Feed your Critical Animal in 2015

Don't Miss These Provocative Books in 2015.

Outlined below is the fourth annual Animal Reading List. This follows 2012's exciting lineup of books challenging conventional approaches to animal ethics and advocacy, 2013's posthuman bonanza, and 2014's expanse of critical animal theory, interspecies relationships, and effective advocacy for animals.

2015 has yet to prove itself to be as fruitful as the last few in regards to critical animal studies. Does this mean "the animal turn" has been but a five year trend in scholarship or that many 2015 books are yet to be announced? It's hard to tell, but there is so much material from 2014 that you'll be too preoccupied with good reads to really notice any lag.

If you are interested in receiving and reviewing any of these books for the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, please send me an email.
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ETHICS
Interspecies Ethics (Cynthia Willet, 2014) 
Interspecies Ethics explores animals’ vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory... Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics.. The book’s ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics... illuminat[ing] a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals (Lori Gruen, 2015) 
In Entangled Empathy, scholar and activist Lori Gruen argues that rather than focusing on animal “rights,” we ought to work to make our relationships with animals right by empathetically responding to their needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and unique perspectives... Gruen describes entangled empathy as a type of caring perception focused on attending to another’s experience of well-being... When we engage in entangled empathy we are transformed and in that transformation we can imagine less violent, more meaningful ways of being together. 

The Ethics of Animal Re-creation and Modification: Reviving, Rewilding, Restoring (Marku Oksanan and Helena Siipi, 2014) 
The Ethics of Animal Recreation and Modification studies philosophical and ethical issues arising from new technological possibilities to repair the loss of animal diversity. Several research groups are currently working toward re-creating extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth by the methods of modern genomic technology and of selective breeding. These projects challenge the main underlying tenet of conservation ethics: the extinction of a species is irreversible. For this reason alone, the idea of de-extinction, or reversing extinction, is troublesome.



GEOGRAPHY
Critical Animal Geographies (Katie Gillespie, Rosemary-Claire Collard 2015) 
Critical Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical animal studies, exploring the spatial, political and ethical dimensions of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounter.... Chapters draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist, post-colonial, and critical race literatures... In doing so, the book pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race, class, and species.

Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Claire Jean Kim, 2015) 
Dangerous Crossings offers an interpretation of the impassioned disputes that have arisen in the contemporary United States over the use of animals in the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples. It examines three controversies: the battle over the “cruelty” of the live animal markets in San Francisco's Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over the Makah tribe's decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Claire Jean Kim shows that each dispute demonstrates how race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power, to create the animal, the Chinese immigrant, the black man, and the “Indian” in the white imagination.



POLITICS & STRATEGY
Political Animals and Animal Politics (M.L.J. Wissenburg & David Schlosberg, 2014) 
While much has been written on environmental politics on the one hand, and animal ethics and welfare on the other, animal politics, as the interface of the two, is underexamined. There are key political implications in the increase of animal protection laws, the rights of nature, and political parties and movements dedicated to animals. What are the implications of the increasing attention and popularity of ethical discourses on animal welfare and animal rights for politics and political philosophy? What is the animal's place in environmental political thought – and in 21st Century political philosophy per se? What can, rather than should, politics do for animals – what institutions and practices are suitable and desirable? Can animal ethics learn from animal politics?

The Politics of Species: Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals (Raymond Corbey & Annette Lanjouw, 2014) 
Bringing together leading experts from a range of disciplines, this volume identifies the key barriers to a definition of moral respect that includes nonhuman animals. It sets out to increase concern, empathy and inclusiveness by developing strategies that can be used to protect other animals from exploitation in the wild and from suffering in captivity. The chapters link scientific data with normative and philosophical reflections, offering unique insight into controversial issues around the ethical, political and legal status of other species.

Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement (David Naguib Pellow, 2014) 
In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim [“all oppression is linked"] and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists’ uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call “total liberation.” 

