MINNEAPOLIMEDIA SPECIAL REPORT | THE UNWRITTEN RECORD: The Language of Dehumanization

How Specific Words, Legal Phrases, and Public Narratives Engineered the Moral Permission for American Injustice

Before injustice becomes law, it becomes language.

The United States did not sustain racial hierarchy by accident or through spontaneous cruelty. It rehearsed it through definition. It drafted it into statutes. It printed it in headlines. It embedded it in administrative manuals. By the time policies hardened, the public had already absorbed the premise.

Dehumanization is not emotional chaos. It is disciplined vocabulary deployed with purpose.

This record examines how specific phrases, cases, and documents did structural work. Each section traces a concrete example where words preceded and enabled material harm.

When Law Converted Person into Property

In 1705, the Virginia General Assembly codified what had already become practice. The statute declared that enslaved persons “shall be held, taken, and adjudged to be real estate.”

Real estate.

The phrase was not metaphorical. It aligned human beings with land under property law. Under English legal tradition, real estate was inheritable and subject to seizure. This classification meant enslaved people could be mortgaged, transferred in dowry, used as collateral, and divided among heirs.

Probate records from eighteenth-century Virginia illustrate the consequence. Estate inventories routinely listed enslaved individuals alongside cattle, horses, and tools. For example, the 1767 inventory of a Virginia planter enumerated “six Negroes, three cows, two ploughs.” The structure of the document was intentional. It equated laboring bodies with farm equipment.

Once language settled this equivalence, moral conflict diminished. Courts treated disputes involving enslaved persons as property disputes. Insurance companies wrote policies covering “loss” of enslaved persons as economic assets.

The vocabulary of real estate allowed violence to masquerade as maintenance of order.

The word preceded the whip.

Constitutional Language and the Denial of Citizenship

The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857 provides one of the clearest examples of dehumanization entering constitutional doctrine.

Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

This sentence did not merely deny Dred Scott standing in court. It announced that African Americans existed outside the constitutional community.

The Court’s opinion reasoned that at the time of the founding, African Americans were considered beings of an inferior order. That reasoning was presented as historical fact, not prejudice.

The language gave intellectual legitimacy to exclusion.

Consider its practical impact. If African Americans were not part of the political community, then federal protections did not extend to them. States were empowered to deny rights without constitutional violation. Federal intervention was constrained.

The phrase no rights became a shield for discrimination.

When the highest judicial authority articulates exclusion as constitutional interpretation, the entire legal system absorbs the premise.

Language here was not commentary. It was doctrine.

Vagrancy and the Criminalization of Freedom

After the Civil War, Mississippi’s 1865 Black Code introduced a vagrancy provision stating that “all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes” without lawful employment could be arrested and fined.

The law did not criminalize theft or assault. It criminalized absence of employment contract.

The term vagrant appears mild. Its effect was not.

Under the statute, failure to pay fines allowed authorities to hire out the individual to private employers. Convict leasing followed.

One documented case from 1866 in Mississippi shows dozens of freedmen arrested for vagrancy during harvest season. They were fined sums impossible to pay and subsequently leased to planters. Labor continued under a new name.

The Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery except as punishment for crime. The word crime expanded to accommodate labor demand.

Language converted unemployment into illegality.

Freedom was linguistically reframed as conditional compliance.

The Press and the Grammar of Lynching

Between 1880 and 1930, over four thousand documented lynchings occurred in the United States. Newspaper coverage frequently employed passive voice and foregrounded alleged offenses.

An 1892 Memphis newspaper headline read “Negro Fiend Lynched for Assault.” The term fiend precedes any adjudication. The alleged crime is presented as fact. The mob remains unnamed.

Ida B. Wells investigated several lynchings in Memphis and found that accusations of assault were often fabricated to suppress Black economic competition. Yet mainstream press repeated the narrative of protection rather than exposing economic motives.

The repeated association of African American men with predatory imagery conditioned public perception. Violence appeared defensive rather than terroristic.

When headlines consistently link identity to threat, readers internalize suspicion as default.

The language did not merely report events. It shaped tolerance for them.

Redlining and the Vocabulary of Risk

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation produced residential security maps to guide mortgage lending. Areas with African American residents were often described as “infiltrated by undesirable populations.”

The word infiltration implies invasion. It frames demographic presence as threat.

Neighborhoods marked D were colored red. Lenders used these maps to deny mortgages or offer predatory terms.

Consider the long-term effect. Families in redlined neighborhoods were unable to access low-interest mortgages available to white families in A-rated areas. As white homeownership expanded through federally backed loans, Black families were excluded from the primary wealth-building mechanism of the twentieth century.

The bureaucratic language of hazard translated directly into generational wealth disparity.

No explicit racial epithet was necessary. The word undesirable performed the function.

Law and Order and the War on Drugs

In the late twentieth century, political rhetoric increasingly invoked law and order in response to urban unrest. The phrase signaled restoration of stability. It did not specify whose stability.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. Possession of five grams of crack triggered a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. It required five hundred grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same sentence.

The statute did not mention race. Enforcement data later showed that crack prosecutions disproportionately affected African American communities.

Public discourse framed the policy as necessary to combat dangerous drugs. The racialized impact was rarely foregrounded in legislative debate.

The phrase war on drugs mobilized urgency. It justified expansion of policing and incarceration.

Language framed enforcement as protection.

Minnesota and the Achievement Gap

Minnesota frequently ranks high in national quality-of-life metrics. It also exhibits some of the largest racial disparities in education.

Public discussion often uses the phrase achievement gap.

The term gap implies difference between two outcomes. It does not specify the structural inputs that produced those outcomes.

It does not reference housing segregation patterns that concentrate poverty. It does not reference school funding formulas tied to property tax. It does not reference disciplinary disparities that remove students from classrooms.

Achievement gap describes symptom. It obscures cause.

Similarly, reports may refer to disproportionate contact with law enforcement. The term contact sounds neutral. It does not describe the nature of that interaction or its consequences.

Measured language can mute urgency.

Bureaucratic Abstraction and the Removal of the Name

In modern policy documents, individuals are frequently reduced to metrics.

Eviction filings are recorded as unit removals. Incarceration rates are charted as population management. Social service recipients are categorized as cases.

Abstraction removes narrative.

When a family is described as a housing instability statistic, the public does not see children changing schools mid-year. When incarceration is described as rate adjustment, the public does not see generational income loss.

Administrative language reduces emotional friction.

Without friction, policy expands quietly.

The Throughline

Across centuries, the pattern is consistent.

Real estate replaced person.
No rights replaced citizenship.
Vagrant replaced worker.
Fiend replaced victim.
Undesirable replaced neighbor.
Law and order replaced protest.
Achievement gap replaced structural inequality.

Each linguistic shift preceded policy.

Each phrase narrowed empathy.

Each abstraction eased enforcement.

Dehumanization was not an emotional accident. It was an intellectual architecture built through repetition.

The Responsibility of the Record

If injustice was rehearsed through language, accountability must begin there.

Precision matters.

To identify perpetrators rather than hide them in passive voice.
To describe structural causation rather than individual deficiency.
To name policy consequences without euphemism.

Democracy depends on accurate description.

The record now demonstrates that injustice was spoken before it was enforced.

The corrective is not louder rhetoric.

It is clearer language.

The architecture of dehumanization was built word by word.

It must be dismantled the same way.

MinneapoliMedia