In the 90s and resurfacing again now, the intentional use of anti-immigrant and dehumanizing language such as the term “illegal” is used to ready the public for more surveillance and control.
It has been used as the pretense to strip basic services and rights from immigrants, to violently deport people, to militarize borders and airports, and to build surveillance infrastructure in every state and every city.
We know the history of dehumanization that led to the erasure and genocide of Indigenous people all over the world.
We know the history and present dehumanization of Palestinians by settler colonizers and the rhetoric that is used to attempt to justify genocide.
We know the history of dehumanization of Black people used to justify enslavement, human zoos, museums, criminalization, and incarceration.
There is a history of my own Korean people who were dehumanized by Japanese imperialists to justify their occupation and colonization of Korea.
Dehumanization is a deliberate and direct tool of Empire to oppress its people.
So in our strategy of fighting empire, we must humanize each other with intention.
We have to keep close the hearts of those on the ground, the starvation, the exhaustion, the grief, rage, disappointment, fear, the mental state of a human under the worst of conditions, the physical pain all of it. Families, loves, elders, young ones, relatives, communities. We have to hold all of it.
When oppressors dehumanize us, we must re-humanize each other even more.
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