Framing Farming: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights (Carrie Freeman, 2014) 
Professor Freeman examines the animal rights movement’s struggles over whether to construct farmed animal campaign messages based more on utility (emphasizing animal welfare, anti-cruelty farming reforms, dietary reduction of animal foods, and human self-interest like health) or based more on ideology (emphasizing animal rights and abolition of farming and eating fellow animals). Freeman prioritizes the latter, “ideological authenticity,” to promote a needed transformation in worldviews and human-animal identity, not just behaviors. This would mean framing “Go Veg” messages not only around compassion, but also around principles of ecology, liberty, and justice



WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN


What Animals Can Teach Us About Politics (Brian Massumi, 2014) 
His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum... [which] requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion."

Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounters with Animals (Richard Iveson, 2014) 
Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals offers radical new possibilities for encountering and thinking with other animals, and thus for the politics of animal liberation. Examining the machinations of power that legitimize the killing of nonhuman animals, Zoogenesis shows too how thoroughly entangled they are with the 'noncriminal' putting to death of human animals... Iveson thereafter explores the possibility of interventions...that potentially make it unthinkable that living beings can be 'legitimately' slaughtered.

Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us about the Origins of Good and Evil (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, 2014) 
Masson has showed that animals can teach us much about our own emotions—love (dogs), contentment (cats), grief (elephants), among others. But animals have much to teach us about negative emotions such as anger and aggression as well, and in unexpected ways... We link the basest human behavior to animals, to “beasts”... and claim the high ground for our species. We are least human, we think, when we succumb to our primitive, animal ancestry. Nothing could be further from the truth... Our burden is that humans, and in particular humans in our modern industrialized world, are the most violent animals to our own kind in existence, or possibly ever in existence on earth

Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood (Matthew Cole, 2014) 
Focusing on the socialization of the human use of other animals as resources in contemporary Western society, this book explores the cultural reproduction of human-nonhuman animal relations in childhood. With close attention to the dominant practices through which children encounter animals and mainstream representations of animals in children's culture... Our Children and Other Animals reveals the interconnectedness of studies of childhood, culture and human-animal relations. In doing so it establishes the importance of human-animal relations in sociology, by describing the sociological importance of animals in children's lives and children in animals’ lives.


OTHER
Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves (Laurel Braitman, 2014) 
For the first time, a historian of science draws evidence from across the world to show how humans and other animals are astonishingly similar when it comes to their feelings and the ways in which they lose their minds. Thankfully, all of us can heal... How do these animals recover? The same way we do: with love, with medicine, and above all, with the knowledge that someone understands why we suffer and what can make us feel better.

Circles of Compassion: Connecting Issues of Justice (Will Tuttle, 2014) 
This book consists of a series of essays by internationally recognized authors and activists...focusing on how the seemingly disparate issues of human, animal, and environmental rights are indeed connected. Authors also provide practical guidance about how to make the individual, systems, and social changes necessary to effectively create a peaceful and just world for all.

Critical Animal Studies in 2014

Welcome to 2014. We have yet again an exciting year of cutting edge books on animal advocacy and theory.

Outlined below is the third annual Animal Reading List. This follows 2012's exciting lineup of books challenging conventional approaches to animal ethics and advocacy and 2013's posthuman bonanza. The Animal Reading List of 2014 is organized into four categories: Critical Animal Theory, Human-Animal-Machine, Ecology, Geography, Effective Advocacy for Animals, and Coffee Table books.

Critical Theory
With the release of two anthologies defining the field, 2014 is a significant year for critical animal studies. In Defining Animal Studies, new and veteran contributors to the field elaborate on the ten principles of critical animal studies from deconstructing the human-animal binary to bridging academics and advocacy to building multi-movement coalitions for total liberation. The Rise of Critical Animal Studies alternatively focuses on the theoretical grounding, challenging methodologies, and effective application of critical animal studies. Finally, Ecofeminism returns attention to two distinguishing themes of ecofeminist theory -- affect and context -- exploring the interspecies phenomenon of joy and grief as well as animal advocactes' complicity with white, class, and gender privilege.

