The images are shocking, but are they really all that shocking by “today’s standards”?

In one propaganda poster, a cartoon depicting a Japanese person’s face is getting punched by a muscled up “American” laborer. The words above the drawing: “Don’t save his face! Every blow counts in the battle for production.” In another cartoon, a Japanese person is depicted as a rat – the most despised of all animals – crawling into a trap that reads, “Army, Navy, Civilian.”And one, by famed children’s book author Dr. Seuss, shows an endless line of Japanese entering California, each gleefully holding a box of TNT.

It would be mildly reassuring to be able to declare these images, from 1940s anti-Japanese propaganda in the U.S. and held by the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, as shocking by today’s standards.

But to do so would not be true. We live in a time and place when similar words are blared on television and throughout posts all over the Internet.

And just as before, much of it comes from the top down.

If you think this is an exaggeration, or that we’re better than we were decades in the past, think again.

We have the absurd anti-Haitian hate that polluted the presidential debate and rippled far beyond a small town in the Midwest. We have the U.S. senator who just told an Arab American activist to hide her head in a “bag,” and implied she supported groups accused of terror. We have another lawmaker who earlier this year appeared to propose dropping atomic bombs on Palestinians.

Closer to home, we have a Boston city councilor who, according to a report in the Boston Herald from December, called an event honoring two Boston high school students for speaking up for Palestinian lives, “a Hamas attack.”

This hate of the immigrant, of the minority, of the Muslim and Arab, and on and on is not new to the past year. This has been going on for a long time, in waves of declining and growing strengths. We have anti-Asian bias that has persisted in one form or another since the 1800s and the infamous laws and policies of exclusion. We have the racism that has allowed for the countless deaths of Black Americans. We have the former president and current candidate who had warned of the “kung flu,” had proposed a “Muslim” ban, and had who likened immigrants entering California to “animals.”

Note the label of “animals,” just like in the rat cartoon, to dehumanize groups of people. “Human animals” – sound familiar? Another one is the blanket term of “rapists” – it’s used by anti-immigrant groups to scapegoat all immigrants for the crimes of one or two. It’s also used in anti-Palestinian propaganda. And then the murky and legally consequential term, “terrorist,” not too dissimilar from the label of “Communist” of generations ago.

To discuss “othering,” damaging and often outright hateful language like this only in the context of hate crimes, however, is a disservice. The hurt is much bigger. Language can influence thought and thought can then justify action, like the violence following a demonstration in Newton earlier this month, the death of Vincent Chin in the 1980s, and police abuse of power at protests at colleges around the country. This language that dehumanizes communities, populations even, has been used to justify forcing entire ethnic and immigrant groups into virtual open air prisons and concentration camps, dropping atomic bombs on civilians, relegating people to poverty and disproportionate imprisonment, and even, as we saw in the past and in the present, genocide.

But this language can also harm in ways that are invisible. It can cause trauma to families and children, people who grow up as the targets of these abhorrent words. Sampan recently wrote about research in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing the negative effects of anti-immigrant political speech on Latino families.

And as Hena Zuberi, a rights activist who spoke recently of Islamophobia in the media, told the Sampan:

“I have four kids … and I can speak from personal experience that we really don’t watch mainstream media in our house, not because we don’t want to, but because of the incessant portrayal of Muslims and of Islam in a manner that we don’t identify with. …”

She said that Muslim families in America and elsewhere “consistently have to fight for their humanity and to prove that they are human, too.” 

Haitians, Palestinians, so many others probably could say the same right now. It’s easy to look back and say we’re better than we were in the past. But how will future generations look back at how we are now?