Racism + Social Justice

No Humans Involved (NHI): The Dehumanization of Black People

Criminal cases involving Black people often deny their humanity

I recently published an article celebrating the inspiring 2023 New York City Council election victory of Yusef Salaam, a man who was falsely arrested and imprisoned as part of the Central Park Five.

While researching and writing that article, I came across the term “No Humans Involved” (NHI).

Denying the humanity of certain people

The term “No Humans Involved” (NHI) was the unofficial term used by members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and other public officials to describe the murders of people of color and those in other communities deemed “nonhuman.” The murders disproportionately involved Black and Brown Angelenos, who were often identified as sex workers, gang members, or drug traffickers.

The use of the term came to light in 1992 following the arrest and acquittal of four LAPD officers caught on video brutally beating Rodney King. In 1992, the Jamaican scholar and theorist Sylvia Wynter penned a seminal text titled “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.”

In her letter, Wynter argued that academia was partly to blame for the Rodney King beating and its aftermath because academic institutions uphold and disseminate problematic constructs of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other categories that continue to overdetermine our lived experiences and justify or deny our humanity.

Wynter asserted that the dehumanization of young, unemployed, Black males allowed them to be subjected to the “genocidal effects [of] incarceration and elimination . . . by ostensibly normal, and everyday means.”

While the term was first associated with encounters between law enforcement and Black Americans, it has been used concerning other marginalized groups as well. NHI has been used alongside terms like “misdemeanor murders” and “prostitute murders” to minimize the killing of women sex workers. Norma Jean Almodovar, a former LAPD officer and prominent advocate for sex worker rights, asserts:

[t]erms like these make it clear that those of us who choose, for whatever reason, to engage in commercial sex are no longer considered a part of the human race.

As Alida Weidensee persuasively argues in an article published in the Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality,

Discounting the violence against marginalized groups through the denial of their humanity allows the narrative of law enforcement as necessary defenders of the innocent to remain uncriticized.

While the term is rarely used today in legal circles, the attitude that the term represents remains pervasive and finds its parallel in the treatment of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG).

NHI is why “All Lives Matter” is an inappropriate response to “Black Lives Matter”

It’s easy to justify the false arrest, incarceration, and even police killing of Black people when Black people are not considered human. NHI is a blatant example of how the humanity of Black people has long been denied within the American criminal (in)justice system.

When Black people demand their humanity be acknowledged by asserting “Black Lives Matter,” non-Black people often retort, “All Lives Matter” (NB: I use the term “non-Black” rather than “white” because the retort “All Lives Matter” is not limited to white people).

While the word “only” is not part of the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” what many non-Black people often hear is “ONLY Black lives matter.” Because of this, non-Black people often feel compelled to respond by saying, “All lives matter.”

When in the history of America has this nation demonstrated that “ALL lives matter”? The non-humanity of Black people was the basis of chattel slavery in America. The non-humanity of enslaved Black people was politically illustrated by the “Three-Fifths Clause” of the U.S. Constitution.

The enslavement, beating, torture, lynching, and corporal punishment of Black people in America has long been promoted and accepted because it has long been understood that regarding injustices involving Black people, “No Humans [are] Involved.” America’s history is full of evidence that Black lives have not mattered to many (and at times most) Americans.

In 2015, visual artist Dread Scott unveiled an updated version of the provocative NAACP flag: “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY.” The NAACP flag was first flown after the lynching of A.L. McCamy in Dalton, Georgia, in 1936.

Scott’s updated version reads, “A MAN WAS LYNCHED BY POLICE YESTERDAY.” Scott created his flag after Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man, was fatally shot five times in the back while running from a police officer in South Carolina.

In a 2016 interview with the arts publication Hyperallergic, Dread Scott explained the message behind his work:

During the Jim Crow era, Black people were terrorized by lynching — often public and publicized extralegal torture and murder of Black people. It was a threat that hung over all Black people who knew that for any reason or no reason whatsoever, you could be killed, and the killers would never be brought to justice. Now, the police are playing the same role of terror that lynch mobs did at the turn of the century. It is a threat that hangs over all Black people, that we can be killed by the police for no reason whatsoever — for a traffic stop, for selling CDs, for selling cigarettes. Shot to death, choked to death, tasered to death, driven to death. Standing still, fleeing. Shot in the chest, shot in the back. Hands up, hands down. Point-blank range or at a distance. And the police never face justice for their crimes. It is a vivid concentration of the complete illegitimacy of this whole system.

A study published in 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that Black men are more than twice as likely as their white peers to die from police use of force. In light of the treatment of Black people in America, there is no more inappropriate response to “Black Lives Matter” than “All Lives Matter.”

Let’s illustrate that All Lives Matter

While the phrase “No Humans Involved” may not be as commonly used as it was in the 1980s and ’90s, our willingness to permit, legitimate, and even promote the corporeal and extrajudicial oppression and murder of some people to allegedly protect and ensure the so-called “freedom” and “well-being” of others, reflects an NHI attitude that must constantly be challenged and repudiated.

If we proclaim “ALL Lives Matter,” then we must be willing to demonstrate that ALL lives matter. We cannot continue to engage in and commit oppressive and destructive acts and behavior against any people that suggest “No Humans [are] Involved.”

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