Several books listed present ontological questions regarding the callous implosion human, animal, and technological natures. In The Silence of Animals, John Gray challenges human exceptionalism and progress, prescribing a Buddhist-like appreciation of our animality including a disciplined suspension to let the world be. Animals and War presents the bloody consequences of human aspirations to compete against others to order the world according to their wills and self interests: exploiting animals as vehicles in war, as test subjects of weapons and medics, as ecological casualties, and as combatants and weapons themselves. Emily Anthes studies the latest violation of body integrity in Frankenstein's Cat, exposing the science fiction realities of remote controlled animals for surveillance, bioenginered pets for profit, and more.

Geography and Ecology
Animal others are, of course, more than the object of ethics and theory as well as the anithesis and prey of technology. Animal others are inhabitants of cherished and forsaken places. Julie Urbanik in Placing Animals draws the most comprehensive map of the spatial arrangements and meanings humans share with animals from the farm, to the woods to the lab, including an introduction to the sub-field of animal geography. Trash Animals is dedicated to the egregiously misunderstood realities of "mis-placed" species, animals who receive little advocacy yet reap a large proportion of violence for being "filthy," "invasive," and "worthless."

Ronald Sandler gives to us a much overdue in-depth discussion of the value of species in his The Ethics of Species, treading controversies over restoration, assisted colonizations, hybrid animals, engineered species, and human "enhancement." Centering Animals in Latin American History is the first of its kind to delve into contested intra and interspecies power relations in Latin America, teetering between posthuman recognition of animals as historical agents and postcolonial critique of market and state domination through animal protection. Last but not least, Andrew Lindzey's Global Guide to Animal Protection collects synopses of nearly two hundred animal rights causes including amphibian conservation, sanctuary work, habitat restoration, living with predators, sabotaging hunts, combating poachers, managing feral cat populations, and animal law.

Effective Words and Images
Animal activists have another collection of books this year that may very well improve their advocacy. In the first, Russ Mead lays out laws and policies in Nonprofit Animal Law spanning across risk management, fundraising, employment and volunteering, animal disaster response, nonprofit structure, tax exemption, animal cruelty, intellectual property, animal transport, public events, privacy laws and more. Arguments about Animal Ethics is another over-due book from the field of communications containing fascinating essays inclusive of interspecies communication, inner dialogue, analysis of sexualized and racialized rhetorical strategies in advocacy,  and critique of the biomedical backlash of said advocacy. Finally, there are the statistics-heavy entries, one on the externalized economic costs of animal flesh production by David Simon in Meatonomics and the other on the efficacy, demographics, myths, and cognitive processes of vegans and omnivores in Nick Cooney's Veganomics.

After the release of We Animals, a book by Jo-Anne McArthur, star of Ghost in the Machine, I've decided to include a new category for less academic and verbose texts, specifically one dedicated to the power of visual art. McArthur's We Animals, Sue Coe's Cruel, and Daniel Imhoff's CAFO are certainly more than coffee books, but they have a heightened accessibility because of their provocative images. Accompanied by anecdotes and essays, all three books provide an opportunity for a reader to witness the popularly unperceptive marginalization and violence against animals.


If you are interested in reviewing a book or film for this blog or in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, please send me an email.

Re-Assessing Animal Rights: Resources

I've been thinking about the state of the animal defense movement* quite a lot after attending four conferences on organizing this summer. Perhaps for the better, the Animal Rights 2013 conference was not one of them. The conferences I attended were either organized by and for grassroots activist or were nearly silent on the status of animal others. Never have I learned so much and been inspired more. There I was exposed to alternative interpretations of the history and politics of the US and the modern world, and there I realized how white and superficial the analyses and strategies of mainstream animal activists often are.

