At stake in contemporary US racial tensions is a struggle over the meaning of being "human." By drawing on black feminist theories of being human as verb, and minority discourse critiques of humanism, the paper links "racialization" to apparatuses of humanization that emerge in early modernity including slavery, colonization, capitalism and environmental devastation. This paper takes up Sylvia Wynter's differentiation between the human and man to examine recent critical public pedagogy projects -- especially the public syllabus projects emerging around the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO; the Charleston, SC church bombing; the Idle No More movement in Canada, and the movement to stop the pipeline construction in Standing Rock, ND. The examination attends to how the "human" has been defined as a being "with a race", and to how this definition of being "human" operates in the service of white supremacy. What the syllabus projects really requires of us, then, is not a curriculum geared toward the lesson that black and Indigenous citizens are humans too, but a collective grappling with the need for "new ways of being human"-- ones not defined by whiteness, ones that can only be articulated in common.