Rehumanization - A Covid-19 Analysis from a PhD Student Slash Writing Professor (and her boyfriend, sort of)
SUNNY ANNE WILLIAMS
May 21, 2020
“To love is to recognize yourself in another.” -Eckhart Tolle
When the government mandated that there could be no gatherings of more than ten people, my boyfriend commented that there would be a lot fewer mass shootings now. He spends many evenings complaining about the attention-seeking selfies that people post on Instagram. He has always complained about this, but it’s gotten worse in the pandemic. He’s only working three or four hours a day now as a travel agent, so he has more free time to judge selfies. He disregards my attempts to impart to him that he can just stop looking. That’s what we do when we’re uncomfortable, isn’t it? We just stop looking. “Apathy and disregard are mechanisms of dehumanization,” I might write in a research essay. My boyfriend goes back to his video game.
We’re both fortunate to be able to work from home. I’m a PhD student and rhetoric professor at a university, so I am currently holding virtual office hours to give pep talks to my stressed out, barely coping students who are too young to know that this feels like 9/11 in so many ways, and therefore, haven’t yet developed the essential American coping skills that I am bequeathing to them. I hope these skills will get them through their final research essays this semester. Then it’ll be summer, and I’ll be unemployed and sitting in my house, still afraid to go out, reading books on literary theory and listening to my boyfriend complain about selfies.
I watch Some Good News every week and feel an amalgamation of hope…: People are out there doing so much good for each other, noticing the weak and the needy and stepping up to serve them. We often see this rehumanization during times of crisis. I wish we saw it all the time. It’s beautiful and uplifting and redeeming. It’s what we truly are when we stop forgetting what we truly are.
… and impotence: I am simply sitting in my home, snuggling my two cats, safe and privileged, not taking any chances. Except for this one.
“This is going to last long enough to lead to some kind of new way of thinking,” predicted David Lynch in a recent interview.
Classism has become increasingly evident during the pandemic. Our plutocracy has been caught with its pants down. Much like the people on my boyfriend’s Instagram, apparently. We’re all in this together, “they” say, but in reality, we’re all having very different experiences. The one thing that unites us is that each one of us is as likely to catch this virus as the next. It is an equalizer, a great reminder of our connectness. It is a chance to rehumanize each other after decades of dehumanization that has slowly been destroying us. It is a chance for a new way of thinking.
Dehumanization has been on my mind for a long time. CNN lists the first mass shooting in the United States as occurring in New Jersey in 1949, though Wikipedia notes four mass shootings in the 1920s and a few every subsequent decade until the 21st century, when things really went gangbusters. But you should never cite Wikipedia. My point is that the number of mass shootings has increased exponentially in the past two decades, with 10-12 shootings per year. Guns have been around since the birth of this country, so what has changed? “I contend that dehumanization has a direct effect on the frequency of mass shootings,” I might claim in my essay.
My grandfather’s mother died in a church mass shooting in the tiny town where I grew up, Daingerfield, Texas. My grandfather wouldn’t talk about her murder. But he would tell me that I looked like her – 4 foot 10, ginger-haired, “but you’re not fat enough yet,” he’d lament. He died in 2008 and didn’t live to see that I look even more like her now. When I lived in London, I discovered a cousin in Wales. This July, I was planning to return, as I do at least once a year, to the country that I consider home to determine how much my Welsh family might look like my murdered great-grandmother. But alas, pandemic.
“Social media’s role in enabling and encouraging us to dehumanize each other can be witnessed in the psychology of mass shootings,” the essay might continue. Then I would cite innumerable psychologists and journalists who keep asking what causes the shooters to commit these heinous crimes, all while the American people grow numb with compassion fatigue at the endless lists of dead students and great-grandmothers. The lists are just names on a page. Kind of like the screen names and avatars we see on social media. My boyfriend might proclaim that the selfies attached to these names only serve to dehumanize further, to assign judgments and labels to the names, who are no longer considered people.
Most people don’t think you’re a people. Did you know that? To them, you’re a screen name or an avatar or a selfie. To the government, you’re a social security number and the product of your proletarian labor. Of course, you and I know that you’re a complex human being with important thoughts and feelings, who loves and is loved, who feels pain and loss and joy and hope. So how can we convince these people to rehumanize you and give you back your human value, and why is it absolutely imperative that we do this?
When they point the gun, mass shooters don’t see people. They see names, numbers, avatars, selfies. “By giving us access to the majority of the world’s population, social media allows us to compartmentalize the people to whom we are digitally connected, thereby increasing emotional distance in a way that generates dehumanization.” That might be my thesis statement. I would utilize Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to support the idea that we other anyone who differs from us in any way, leading to varying degrees of categorization, xenophobia, and apathy. Then I might add that a virus, just like a shooter, doesn’t care about your ethnicity, your political or religious leanings, or how much money you make. To the virus, there is no other. It sees us for what we truly are: the same.
As the coronavirus death toll rises, we see lists of names, just like we do every time there’s a shooting. The difference now is that the killer is as dangerously close to you as it was to those dead names. Suddenly, those names are rehumanized by the realization that we are unavoidably, biologically, spiritually ONE.
In a society that values capitalism and individualism over human lives, are we capable of recognizing and seizing the opportunity presented to us by this pandemic? The American people have been given a chance to change, to rehumanize. Maybe we already are. There are those who say that when we practice social distancing, when we shut ourselves away in our homes for what could be months, when we wear masks to protect each other, it is a great performance of love. We are acting out of love for our grandparents, our parents, our students, our neighbors, our auto-immune compromised friends, all of our loved ones, each other.
We are relearning, re-awakening the collective memory of humanity, realizing that each other has breath, sharing the same oxygen, and the suffocation of that breath by a deadly virus is the suffocation of us all. We are rehumanizing. We can choose to remain in this state of knowing, to decide not to go back to “normal.” We can keep rising, hand in hand (metaphorically, of course; do not touch each other!) with our fellow human beings. ”To return to dehumanizing each other would be a tragedy as great as the lives we are losing every day, and it would ultimately lead to more lives lost,” my essay might conclude.
SUNNY ANNE WILLIAMS is a PhD student and professor at UT Dallas, where she specializes in literature, theory, and philosophy. Born and raised in east Texas, writing since the age of three, she made the cliched move to escape it all, to live in Canada and England, to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles, to dance and sing and wander. In the end, it all brought her full circle, back to Texas, back to writing, where she belongs.