This post is dedicated to providing resources to those open to re-assessing the history, politics, organization, tactics, theories, and language of the animal defense movement. I intend to write more about the presentations and drama I witnessed at these conferences, but for now I want to share some essays and presentations that have really challenged and inspired me to re-think my assumptions and history of abstract theorizing that is valued in academic settings, especially in philosophy.

Re-Assessing Animal Defense

 

The History and Politics of the Animal Defense Movement

With the rise of the vegan movements, the politics of animal defense have become increasing personal that many activists have forgotten that vegan-consumption is just one strategy, and not even the most important. On the other hand, large nonprofits have taken to reforms that do not challenge the source of animal oppression: their status as commodities. Yet still, animal defense is often interpreted from the perspective of those who have made careers at nonprofits and universities--what of the history of the grassroots?

• Animal Rights: Moral Crusade or Political Movement (Kim Stallwood 2013)
• The State of the US Animal Rights Movement (Interview w/ Gary Francione 2002)
• Animal Rights History, Welfarism, and 'Star Wars' (Interview w/ Josh Harper 2011)
• History of the Anti-Vivisection Movement (Josh Harper 2013)

The Limits of Vegetarian Outreach

Vegetarian outreach has been a staple of the nonprofit animal defense movement since the 1990's when activists realized that over 95% of animals were killed and exploited by agribusiness. While there is much debate over how to best "sell" vegetarianism, critiques of the sufficiency of veganism as a "baseline" has been less frequent. Is vegan education our most effective tactic? Is "veganism" sufficient for animal liberation?

• The Science of Animal Advocacy (Nick Cooney 2013)
• Science of Science-y -- A Critique of Vegan Outreach Studies (DXE 2013)
• Skinny Bitch and Bulimic Vegetarians (Adam Weitzenfeld 2009)
• Boycott Veganism: Animal rights only begins with your diet (Anonymous 2007)
• A Critique of Consumption-Centered Veganism (Adam Weitzenfeld 2011)
• Abolition, Liberation, Veganism (Ida Hammer 2011)

The Problem with Analogies to Human Oppression

Some animal activists draw logical analogies between the institutional violence against nonhuman animals and oppressed humans. The presumption is that the public will have a logical breakthrough that violence against nonhuman animals is unjust like violence against oppressed humans. Have the articulation and performances of these analogies bore the breakthroughs as activists hoped, or only further alienated them from their cause?

• Animal Whites: PETA and the Politics of Putting things in Perspective (Tim Wise 2005)
• On Analogies as Advocacy Tools: Some Thoughts on Appropriation (BWM 2013)
• Performance Politics: Abstract Animals and Suffering Humans (Dylan Powell 2013)
• Why "Putting Non-Humans First"... Doesn't Work (Corey Wrenn 2013)
• Inadmissible Comparisons (UPC 7th Conference 2007)*
 

Critiques of Non-Profit Campaigns & Conferences
The hegemony of corporate non-profits have "hijacked" the strategy, language, and tactics of animal liberation. Non-profits generate funds and publicity for animals, however, they have also been notoriously conservative on matters of class, race, and gender in their organizations and campaigns. Their collusion with State power, capital, and white supremacy has built a large funding base, but are they building a movement upon the marginalization and oppression of humans?

• Smoke and Mirrors -- A Critique of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Ida Hammer 2009)
• Invasion of the Movement Snatchers  (James LaVeck 2006)
• The Need to Address Classism at Conferences, Seminars, and Festivals (Ida Hammer 2008)
• Recalling the Animal Rights Conference 2013 (Anastasia Yarbrough 2013)
• Sexualization (of Women in the Animal Rights Movement) (Vegan Feminist Network 2013)
• Colonialism (in the Animal Rights Movement) (Vegans of Color 2008)
• Veganism and Prison Abolition (Ida Hammer 2009) 

 
The Intersections of Human and White Privilege in the ADM

The animal defense movement has continued to be the whitest social justice movements in the US for decades, despite that people of color are no less compassionate and no less likely to be vegetarian. We've already looked at colonial campaigns, analogies that alienate, under-representation in leadership, and complicity in racist law enforcement. What analytic tools, strategies, and language can whites adopt and support to build coalitions across racialized experiences?

