophilia, genocide, incest, totalitarianism, eugenics, settler-colonialism, transphobia, adultism, colorism, and so on. In an effort to explicate humanism’s shortcomings, we can first examine its etymology:
humanism(n.) — long with humanist used in a variety of philosophical and theological senses 16c.-18c., especially ones concerned with the (mere) humanity of Christ, or imitating Latin humanitas “education befitting a cultivated man.” See human (adj.) + -ism. In the sense “the doctrine or science of human nature,” humanics (1864) has been used.
From 1832 in reference to “intelligent study and appreciation of the classics,” especially in reference to the Renaissance. By 1847 in reference to “system or mode of thought in which human interests predominate” (originally often in the writings of its enemies). As a pragmatic system of thought, defined 1907 by co-founder F.C.S. Schiller as “The perception that the philosophical problem concerns human beings striving to comprehend a world of human experience by the resources of human minds.”
In etymological, historical, and semantic terms, we find that the Human(ist) is an “educated and cultivated man.” What is it about this presumably white, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, neurotypical, able-bodied man that constitutes the supposed archetypal being? Additionally, how do we come to find that the metaphysical distinctions between humanity and inhumanity are intertwined, yet supposedly so separate when cast out of anything that exists outside of the status quo?
“Oh, the inhumanity!” is collectively uttered in grief, in anguish, in rage, in defeat.
Every day, we choose to bear witness to or close ourselves off to our news feeds that are continuously overloaded with starkly graphic occurrences happening in the imperial core and abroad: from femicide and rape culture permeating throughout South Africa, Nigeria, India, the Caribbean, America—an ever-growing manosphere of streamers and content creators have made a living off antagonizing oppressed and colonized people, LGBTQIA+ (and more specifically trans and intersex Black people who have faced the brunt of genocidal violence), viral pandamicines have claimed the lives of billions (the Bubonic plague, HIV, Ebola virus, COVID, Monkeypox, Hantavirus, Cyclospora), the U.S. government’s abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores, their military sending more than 60+ airstrikes towards people navigating boats in the Caribbean, killing more than 200+ aboard said ships, rolled back protections for wildlife, and annihilated longstanding trees and natural resources—anti-Black lynchings have surged dramatically within the last two decades, the Israeli Zionist occupation continues its onslaught against Palestinians, multiple Sudanese casualties at the whims of the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and SAF’s (Sudanese Armed Forces), West Papuans surviving genocide at the hands of the Indonesian state, the Dominican Republic continues its genocide and abduction of Haitians, Afrophobia permeates throughout the African continent and the world, artificial intelligence (AI) has gradually taken hold on millions as the ecosystem exacerbates, stealing the jobs of those most marginalized—the uncle, mother, or aunt or molests their daughter or son. The family who abandons kicks their child out of their home—leaving them to be homeless because they’re 18 and “independent” or because they’re gay. The bystanders who deputize themselves as racist social service workers to pickpocket who is homeless and who isn’t only to discover they won’t support them anyway. The therapist who by proxy of the white State, institutionalizes their patient. The doctor who routinely tells his visitors to lose weight in order to live an optimal life— celebrities are deemed just even when we know full well, they’d never cared about the human populous to begin with.
“Oh, the inhumanity!”
“Oh, the inhumanity!”
“Oh, the inhumanity!”
“Oh, the inhumanity!” is uttered again. It is uttered within reason, but without forethought.
If the inhumane are the ones so-called responsible for wrongdoing, then what and who is the Human being? To be clear, the Human being is white and by extension, not Black. This call to inhumanity is a reflexive manner of evasiveness, stepping out of ourselves because the violence is abhorrently disproportionate for one’s own emotional bandwidth to withstand. Otherworldly beings, demons, monsters, and ethereal places not of this earthly plane such as Lucifer and hell are named as the primary point of reference in place of the vices in which the Human being was always the central malefactor. In social justice circles, and those who have begun to broaden their political consciousness are right to say death to all racists, sexists, transphobes, and those who are anti-Black; nevertheless, it is not so much that the sentiment is vapid (although in some cases it is uttered vapidly by progressives, liberals, and so-called “leftists” alike), but people seem to poorly gloss over the fact of what made all of these -isms possible: the Human being. If people who utter this sentiment hold true to their word, then would that not mean they too would have to die? Wouldn’t that mean we would have to die? Or, in the words of Calvin Warren, abandon the Human?
I am not speaking facetiously. I mean to say that these all of these oppressive systems were created long before we were born and we are inculcated with conditioned beliefs to be what we deny what has sutured our lives psychically. Structures of oppression are still very much relegated to individual attitudes we have. Race is undeniably an inescapable, leading constituent that shapes all of politics and life itself, socially, historically, epistemologically and libidinally. There are many who are misinformed with the belief that race is “brought into” the center of conversation—that race is primarily a so-called “American crisis,” yet there is nowhere on Earth the reverberations of race have not corroded. For the reason all racists must die, the Human would not exist, and therein lies a fundamental belief in Humanist thinking that yearns for something redemptive and restorative in the Human, despite all terrors. Lamenting at the vices of inhumanity and pleading for our respective governments to be just—for a rapist to be just, for the police officer to be just—for a president and politician to be just, for Child Protective Service workers to be just—for doctors to be just, are all farcical contradictions. When philosopher David Marriott asserts from an excerpt of his book, Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being that “most people are anti-black not because they are avowedly racist because such is the insecure being of their world,” it means to a degree that the interiority of the Human being is structured by an unfathomable violence that doesn’t require primarily necessitate military grade weapons to kill people like me.