Illustrating Injustice: Alien vs. Citizen

As a Creative Writing major, I believe art helps us understand the world. When I see a social justice issue, I like to use art to help gain a deeper understanding, and also to spread awareness. Art can reach audiences that other forms of expression, such as academic articles, cannot.

To understand the social justice issue of this blog, “Alien vs. Citizen,” I felt that art would be helpful to put the concept into more concrete terms. The point of our blog is to show that language such as “illegal alien” is dehumanizing and wrong. However, I know that often times, when we put such strong labels on things, such as “dehumanizing,” many people are turned off. “Dehumanizing” is a strong word. Taking away someone’s humanity is a strong accusation. Many of my friends from high school would have simply stopped listening to me if I had begun a rant about how certain language is “dehumanizing.”

In order to explain how calling someone an “alien” is dehumanizing, I decided to do an art survey of my fellow students at the University of Michigan. They did not know the purpose of my survey at the beginning, and many were willing participants. I surveyed mainly freshmen and sophomores from the University of Michigan. These participants are all residents of my dormitory. I approached them in the hallways with a box of crayons and a piece of paper, and invited them to draw an alien.

It is the midst of finals, many people were more than willing to drop studying for a few minutes to doodle an alien. In fact, many people got excited about my invitation, and encouraged their friends and roommates to come draw aliens, too. After around five to ten minutes of drawing, I’d tell them the next part of their assignment: to draw a citizen.

“A citizen?” they’d ask, as if it was some sort of trick. “Like, a person?”

“Yes,” I’d tell them. “A citizen of the United States of America.”

They would comply, much more hesitantly, mainly sticking to a pencil or a black pen to draw, contrasting with the brightly illustrated alien.

The final result of my art survey is astonishingly clear. When asked to draw a picture of an alien, almost every student I surveyed drew a figure that was deprived of positive human qualities. These figures had oversized heads, long tails, green bodies, spaceships, tentacles, three eyes, one eye, and polka-dots. They were decidedly not human figures. Next to the citizens, they looked even less human. The citizens people drew had all human features. Even some of the stick-figured humans had more human features than the aliens.

After completing the survey, I informed participants of the research I was conducting. I explained that immigrants are often called “illegal” and “illegal aliens.” Since some people call immigrants “aliens,” I wanted to examine whether or not the term “alien” had developed a new connotation, one of humanity as opposed to “alienness.” However, I explained to the participant, their drawing showed that the figure associated with the term “alien” was not a human being.

Therefore, I’d explain to the participant, calling an immigrant an “alien,” or an “illegal alien,” dehumanized them, because it associated them with a non-human. Calling an immigrant an “alien” suggested that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are less than human, and following this train of thought, they therefore deserve less than human dignity and respect.

An interesting aspect of the data I collected was that all illustrations of “citizens” included the drawing of a white, middle-aged male figure. This supports Omi and Winant’s claim that the US is still transitioning out of a racial dictatorship, in which white males maintained all of the country’s hegemonic power. Still today, when asked to picture and draw a citizen, the people I surveyed did not draw a black person, a brown person, an Asian person, or, even more surprisingly to me, a female. They drew white males. Perhaps this could be used to claim that white males still possess the majority of the power in the United States? This thesis would require further investigation, but it is an unexpected result of my study that caught my attention.