• Working With(in) Whiteness (pattrice Jones 2013)
• The Color of Animal Rights (Dr. Harper, L. Ornelas 2013)
• Intersectionality in Theory and Practice (pattrice Jones 2013)
• What’s Wrong with ‘Rights’ (pattrice jones 2013)
• Beyond Veganism: Food Justice (Lauren Ornelas 2012)
• Decolonizing our Taste Buds and Self-Care (Claudia Serrato 2013)

How to Disrupt Oppression

Once equipped with more sophisticated theory and more supportive of people of color and queer leadership and projects, animal activists are on their way to building a movement that reaches beyond the single-issue identity politics of "animal rights." This is, of course, easier than it sounds. Because nearly all of us in the US have been colonised by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, it will take some effort on our behalf to challenge its "common sense" built into our brains-and-flesh. How can we resist these old habits?

• Don't be that Dude: Handy Tips for the Male Academic (Acclimatrix 2013)
• The Problem when Sexism Sounds so Darn Friendly (Melanie Tannenbaum 2013)
• Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful  Subjects) (Sara Ahmed 2010)
• How to Tell Someone they Sound Racist (Jay Smooth 2008)
• The Revolution Will Not be Polite (Rachael 2012)
• Getting Called Out: how to Apologize (Chesaleigh 2013)

Critiques of Ally, Intersectionality, and Privilege

Over the last ten years as the internet has made it easier to "call-out" animal activists for their complicity with racism and other oppressive systems, some mainstream organizations and many white activists have adopted the language of anti-oppression. Have white activists' identification as allies, acknowledgement of their privileges, and references to "intersectionality" transformed their activism or obscured privilege and power?

• No More "Allies" (Mia Mckenzie 2013)
• Defining and Critiquing 'Intersectionality' (S.E. Smith 2010)
• Tim Wise & the Failure of Privilege Discourse (Robtheidealist 2013)
• The Problem with Privilege (Andrea Smith 2013)
• How Vegan Oppression Cannot Exist (Ida Hammer 2010)
• A Class Struggle Anarchist Analysis of Privilege Theory -- From the Women's Caucus

Are there any essays, talks, and books that have changed your advocacy for animals? Please share in the comments. I may add them to the list!

Eating our Way to Global Citizenship

Eating our Way to Global Citizenship:
A Rumination on the Role of International Education in Creating a Sustainable Future of Food and Identity

“The lesson of ecology is that one cannot care for the future of the human race without caring for the future of its context… A land ethic, on this view, is the moral thread that links past, present, and future individuals in a common culture. That culture can be perpetuated only if it respects limits inherent in the land context—for continuity in that land context gives shared meaning to cultures as they unfold through time.” -- Bryan Norton in Toward a Unity Among Environmentalists (1991,219)

“All education is environmental education,” writes environmental educator David Orr. “By what is included or excluded we teach the young that they are part or apart from the natural world.” Likewise could be said about an international education of food. While environmental and international education have grown more prominent in the 21st century, food has been relatively neglected as a subject within both international and ecological contexts in proportion to its role in environmental justice. Food ought to be among the highest priorities of all people concerned with the world’s one billion hungry people, the thousands of children who die daily of malnutrition, and the irreversible disappearance of Earth’s biocultural diversity. In the context of food, addressing sustainability requires a concern for not only economy and society, but culture and individual human life as well. Far from a private, domestic concern, eating fair and sustainable food is one aspect of becoming a global citizen.

