Mi Nguyen
Names have been changed to protect source privacy.
On a crowded school bus last spring, senior Lawrence* felt a car swerve dangerously close. In that moment of shock, a racial slur escaped his lips — not directed at anyone, just an exclamation absorbed from years of environmental exposure.
“Just how people pick up on accents depending on the environment, the same can happen even with whole words,” Lawrence said. “That exposure, even subconsciously, got to me.”
This incident captures a troubling reality at Aragon: dehumanizing language has become so normalized that students internalize it without conscious intent, deploying slurs as casual punctuation in their daily vocabulary. However, students are not inventing this language. They are downloading it from institutional sources that have spent decades, sometimes centuries, refining the art of dehumanization.
Many turn on the news to hear government officials use the word “alien” to describe human beings. The term is clinical, legal, institutional and profoundly dehumanizing. It strips away individuality, family connections, dreams, and fears, reducing complex human stories to a category of otherness. This is how dehumanizing language has always worked. It operates by stripping individuals of their inherent worth and complex inner lives. When someone is registered as less than human, the moral constraints against mistreating them weaken or disappear entirely.
Historical patterns demonstrate that dehumanizing language can serve as infrastructure for systemic violence. The Holocaust was preceded by years of propaganda depicting Jews as vermin and disease. Rwandan genocide was enabled by Hutu Power radio broadcast calling Tutsis “cockroaches” who needed to be exterminated. American slavery and Jim Crow segregation required an elaborate ideological apparatus portraying black people as subhuman.
Though the slurs in school hallways aren’t equivalent to genocide, they draw from the same psychological well that has enabled humanity’s worst crimes. They’re also being fed by active pipelines that connect institutional hate speech directly to teenage social dynamics.
“The main way alpha bro culture thrives under Andrew Tate and similar influencers is it plays on the insecurities of young men, whether that be loneliness [because] they don’t have friends, or they struggle finding romantic connection,” Lawrence said. “It grows anger in them and sells this idea of being an alpha bro. They say ‘stop these women trifling with you. Be an archetypal man. Be aggressive. Go make money. Be angry at all these other groups.’ [When you’re taught] to put others down, that easily segues into hate speech.”
These influencers aren’t operating in a vacuum. When political rhetoric describes immigrants as “invasions” and “infestations,” when memes circulate reducing entire groups to caricatures, when algorithms reward transgressive content with engagement, teenagers are absorbing the same dehumanizing patterns that have enabled systemic violence throughout history.
Adolescence amplifies these dynamics. Teenagers are actively constructing their identity and determining group membership, making the “us/them” boundaries that enable dehumanization particularly salient. Social hierarchies in high school are often rigid and consequential, creating strong incentives to elevate one’s own group by denigrating others. The discomfort in breaking these barriers itself can drive the behavior.
“It’s a normal reaction for humans to poke fun at things that make them uncomfortable,” said Assistant Principal Andrew Hartig.
Language that begins as a defense mechanism can become a predictable pattern of speech..
“At first, it’s a feeling of shock,” said senior Kabir Sulur. “You’re like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know they would muster up the confidence to say this stuff.’ But then, as they keep saying it, honestly, you even become desensitized to it.”
This gradual numbing represents precisely the danger of normalized dehumanization. What should provoke moral outrage becomes background noise; yet, the disappointment lingers even as the shock fades.
“[I] don’t want the people [I’m] closest [to] to be saying insensitive things and neglecting the value or the meaning of words in their implications and how much they can hurt people,” Sulur said.
Dehumanizing rhetoric can create hostile environments even in supposedly intellectual spaces.
“At a Harvard Model Congress conference, I was in a committee discussing border security,” Finn said. “Some people got really heated and said that ‘immigrants are going to steal our jobs and rape our women.’ Everyone was shocked by what they were saying.”
These instances raise endless questions about intent versus impact that runs through every conversation about dehumanizing language at Aragon. There are countless rationalizations.
“[People might not be] really racist when they do say these things,” Sulur said. “However, there [are] some [aspects] of your values coming in. It’s just a matter of respect that you have for … intolerance towards hateful speech. When you have banter, you’re poking fun at each other. But when it comes to hate speech, you are emotionally hurting them.”
