🕯️ We All Belong: Naming Dehumanization, Choosing Humanity 🌿
we are all family here. 🕊️🌍
It’s impossible to ignore the cruelty in the world right now. Wars are raging. People are displaced. Communities are struggling to make ends meet. Online spaces overflow with anger, fear, and blame. In moments like these, the thread that connects so many kinds of harm — from individual bullying to systemic violence to genocide — is dehumanization.
Dehumanization happens when we start treating some people as less real, less worthy, or less important than others. It can show up in countless ways: racism, sexism, fatphobia, ableism, queerphobia, classism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, religious persecution, xenophobia. It can appear in casual jokes, cruel comments, policy decisions, economic exclusion, or deadly violence.
Why does this happen? Often, it grows out of fear and insecurity. When people feel unsafe, ashamed, or left out, they sometimes cling to belonging by aligning with the group they think is “strong” or “normal.” To do that, they distance themselves from people who are struggling — the poor, the disabled, those from minority religions, people with unusual or marginalized identities, refugees, immigrants, those whose bodies or lives don’t fit the mold.
This distancing is subtle at first. It can start with ignoring someone’s pain. With deciding that “those people” are too different to care about. With laughing along at cruelty to avoid being the target. But those small acts of dehumanization stack up. They create conditions where abuse is tolerated, where communities fracture, where school shootings and pogroms and genocides become possible.
Facing dehumanization honestly doesn’t mean giving up hope. It means refusing to look away. It means noticing when fear and self-hate try to push us toward cruelty or indifference — and choosing something else. It means naming the systems that harm people, and choosing daily acts of connection and care.
A lot of times we get stuck. We get overwhelmed, or we don’t know what to do. Being able to meet ourselves and others where we are, being able to tell when we are pushing past our boundaries in a harmful way, being able to notice these patterns before they become crisis…
We can’t solve every crisis overnight. But together, we can keep choosing humanity over hate. We can reach across difference. We can build communities that see every person as worthy of safety, dignity, and love.
Because the truth is: we all belong here.
