15 DEHUMANIZATION AND SOCIAL DEATH AS FUNDAMENTALS OF RACISM Wulf D. Hund 15.1 Introduction Racism,throughout its long history,was associated with diferent forms of dehumanization.These ranged from barbarization to racialization and from demonization to verminization, and were accompanied by a pattern of social exclusion, which, in the context of slavery, was conceptualized as ‘social death.’This term describes a power relation in which the members of racist societies consider themselves entitled to ignore the sociability of their victims. Racist egalitarianism is the mirror of social inequality. The members of racist societies are linked by a discriminatory nexus.Their social positions are allocated, inter alia, by age, authority, education, gender, health, power, and wealth. In this landscape of social hierarchies, classism and sexism determine the crucial dividing lines. Such a societalization is fragile. It generates discontent and resistance. Early on, they were reciprocated with narrations about the functionality of social distinction, portraying society as a body with diferent limbs and organs, a house with various foors and rooms, or a ship with a commander and a crew.These images, intended as positive, were regularly fanked by negative legends about threats from without. They portrayed the cohesion between the unequal indi- viduals as indispensable and, by this means, tried to bring about a feeling of shared identity. No matter how disparate they were among themselves, they could imagine oneness in relation to others who were constructed as utterly deviant. Societalization determined by dominance and power cannot exist without this negative dimension.The communality of the unequals produces untermenschen. In this panopticon of social diferences, dehumanization assumes various forms.Where men of the ruling classes fancy themselves real, full humans, women and members of the lower classes are considered to be merely incomplete humans.They share the humanness of their masters not least because they, together with them, are free to consider themselves superior to those who, as barbarous, heathenish, impure, or inferior, lack substantial elements of humanity. Racism, as societalization by dehumanization, is a social relation that allows even the lowest member of society the imagination of belonging to a community, with all of its superior parts, in contrast to completely alienated others. In the process, tendencies of gradual dehumanization within society change into fundamental dehumanization of expelled outsiders. 231