deshumanizar

Means to strip something or someone of human qualities or dignity — deshumanizar el trato a los presos, la deshumanización de la guerra. It's common in discussions of ethics, war, bureaucracy, and art criticism, almost always used critically about a process that reduces people to objects or numbers.

• La burocracia puede deshumanizar el trato a los pacientes. — Bureaucracy can dehumanize the way patients are treated.
• La propaganda de guerra deshumaniza al enemigo. — War propaganda dehumanizes the enemy.
• No dejes que el trabajo te deshumanice. — Don't let the job dehumanize you.

Using deshumanizar to mean simply 'to be unkind' — it specifically implies stripping away human status or dignity, a stronger and more specific claim than ordinary rudeness.

Often confused with humanizar.

• book La deshumanización del arte — José Ortega y Gasset's influential 1925 essay analyzing early 20th-century avant-garde art's deliberate break from realism and human emotion — a foundational, frequently cited work of Spanish-language art criticism, still assigned in aesthetics courses today.