Dehumanization Rebranded as Humor—Race, Animals, and the Refusal to Let Dehumanization Have the Last Word

In my last post, I described the world as feeling “griefy.” That feeling has not lifted. If anything, it has sharpened.

Recently, a racist post circulated publicly, shared by President Donald Trump, mocking President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama by drawing on a long-standing and violent trope of dehumanization. The fact that this occurred during Black History Month only sharpened its impact. While the act itself was not surprising, the ease with which it was normalized was deeply unsettling.

I am not reacting to this in the heat of the moment, but rather I’ve been moving toward it slowly because the harm it surfaced intersects directly with my scholarship, my faith, and my work in the human–animal bond. It touched a history that is not abstract to me, but studied, cited, lived, and grieved.

What follows is not about outrage for its own sake. It is about naming harm clearly, situating it within a longer history, and reflecting on what it means when dehumanization is repeatedly rebranded as humor and treated as though it costs nothing.

The Moment That Hurt

The imagery that was posted (and has since been taken down with no apology) drew on comparisons that have long been used to ridicule, diminish, and deny the full humanity of Black people. What made this moment especially painful was the casualness with which this kind of harm continues to circulate, be defended, or be dismissed as “humor,” especially during Black History Month, which carries its own weight. It signals not only what is said, but what is permitted.

Like so many other things that have occurred during the last year, or even the past month, this was racist. It was harmful. It landed as grief.

Unfortunately, this was a familiar grief that aligned with a long history of dehumanization that has been studied, documented, and lived. The pain was not just in the image itself, but in the reminder that even now, such portrayals can be offered without consequence, as if they cost nothing.

What the Scholarship Had Already Named

I soon realized that this moment was not separate from my scholarship, but was already part of it.

I devoted a section of the literature review of my doctoral research, Understanding Grief Experiences of Pet Loss Among African Americans, to the historical and cultural relationship between African Americans and animals. At the time, this section was not written in response to a headline or a viral incident. It emerged from gaps in representation that I have written about and questions I was trying to understand about why the human–animal bond has so often been discussed as though Black people were absent from it.

What that review revealed was not a lack of care or attachment, but a complex history shaped by dehumanization, violence, and exclusion—one in which animals were used as instruments of terror, and Black humanity was repeatedly called into question. That history does not disappear simply because time has passed. It lingers, informing how harm is delivered and how it is received.

Reading my own words now, I was struck by how what I was witnessing in the present was not an isolated insult but part of a longer, deeply rooted narrative.

The historical relationship between African Americans and animals is multifaceted, originating from dehumanization imposed upon the African American community. During slavery, dogs were used to apprehend freedom seekers, and during the civil rights movement were used to attack protestors (Mayorga‐Gallo, 2018; Richardson et al., 2020; Rose et al., 2023). In addition, African American and pit bull stigma stemmed from the stereotypes of African American criminality and mascots in hip-hop culture (Applebaum et al., 2021; Linder, 2018; Rose et al., 2023). Historical dehumanization has contributed to false cultural beliefs that African Americans are animals or animal-like in that the race is not capable of processing physical and emotional pain and lacks reasoning and intellect in comparison to other racial groups (McCleary-Gaddy & James, 2022; Richardson et al., 2020). However, African Americans’ shared historical experience of victimization and exploitation fosters understanding and compassion for animal suffering and inferior status (Richardson et al.,
2020). It remains unclear whether the complex history of African Americans and animals contributes to lower rates of pet ownership among African Americans.

A History That Still Shapes Meaning

The relationship between African Americans and animals has been shaped by history in ways that are often unspoken, yet deeply felt. One of the cultural touchstones that continues to surface for me—especially during Black History Month—is the television series, Roots. I return to it each year not as an academic exercise, but as a reminder of how history is carried visually, emotionally, and generationally. In those early episodes, dogs are not companions. They are weapons—used to track, threaten, and terrorize Black people seeking freedom. 

Those portrayals were not fictional exaggerations. They reflect documented practices during slavery and later during the Civil Rights Movement, where animals were deployed as tools of control and intimidation. Over time, this history helped produce a cultural landscape in which Black people were simultaneously compared to animals and attacked by them being stripped of humanity while being punished for allegedly lacking it.

