Savage! Now there’s a powerful word, but one you don’t hear everyday any more.
I remember reading the word a good bit when I was a kid. Native Americans were deemed to be savages in many of the books I read while growing up. At first it may have been because they were considered to be uncivilized by European standards. Later, Native Americans tended to respond in anger when their ancestral lands were over-run or when yet another solemn treaty was broken. But that word savage did its duty. By designating Native Americans to be savages, by questioning if they even had a soul, their humanity was lost to those who felt the need to kill them. It is easier to kill someone who is savage then someone who is my equal in shared humanity.
Africans were other people who I read about/heard referred to as savages. They too were uncivilized as the story was told. But it was, in part, we civilized folk of European extraction who bought and sold others as slaves. That blatant mindset is not always so easily seen, but as I was growing up I heard of cross burnings in our community, and witnessed how as late as the sixties, having a black man in a restaurant could cause “problems.” It was all just a tame way of declaring African Americans to be savages. The most powerful and deliberate use of the term savage in that regard happened in a conversation I had once when I was fifteen or sixteen.
I was doing my best to hold my own in an argument with a much older, wiser gentleman. The topic was race relations, the setting Virginia in the early 70’s. This gentleman was a true southerner. On one hand a delightful man and on the other a racist. The end of our discussion came when he triumphantly stated these words.
“The white man has been civilized (there’s that word again) for millennia while the black man was a monkey eating savage in the jungle as little as 400 years ago.” I will never forget that short sentence. I turned and walked away. How was I to respond? I knew this didn’t feel right. That attitude, if not the actual words, were wrong, but I didn’t have the evidence to refute him. So I walked away.
Savages eh? The word still sucks the air out of my lungs today, just as it is intended to suck the humanity out of whomever it is heaped upon. What is more troubling to me than the conversation I had as a teenager is that the word seems to be coming back into vogue.
Recently, and on multiple occasions, I have heard Muslims and Islam being referred to as savage. The implication of that kind of language is to dehumanize them. They are merely savages! One person stated, “They should all be kicked out of the army” after the tragic events of Fort Hood. As U.S. congressman went on TV and stated that we should be concerned about them living among us. Sarah Palin flat out stated that some profiling should be done.
Haven’t we been here before in our history? Didn’t we start referring to people as savage and begin acting in ways that, to any unbiased student of history, was an abomination? In Germany, during the run up to the final solution, Jews and other “undesirables” received similar dehumanizing designations in. Before the Rwandan holocaust, people of different tribes used such language when speaking about the others. In fact they often referred to those they did not want associate with as “roaches.”
Terms of derision, dehumanizing terms, and demeaning language has a specific purpose. They help create a sense of superiority within ourselves and lower our opinion of the other. See if they are savages, then we are not. If they are roaches, then we are not. And finally, if they are less human than us, we can more easily treat them in inhuman ways, or perhaps even kill them.
Perhaps one way of thinking about this is to realize that people who commit acts of evil against other people, first regard them as not worthy of living. That is how our country has been viewed by some who have committed acts of terror. We rightly decry their violence. We rightly condemn all being painted with the same brush. But then we turn around and begin the cycle against them by calling them savage.
May the voice of reason once again call us to see all our fellow humans in the way God sees them. May the voice of God teach us how to refer to those who hold to different beliefs. And may God have mercy on us all. We need to be healed of the pride that causes us to elevate ourselves and devalue someone else.
Peace
Leon