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (review)

Table of Contents

Part 1:
• Are Animals the New Slaves?
• What Went Wrong?
• Racism, Speciesism, and Cross-racial Misunderstanding
• Are human-animal juxtapositions reductionistic?
Part 2:
• Animal Rights or Animal Whites?
• Animal White Supremacists?
• Vegan Colonialism
• One Word: Empathy
Part 3:
• A Colorful Movement: Debunking the White Lie of White Exceptionalism
• Making us Invisible: The Epistemology of Ignorance
• The White Activist's Burden: Engaging the "Other"
Part 4:
• Killing Us Softly: Narratives of Alienation
• With Us or against Us –or- “Sit Down and Shut Up, Little Brown Girl”
Part 5:
• Eating the Other: "Exotic" Food Fetishes
• Are Vegans Oppressed?
• The Police & White Privilege
• Freeganism: The Privilege of Free Food?
  
• Classism & Consumer Advocacy
• Toward a Mutual Trust: Veganism as a Safe Place
  

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 5)

After having argued that there is actually quite a bit of racial diversity in the international and domestic vegetarian and animal rights movements, I discussed reasons for why the movements are nonetheless perceived as so white: epistemologies of ignorance (i.e. a whitewashed history, framing veg*nism as a lifestyle rather than a social justice philosophy/diet), disinterest in outreach and collaboration within communities of color, self-fulfilling prophesies about race (i.e. scrutinizing "others" rather than scrutinizing our tactics), and alienating interested persons at events and conferences.[part 3]

Afterwards, I exclusively focused on several ways in which well-intentioned vegans and ARAs alienate vegans of color: They may (obliviously) make blatantly racism comments, treat VOC as tokens to flag in front of the public rather than full-fledged allies, be ignorant of/indifferent to how their discourse and tactics are offensive to VOC, suppress criticism of/concerns about said discourse/tactics ("you're being divisive"), marginalize the emotional trauma/rage triggered by said events (b/c "some good will come of it"), and invalidate their feelings ("get over it"/"you didn't get the message"). [part 4] In this post I will also add the alienation that arises when VOC are "Othered" through discourse of "exoticism."

The remainder of the series, which I will conclude here, will cover additional areas in which white and middle-class privilege go ignored by the majority of the U.S. ARA and vegan movements. Specifically, I'll discuss the greater obstacles and consequences VOC encounter within direct action (i.e. open rescues) and freeganism (i.e. dumpster diving), and why vegans are not "oppressed." In addition, I will briefly discuss the classism present within the dominant discourse of animal activism and veganism. I will conclude by acknowledging the limits of how much privileged persons can understand the struggles those without it face, and the need for them to "liberate" themselves from ignorance before they can become allies in their liberation.

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 4)

Introduction
In part 1 of the Privilege series, I examined a particular case of when vegan outreach goes wrong (i.e. the public juxtaposition of images in which "animals" and people of color are being oppressed) and discussed how such tactics generally alienate people from the cause rather than welcoming them into it. In part 2, I delved into the issue of race relations a bit more by discussing how many white AR and vegan activists are oblivious to their white (and sometimes class) privilege and thus unintentionally oppress others through their rhetoric and discourse. In part 3, I documented how, despite the overall whiteness of the movements, people of color are active in vegetarian and animal advocacy around the world and how epistemologies of ignorance make it seem otherwise.

In each of the aforementioned parts, I concluded by emphasizing the importance of inclusiveness, empathy, and partnership. In part 4, these three criteria for effective and appropriate outreach/relationship with people of color come together and it becomes clear how white ARAs and vegans can alienate their allies. Racism comes in many forms. Here we will see it in the form of blaming, stereotyping, suppressing, marginalizing, fetishizing, and reversing victimization.

