We Don’t Have to Humanize Refugees

Because they are already human and always have been

It is not uncommon to hear journalists or photographers praised for humanizing refugees. They are people just like us.

But they’re not just like us. And I know this because we don’t treat them that way.

Those whose goal is to humanize refugees in order to change people’s attitudes want us to feel sad when we see pictures of refugee children washed up on the shores of Europe. They want us to say, That could be my son, my sister, my cousin. They want us to relate to the refugee experience so that we can feel sad.

And it is sad. It’s heartbreaking, it’s unnecessary, it’s a product of our ignorance and carelessness. And it is just as ignorant and careless an assumption that refugees and displaced people are human only because we validate their humanity.

We see bodies in desperate situations, faces crying, and groups of tired feet waiting around. We see people who we have never known and whose language we do not speak and whose culture we do not share, and we think that we will understand them if we are told they are people just like us. But we don’t understand them because we can’t relate and so we grow tired of feeling sad and we move on to easier thoughts.

Once refugees become “just like us”, they lose their unique identity as individuals. We appropriate them into a cultural ideal that we understand. We take away their individuality; we undermine that which makes them human.

In humanizing, we strip refugees down to their core to build them back up in our own image. We further alienate them from ourselves as we emphasize an imagined similarity. So they become “refugees”: “large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance,” as Edward Said wrote in Reflections on Exile. Not humans.

When we try to force them into our understood category of human — the most simplified and least defined form of identification one could be assigned — we instead create blank canvasses onto which to project our misunderstandings and preconceptions, as we have done to Alan Kurdi.

Little Alan brought attention to the humanitarian crisis when the photograph of his body on the Turkish shore came to be the defining image of the international community’s neglect of those fleeing persecution. It was said that the image of the three-year-old face-down in the sand put a face to the faceless refugee community. Now things would change.

Recently, Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon of this image next to a drawing representative of the New Years sexual assaults on women in Cologne, Germany. The caption read, “What would little Alan have grown up to be? A groper in Germany.” Whether or not this was meant to be a satirical critique of negative European views toward the refugee crisis, this cartoon reveals the consequences of making Alan’s vulnerability the face of refugees. We have denied the fact that the refugee community already has a diverse range of resilient faces that we ignore when we try to put individuals into a human category that we can feel sorry for. Instead, Hebdo’s cartoon exemplifies how false stereotypes of male refugees in particular have been connected to an unrelated child whose photograph has been shoved in our faces as the definition of a refugee. A photograph that was meant to make us care more by showing us that refugees are human too.

Are we to deny refugees a future because we have projected onto them our fears and prejudices? Must we continue to deny the part we play in shaping our fellow humans into the people that they become, whoever that may be?

All this because we cannot accept that the refugee community hails from places, backgrounds, cultures, races, traditions, and religions that are different from ours and from each other’s. And we don’t understand that these differences don’t mean they can’t still be “just like us”.

We should celebrate these differences. The individuals of the refugee communities have so much to contribute and so much to teach us.

So let’s stop declaring that we must give refugees a voice and instead start listening to them. Let’s stop claiming that we must tell their stories and instead give them our undivided attention.

And let’s stop wasting time humanizing refugees and instead start treating them as the human beings they always have been.