Dehumanization in "The Fifth Season"

In 1767, Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, in which he attempted to classify human beings into racial categories. He wrote of four different racial groups and organized them into a hierarchy. In descending order, he wrote about Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, and Africans. Europeans were at the top of this racial hierarchy, while Africans were at the bottom. Linnaeus added descriptions of each race to his classifications, describing Europeans at the top as "very smart, inventive, ruled by law" (Foster, slide 14), and describing Africans at the bottom as "sluggish, lazy.....covered by grease, ruled by caprice" (Foster, slide 17). The racial hierarchy Linnaeus outlined presented Europeans as superior to Africans, and disadvantaged Africans as less than human. This idea of Africans being less than human and inferior to Europeans was used to justify the violence of European imperialism towards African indigenous peoples. This systematic dehumanization still persists to this day, as shown through incidents such as the H&M monkey sweatshirt advertisement. 

N. K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" follows a fictional group of people called "orogenes" in a world called the Stillness whose treatment by society is analogous to the experiences of black people and other marginalized groups. The orogenes' oppression can be seen through the experiences of various characters in the novel. A toddler orogene, Uche, is beaten to death by his father Jija when the child unintentionally expresses his orogene powers. Though their whole village knows about the filicide, nobody blames Jija for killing his son because the murder of orogenes is common and even encouraged in the Stillness. This incident is abhorrent to readers, because we cannot imagine a just reason for a father to ever beat his 3-year-old son to death. However, in the Stillness, the murder is justified by the systematic dehumanization of orogenes in their society. Stonelore, which is taught in schools and accepted as fact, describes orogenes as monsters and agents of Father Earth. This dehumanization of orogenes is ingrained into the very history of the Stillness. This is why Jija does not face social backlash for murdering his son, just as how European imperialism was justified in the real world by the scientific dehumanization of indigenous peoples. Even orogenes themselves perpetuate their own dehumanization; another young orogene, Damaya, thinks to herself "officially speaking, you're not human either" (234). Through Jemisin's depiction of the societal framing of orogenes as less than human, she shows how oppression is justified in both the fictional society of the Stillness as well as in the real world. 

Bibliography

Foster, Laura. "Classification". Fall 2019, "https://iu.instructure.com/courses/1820385/files/93309360?module_item_id=19455970", PowerPoint Presentation.