David Livingstone Smith, "On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It" (Oxford UP, 2020)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Sep 18, 2020 · 1h 5m

The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again--that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche--deeper than prejudice itself--leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Smith takes an unflinching look at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less…