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 2)

In the first part in this series on privilege and veganism, I analyzed the poor reception of PeTA’s “Are Animals the New Slaves?” exhibit and the general use of human and non-human oppression analogies. [14] I concluded that outreach efforts like these

ought to cast the vegan movement into dire reflection. The reaction the exhibit received signifies a severe shortcoming in the general movements tactics and social consciousness—even for those who do not generally like PETA. Much of vegan discourse and tactics are engendered with implicit racism and classism… of the preferential kind that caters to a white middle-class audience… It is assumed that only white, English-speaking middle-class people really care about animals; only they are the enlightened heroes. [14]

I can imagine some people still thinking “Wait! Most animal/vegan activists I know are not racist, don’t like PeTA, and would never use these tactics. The racist, sexist, and discursive practices of some vegans don’t represent the whole vegan movement!” Perhaps this is true, but I am more inclined to disagree. If anything the inverse is true. The general vegan movement is obliviously “white;” it has neither condemned the racism of demonizing and/or fetishizing foreign nations and cultures nor has it put forth significant effort into respectful vegan outreach in communities of color.

In the following sections I will explore how the animal/vegan movement(s) systemically ostracize people of color (which is arguably a symptom of institutional racism)—most often without any consciousness of doing so.

Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 1)

Introduction
My aim in this series on privilege is to examine the (not so) invisible whiteness of the “vegan” movement. In the subsequential posts, I hope to educate fellow advocates who have not thought much, if at all, about white privilege and how it not only ostracizes vegans of color, but also alienates potential vegans and allies from joining the movement. The first post in this series will focus on one of the most controversial (and obvious) demonstration of race-relations gone wrong, then the following ones will delve more into the dynamics in everyday vegan advocacy.

“Are Animals the New Slaves?”
In the summer 2005, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PeTA] began a traveling exhibit entitled "The Animal Liberation Project" [NOTE: This is an updated version of the ALP. Also see the UK versions] in which it was asked, “Are Animal the New Slaves?” The original exhibit, composed of images from the Cambodian genocide, exploitative child labor practices, and enslaved and lynched American slaves to photos of nonhuman animal bodies in like contexts, attempted to manifest the conceptual connections between the oppression of human groups and the oppression of animals in the minds of its audience. However, after only a month on the road, the exhibit was suspended after major outrage ensued in New Haven, Connecticut.

Not only did students begin shouting at PeTA’s staff that the exhibit was racist, but predominant Afro-American organizations joined in the outrage at the juxtapositions being made. For instance, Scott X. Esdaile, the president of the regional NAACP, arrived at the exhibition in order to demand its removal. He declared that “[o]nce again, black people are being pimped. You used us. You have used us enough." [1]

Vakiya Courtney, executive director of America’s Black Holocaust Museum was particularly outraged, as Dr. James Cameron, the founder of the museum, was one of the men in a noose being juxtaposed to slaughtered steers. "How can you possibly compare the brutality that our ancestors... that people like Dr. Cameron had to overcome," she asked, "to animal cruelty?" [1]

Dr. Cameron, the only living survivor of a lynching in America, acknowledged that he was "treated like an animal" at the beginning of the century, but that "there is no way we should be compared to animals today… You cannot compare the suffering… I experienced to the suffering of an animal." [1]

In response to one person’s outrage, Ingrid Newkirk, the president and cofounder of PeTA, wrote that she can and should make such comparisons despite the outrage of millions of Afro-Americans “because it is right to do so and wrong to reject the concept. Please open your heart and your mind and do not take such offense” [2]. While PeTA’s exhibit may have been created with good intentions, Newkirk’s remarks, on the contrary, were strikingly insensitive toward the Afro-American community whose ancestors were enslaved not 150 years ago and who still to this day struggle with dehumanization and subordination in America. Later, Newkirk went on to "unequivocally apologize for the hurt" after realizing that "old wounds can be slow to heal and for not helping them to heal, I am sorry." [1*] The NAACP spokesperson, John White, in response to Newkirk's decision to continue the project said simply, "I'm not surprised." [1*]