Without our humanity, we are lost

Something stuck with me after the events of this week, including the tour of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture: Why is it so easy for people to strip each other of their humanity?This isn't a new question, of course. Nor is it relegated just to American slavery. Think of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide - or come back home to America and think of our treatment of Native Americans. Just to mention a few.In many of these cases, it wasn't merely slaughter of other people, as horrifying as that is in and of itself. These were situations in which families were torn apart, people were considered nothing more than chattel or a pestilence.As a mom, several things struck me in my tour of the museum, including the above photo, which I took - the smaller shackles were for children.So not only did people believe it was right to take children from their families and enslave them, they also felt so strongly about it that they manufactured special shackles just for them and, with their own hands, shackled the children in the ship for the crossing to America. They had to look at a small child and believe they were right and human to shackle them.I think back to my studies of the Holocaust and am reminded of children separated from their parents when their parents were sent to the gas chambers or simply to keep the men and women separate - boys had to leave their moms, and girls their dads. If they cried? Most likely they were smacked by a guard.Then there are the Native children in the United States who were taken from their families and forced to learn to be "white". They lost their language and culture and, above all, their family. Their parents had no recourse.To do these things to children - yes, to adults as well, but to children, whom we always claim we must protect at all costs - is ghastly. It means you have had to strip yourself of your own humanity in order to not see them as human. You have to think of them as less than human if you are convinced you are right in what you are doing.How does that internal conversation go? How do you get to the point where you can believe that any other person is less than human simply due to an accident of birth?