A constant theme throughout racist or sectarian propaganda is the dehumanization of the opposing party.  People instinctually attempt to make themselves feel better about themselves and their position, and often the easiest way to accomplish this is by reducing anyone different to the status of a monster. This form of denial has been used to justify the worst atrocities in human history. Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s stories “The Scapegoat” and “The Lynching of Jube Benson” both highlight this sort of behavior in early America. The titular scapegoat of “The Scapegoat” is Robison Asbury, a black man who becomes an idol to his community and enters politics. When he wins the election he enters, he is instantly undone after the opposing party claims fraud and his supporters desert him. “He must have been a crook!” his opponents shout, too steeped in denial to admit defeat. “The Lynching of Jube Benson,” meanwhile, has a doctor lament the racist teachings from his childhood that led him to murder his black assistant after suspecting him of raping and murdering a white woman. He became so focused on finding the man who killed the girl he was infatuated with that he refused to think rationally or listen to his suspect.

The best example of this sort of denial and dehumanization comes from the mouths of the propagandists themselves. “The Birth of a Nation” remains one of the most infamous – and influential – films of American history. The film depicts Northerner Americans as tyrants, leading the savage blacks on an all-out assault on the South during the Civil War. Black politicians are presented as drunkards and louts, whites who sympathize with blacks are portrayed as sniveling, depraved cowards. The good Southern people, of course, are shown as innocent, helpless saints, waiting to be saved by the shining knights of the KKK. The South fights valiantly, the Klan rides to the rescue, and the evils of Reconstruction are purged from the world with musket fire and bravery, or so the movie claims. The truth, of course, is simply that Reconstruction was undone by politics and corporate conspiracy, and another hundred years passed before black people could even dream of being treated as human.

Most disturbingly, these trends continue even today. The lines may have shifted, but politics remains much the same. Today’s boogiemen are “gays”, “terrorists”, and “socialists”, rather than the “negroes” and “communists” of days past, but their treatment is exactly the same. “Socialist”, “communist”, and “big government” are all swearwords used to degrade any political or economic policy anyone sees as digging too far into their pocket – silently ignoring and denying any positive possible, or even the suggestion that one should actually contribute to society. Meanwhile, gay marriage is defamed with exactly the same rhetoric used to defame interracial marriage during the Fifties. Gays themselves are labeled a threat and berated.  Even the very real threat of religious extremism and terrorism is turned into a buzzword, to be thrown about as an insult, and all too often the same people who accuse their enemies of “supporting Islamic terrorism!” are the very same people who enable the politely unmentioned Christian extremist movements right here in the United States. The monsters in the closet and under the bed exist only to keep people from looking at what they’re sleeping with.