This is context. 

Context complicates the easy assumptions often made about African American relationships with animals, assumptions that frame absence as disinterest or distance as lack of care. What is erased in those narratives is the cost of history—the way trauma, survival, and structural exclusion shape visibility and participation. When I think about the incident that prompted this reflection, I cannot separate it from that longer story. The harm did not arrive out of nowhere. It arrived already familiar.

When the Logic of Dehumanization Collapses

As I continued to sit with this history, another realization surfaced—one that was unexpected, did not erase the harm, but reframed the power it claimed.

The imagery used in the recent racist post relied on a familiar assumption: that comparing Black people to animals is inherently degrading because animals are presumed to be lesser—less intelligent, less emotional, less worthy. That assumption has long been central to dehumanization, and it is also deeply flawed.

Much of the work that shaped my own thinking about animals—particularly research on great apes—directly challenges this hierarchy. Scholars such as Jane Goodall have demonstrated that chimpanzees and other primates exhibit complex emotional lives, social bonds, grief responses, communication, problem-solving, and moral awareness. These findings do not blur the distinction between humans and animals in careless ways; they complicate the idea that worth is measured by distance from humanity.

This is where the logic of the insult begins to unravel.

Dehumanization only functions if we accept its premise—that being associated with an animal is a downgrade. That premise depends not on truth, but on a worldview that ranks lives, assigns value hierarchically, and treats difference as deficiency. When that worldview is exposed, the insult loses the authority it claims.

None of this makes the racist act acceptable. The harm remains. The history remains. The grief remains.

But what becomes clear is that the power of dehumanization is not inherent—it is borrowed. It relies on a shared agreement that some lives are lesser. When that agreement is refused, the insult is revealed not as truth, but as foolishness masquerading as humor.

What was meant to degrade instead exposes the fragility of the logic behind it.

Why This Still Grieves Me

What I felt in response to this moment was grief.

Not only grief for what was done or expressed, but grief for how easily it was allowed to be expressed—for how familiar it felt to watch Black humanity treated as a punchline, and for how exhausting it is to continue naming harm that should already be understood.

Black History Month is often framed as a time for celebration, resilience, and progress—and so it is. But it is also a time when the unfinished work of history becomes harder to ignore, when the distance between past and present collapses, and when old narratives reappear with new packaging and are offered as humor instead of hate.

This is the grief I carry: A grief rooted in knowing that dehumanization is not an artifact of history, but a pattern that resurfaces whenever power feels unaccountable. A grief shaped by faith that teaches me to name harm honestly without surrendering my sense of worth to it.

I grieve that my humanity continues to be treated as negotiable.

The Post I Did Not Plan to Write

It is difficult to ignore the fact that this is the post I am writing during Black History Month.

I would have preferred to write something else—something celebratory, something rooted in the beauty of Black culture, or in the joy and tenderness of the human–animal bond in Black lives. If I were to address the harm, I would have preferred to do so by educating about our complex history with animals, some stigmas about pet ownership that still linger, and other stereotypes. I would have liked to write about care, connection, and the ways animals have offered companionship, comfort, and meaning in our homes and communities.

Instead, I am writing this.

There is grief in the reminder that even in 2026, time must still be spent naming harm that should no longer require explanation. That I must see the world, particularly my country, through the same lens that my mother and grandmother viewed. I don’t want to see the world this way. But I remember that grief is that squiggly line. So this is my confrontation with the fact that dehumanization continues to demand attention, pulling focus from stories that deserve to be told without qualification.

And here is my restorative truth.

Black humanity does not depend on defense. Black relationships with animals do not need justification. The love, care, grief, and connection that exist within Black lives are real—whether or not they are acknowledged, represented, or respected.

I wrote this not because dehumanization deserves the last word, but because it does not.

The excerpted section above is drawn from my doctoral dissertation, Understanding Grief Experiences of Pet Loss Among African Americans (2025). Sources cited within the excerpt originate from that work.