What is Human?

What is human? To me it is the idea of not only living, but also those things that we humans feel- raging emotions. What does it mean to be dehumanized? To take away the human traits and characteristics of someone, by my definition. For example, Congresswoman Giffords shooting- I am led to understand that on Sarah Palin's website there were crosshairs (like that of a scope of a gun) used in reference to strong Democratic and Liberal representatives (See this article) This is dehumanization in the sense that this image takes away human traits of these representatives-showing them as something to be hunted (these types of images-this rhetoric is used by many political parties, I am not attempting to advocate one or the other). This same method was used by Hitler and the Nazi's, calling the Jews "rats" and treated them as something to be hunted. Our humanity is being rhetoric-ed out from under us. In Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" he attempts to break down the duality (or "us" and "them", "democrat" and "republican", "teacher" and "student", basically any label of difference between class or importance of people) of human kind. This is incredibly significant because it takes away the "I am right and you are wrong" idea, and opens everyone up to free dialogue, actual and real discussion. Is this not a more human(e) way to live?