Pronouns Are Dangerous
By Joshua Colangelo-Bryan
Demagoguery is alive and well. Thriving, even. Heads of state and other leaders around the world are making easy political hay by demonizing groups they claim have caused their followers all manner of harm.
Vladimir Putin must defend Russia from the “Nazis” in Ukraine. Viktor Orban insists people working for civil society groups are “bugs.” Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu opined that there were “no uninvolved civilians” in Gaza. These are just a few examples of words being used as figurative weaponry today.
The Trump administration has long relied on this demonization blueprint, calling all undocumented immigrants “criminals,” or claiming in a campaign ad that “Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens. Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
Demonization provides a facile justification for a dominant group, be it national, racial, religious, or otherwise, to wield power to the disadvantage of a less powerful group that is disparaged by reference to “they” or “them.” Naturally, it creates fear and hatred of the demonized group. And it often provides a political boost to the person engaged in the vilification, which is, in fact, the point.
There may be sophisticated strategies to counter demagoguery, but one basic antidote is getting to know people who are part of a supposedly malign “they” or “them.” I had that experience the first time I met with a client at Guantanamo Bay in 2004, when the base held hundreds of people captured in the post-9/11 “War on Terror.”
At the time, U.S. officials were describing all the men detained there as the “worst of the worst.” They were the kind of people, we were told, who would “gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” While that sounded melodramatic, I found it impossible not to worry I was about to meet a hardened terrorist as I went into my first meeting with one of the “worst of the worst.”
My client, Jaber, was a slight man with a welcoming smile. He was shackled by the ankle but tried to get up to shake my hand. Quickly, we fell into an easy conversation about food, family, and movies (including his favorite, Jumanji—which I had to confess I hadn’t seen). He definitely wasn’t what I pictured as the “worst of the worst.”
National-security hawks would note that perfectly charming people can be terrorists, which is true. But once we got the courts to force the government to explain why it was holding each detainee, the government was unable even to allege that most detainees had taken any action against the U.S.
An obvious lesson was that vilifying a disfavored group and denying them due process leads to results even the hawks would say make no sense. After all, there’s no national security benefit in locking up someone who isn’t a threat. This was a lesson we could have learned from, say, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but fearmongering tends to make us foggy about similar past episodes.
This same dynamic is at work now. The Trump administration is locking up thousands of migrants, most of whom do not remotely match the description of “worst of the worst” – a phrase ICE recently revived for recruiting ads. As of this summer, ICE held nearly 59,000 people, but almost half had no criminal record, and fewer than one in ten had serious convictions. Those numbers vitiate the idea that we’re devoting massive law enforcement and military resources, spending untold funds, and building facilities like “Alligator Alcatraz” to house immigrants for legitimate national security purposes.
Indeed, the numbers highlight that the government is doing its best to look tough, human and other consequences be damned. In that vein, the administration is sending some of these people to Guantanamo. It’s hard to imagine a less practical, more expensive way to remove anyone from the U.S. than with a needless stopover in Guantanamo, a remote base in Cuba.
If these cruel (and strategically misguided) tactics are to be stopped, it will take more than litigation—a hard thing for a lawyer to say. We will need widespread opposition, which seems to be stirring, at least in part, as citizens in solidly red areas of America object to seeing immigrants they’ve known for years—neighbors or parents of their kids’ friends—swept up in the ICE dragnet. Again, when you actually know the people being vilified as part of “them” or “they,” it just doesn’t take in the same way.
So, despite the nonsensical talk during the last presidential campaign about the supposed dangers of people asking to be referred to by “they” or “them,” the real threat with those pronouns is when they are used to paint human beings as monsters.
I was discussing this with Jaber the other day, who has been home for years. He lamented how, despite all the lessons we should have learned, entire groups of people continue to be disparaged. “I don’t care who you are,” he said. “Deal with me respectfully, and that’s how I’ll deal with you.”
Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, Special Counsel at Human Rights First, has spent decades leading advocacy efforts to uphold democratic principles and support human rights globally, and sharing his wealth of knowledge through national media commentary, op-eds in publications such as The Washington Post, and speaking engagements across universities and institutions. His debut book, Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay, is a powerful account of his unlikely friendship with a Guantanamo Bay detainee and what it takes to fight for human rights since September 11, 2001.