"Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination"
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Genocide does not erupt from nowhere; it is prepared by a worldview that claims biology authorizes hierarchy. The belief that human beings come in fixed, natural kinds whose supposed traits justify unequal rights converts prejudice into policy and policy into violence. The hinge is certainty: once a society decides that biological distinctions indisputably sanction discrimination, cruelty becomes common sense, opposition becomes irrational, and the path to annihilation opens, however distant it first appears.
History keeps rehearsing this arc. Racial science under Nazism clothed extermination in the language of heredity and hygiene. Colonial regimes appealed to innate difference to rationalize conquest and forced labor. In Rwanda, pseudo-anthropological categories laid groundwork for the killing of neighbors. Disabled people, queer people, and others have repeatedly been targeted as biological problems to be solved. The point is not the particular trait but the conversion of difference into destiny.
Dworkin, writing as a radical feminist, underscored how definitions of women as a biological class have long been used to sanction their subordination. Claims that sex is destiny, that women are naturally fit for certain roles and unfit for power, illustrate the same logic in a less catastrophic register. When a society normalizes discrimination by appealing to nature, it builds the moral and institutional habits that make more extreme forms of exclusion thinkable.
The adverb "improbably" matters. Genocide always seems unthinkable before it happens; its preconditions look like ordinary attitudes, unremarkable laws, and respectable scholarship. The safeguard is not only to condemn slaughter but to refuse the initial conviction that biology licenses caste. That means treating scientific knowledge with humility, resisting any translation of difference into lesser worth, and insisting that political rights are not contingent on traits of birth. The distance between a confident theory of human types and a campaign to eliminate them is far shorter than it appears.
History keeps rehearsing this arc. Racial science under Nazism clothed extermination in the language of heredity and hygiene. Colonial regimes appealed to innate difference to rationalize conquest and forced labor. In Rwanda, pseudo-anthropological categories laid groundwork for the killing of neighbors. Disabled people, queer people, and others have repeatedly been targeted as biological problems to be solved. The point is not the particular trait but the conversion of difference into destiny.
Dworkin, writing as a radical feminist, underscored how definitions of women as a biological class have long been used to sanction their subordination. Claims that sex is destiny, that women are naturally fit for certain roles and unfit for power, illustrate the same logic in a less catastrophic register. When a society normalizes discrimination by appealing to nature, it builds the moral and institutional habits that make more extreme forms of exclusion thinkable.
The adverb "improbably" matters. Genocide always seems unthinkable before it happens; its preconditions look like ordinary attitudes, unremarkable laws, and respectable scholarship. The safeguard is not only to condemn slaughter but to refuse the initial conviction that biology licenses caste. That means treating scientific knowledge with humility, resisting any translation of difference into lesser worth, and insisting that political rights are not contingent on traits of birth. The distance between a confident theory of human types and a campaign to eliminate them is far shorter than it appears.
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| Topic | Human Rights |
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