How do we decide that another is non-human?

Tau Lewis, The Space Congregation (No Surprise to Find the Angels Come Here), 2019. Recycled leathers and fabrics, acrylic paint, rawhide, found photographs, found objects, bone, seashells, stones. Part of exhibit “No Humans Involved.”

Image Description: Photograph of artwork hung on a pink wall. The artwork is assembled with black, yellow, orange, and green leathers and fabric pieces in mostly rectangular and circular shapes, with figures resembling hands at the bottom.

I went to a museum exhibit last month called “No Humans Involved.”

“No Humans Involved,” or “NHI,” was an internal code used by the Los Angeles Police in relation to cases involving humans who were “disproportionately…Black and Brown [and] often identified as sex workers, gang members, or drug traffickers.”

This internal code was made public during the trial of police brutality against Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992. After this revelation, scholar Sylvia Wynter wrote an open letter to her colleagues in academia, questioning what was being taught in schools that ultimately gave people the tools to conceive of what it meant to be human. Wynter partly blames academia for constructing the boundary between “Human” and “Other.”

This boundary is also aided by narratives and images circulated in dominant media outside of academia. The dominant media elevates white and wealthy people not only as the standard to strive for, but as the standard for what it means to be human.

The problem is not just that the boundary serves to dehumanize some of us; the deeper problem is actually the idea that such a boundary could even exist in the first place. It’s the notion that some of us are not human and that some of us have the knowledge and power to decide who is and is not human.

How can a human, looking at an incident involving another human, write on a case file “no humans involved?” What had to happen to allow one human to ignore the very biological kinship among us and to deny humanity from another?

The only possibility I could think of is that a person has to turn off a part of their humanity in order to see another as non-human. A person has to cut off their own connection to our life force energy in order to see another as non-human. The only way to sever another person’s belonging to humanity is to disconnect one’s own. Because our souls are mirrors for each other. Because our liberation is bound up together.