However, understanding how dehumanizing language spreads requires examining not just who says it, but who stays silent. Bystanders recognize their own complicity with varying levels of comfort. Many students have a clear understanding that they should intervene when witnessing dehumanizing language but feel paralyzed by social cost calculations. Speaking up risks becoming the next target, being labeled as oversensitive or “woke” or losing social status by breaking group norms.
“You have this sense of helplessness,” Lawrence said. “Especially in a tense social situation, you want to say something that’s not severe but you [convince] yourself into thinking it’s not too severe. ‘This is nothing. This is common.’ You want to do something, but it could potentially have more negative outcomes for you than general positive good, which is pretty selfish but that’s how people weigh their options.”
This calculation of weighing personal risk against collective good is precisely how systemic dehumanization maintains itself. The silence of witnesses becomes complicity, and complicity becomes normalization. Each incident that passes without challenge sends a message that such language is acceptable, lowering the threshold for the next offense. The administrative response directly correlates with this principle.
“The staff here felt more empowered [addressing hate speech] as we talked about strategies for dealing with it,” Hartig said. “It’s deeply uncomfortable to have to confront somebody about something they’ve said, especially if you don’t know them. The default in many institutions and cultures is to ignore.”
Regardless of the intention, peer pressure, or cultural norms, many express genuine remorse when confronted with the harm they’ve caused.
“The second [the slur] left my mouth, I knew,” said sophomore Tyce*. “I watched [my friend’s] face change. My other friends kept laughing, but in that moment I knew I lost one of my best friends. I tried to apologize later but he just said ‘I thought you were different.’ That sentence plays in my head every day … It felt like a breakup over a word.”
Combating dehumanizing rhetoric requires not just punishing its use but building the psychological infrastructure that makes students resistant to its appeal. The administrative response wrestles with the tension between institutional responsibility and practical limitations.
“If it’s happening in the classroom, we have to own it,” Felder said. “It depends what language is said and also the way it’s said but if certain [offensive] language, like the n-word, is used, we are supposed to respond. Sometimes it’s a judgment call … If [the language] is blurrier, [the response] would be contingent on [many factors].
When dehumanizing language incidents are reported, the school’s response depends on multiple factors including the severity of the offense, the student’s disciplinary history and whether the speech created substantial disruption to the educational environment.
“There’s a different level of severity between someone putting graffiti of a swastika on a wall and two friends who may be of a particular group or ethnicity using a slur that’s been appropriated by that group,” Hartig said. “They’re very different situations. Both of them require education and some remediation, but how we deal with those in terms of consequences looks very different.”
There is a comprehensive response with policies relating to harassment, discrimination, hate speech and dehumanizing language, as outlined by the school handbook.
“When the swastika was discovered in the boy’s bathroom, the immediate response, as with any hate speech or symbolism on campus, is to minimize contact,” Hartig said. “That is always quickly followed by informing the district and sending out a message containing all the relevant information. Another part of the response people don’t see if we have our site safety team review video footage to see who did it. We also worked with the San Mateo Police Department.”
The Student Equity Council’s campus-wide campaign represented a turning point.
“I’m really proud of our Student Equity Council for bringing this issue forward and the faculty for taking it on,” Hartig said. “As a result of that work, our director of student services was able to add dehumanizing language as a category to our discipline platform in Aeries. The district, as part of their response, created an alternative suspension program around dehumanizing language.”
These institutional changes matter because they signal that dehumanizing language isn’t an individual problem but a systemic issue that requires systemic responses. The campaign, therefore, represents a broader educational philosophy.
“School is not just a place where we learn English, history, math, science, art, it’s also where we learn about life and we learn these broader experiences.” Hartig said.
The initiative has provided a measurable impact.
“Since the dehumanizing language campaign through the student Equity Council, there’s a greater awareness and sensitivity on behalf of our students,” Hartig said. “It doesn’t mean that dehumanizing language has disappeared. Obviously with a hate symbol appearing on our walls, people still [need to be educated] around it. The fact that we’re having less of it reported to us as issues is a positive trend.”
Students themselves recognize that effective responses require calibration rather than simply severity. Overreaction can trigger defensiveness and backlash, entrenching the very behavior it aims to change.
“The severity of the response is important,” Lawrence said. “You could say to someone lightly ‘keep it down and watch your language’ instead of raging at them, which will only make things worse.”
The path forward requires creating a culture where students feel empowered to break the silence, where bystanders can intervene without social martyrdom, where victims can report without fear of retaliation, and where those who’ve caused harm can find pathways to genuine accountability and change.
