When Johann “Rukeli” Trollmann won the German light-heavyweight title in 1933, Nazi officials ripped it away. He was not their vision of a champion. After all, he was a German boxer of Sinti Romani heritage, an identity that made him an enemy in his own homeland. And for that, he was punished.
They gave him one last fight — a cruel ultimatum to box like a “real” German. So, he stepped into the ring with his hair bleached and his face powdered ghostly white in mockery of their Aryan ideal. Then, he let his opponent pummel him to the ground, a brutal display of defiance.
They took his title, then his body. They sterilized him, sent him to war, and finally condemned him to a concentration camp, where SS guards forced him to fight for their amusement. The once-beloved boxing champion was beaten to death.
Trollmann’s story is not just a relic of the past. It's a story that warns of the danger of dehumanization. Before policies strip rights, language strips humanity. Before a people are expelled, they are first made unwelcome. Before a group is erased, they are dehumanized.
This process of othering begins with the act of unseeing some people as people at all. It’s not the work of extremists alone, it is something people like you and me do every day as we decide whose suffering is unfortunate but not urgent. Or worse, whose pain is a natural consequence of their own choices.
In reality, injustice never announces itself with a drumroll. It’s gradual. It’s administrative. It’s dull, in the way that watching a single brick being laid is dull — until you step back and realize a wall has been built.
It is happening now, in the executive orders that frame immigrants as a national emergency, as if people fleeing violence are an invasion rather than an exodus. The rhetoric is familiar. Whether it is the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, or Operation Wetback, the justification is always the same. Once people become an “invasion,” their suffering is no longer an issue of morality but a problem of logistics.
It is happening in the attempts to suspend refugee admissions, or undo birthright citizenship, in the way the state begins to decide which babies deserve a country and which do not. It is happening in legislation that forces federal agencies to define gender in a way that erases trans existence — billed as “defending women,” even as women are turned away from clinics that once provided maternity care, cancer screenings, and HIV treatment, and entire networks of female-focused healthcare have been “decimated overnight.”
It is happening in the push to purge schools of anything deemed “radical,” in the efforts to brand education as dangerous whenever it acknowledges race, history, or anything that does not fit inside a narrow, pre-approved narrative. It is happening in the legal maneuvers that make people disappear not by rounding them up in camps but by stripping them from every official record, every space, every right.
If you’re waiting for a regime to openly declare that it intends to harm people before you call it extreme, you’re already too late.
Once a group is sufficiently dehumanized, the laws that strip them of rights feel less like an injustice and more like an inevitability. And once laws are in place, violence becomes just another administrative function. The guards who made Trollmann fight for bread until they grew tired of him were not monsters. They were men who had been given permission to see him as something less than human.
What we fail to realize is that othering is not just about those who are pushed out of the circle of humanity but also about those who remain inside. When you build a world where people can be excluded, rewritten, erased, you are creating a system in which belonging is conditional. You may feel safe today, but safety built on exclusion is always temporary. When a government learns it can make one group disappear without consequence, it will demonstrate that it has the right to decide who is real and who is not. It is a lesson, taught over and over, that you only exist because the law allows you to. It is a system built to ensure that no one feels safe enough to resist — because when belonging is a privilege rather than a right, people will do anything to protect their own.
However, there are five key steps to this process — steps we must learn to recognize and call out before they become irreversible:
- A people’s intelligence and morality are questioned: In 2024, then-Ohio Senator J.D. Vance falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating pets. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has argued that gender-affirming care and transitioning is based on "delusions.”
- Infestation analogies are utilized: Donald Trump claimed in 2023 that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of America. Texas Governor Greg Abbott repeatedly referred to asylum seekers at the United States-Mexico border as an "invasion."
- People are compared to animals: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Gaza residents as "human animals" in 2023 while justifying military escalation.
- Threats of violence are disguised in not-so-subtle jokes: During a 2018 campaign rally, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro exclaimed, “Let’s machine-gun Acre’s Workers’ Party supporters.” At a 2019 rally, Trump supporters chanted "Send her back!" in reference to U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (a naturalized citizen).
- Whole identities are legally erased: The National Park Service removed the term "transgender" from its Stonewall National Monument webpage. Efforts to rescind DACA have threatened the legal status of approximately 700,000 recipients.
These patterns are not new. They are old, well documented, and devastatingly effective. Although silence is easier than seeing, seeing is not impossible. And once seen, it cannot be ignored for long.
LALA MUSTAFA is a College junior studying international relations and history from Baku, Azerbaijan. Her email address is lmustafa@sas.upenn.edu.
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