Citizenship Politics and Hierarchies in Animal Rights Activism and Oppression
I’ve been mulling over two really great pieces on animal liberation and the animal rights movement these past couple of weeks.
Aph Ko: Afrofuturism and Black Veganism: Towards a New Citizenship at the Intersectional Justice Conference
Aph’s work on Aphro-ism and Black Vegans Rock is awesome, and this video is really important. I’ve been wanting to post this ever since it came out. I finally finished captioning it, so now you can view it on Amara in English. I also put the captions into a slightly edited transcript if you’d rather read her talk. Her description: “In my talk, I discuss how intersectionality is a useful tool for navigating current oppressive systems, and how Afrofuturism is a brilliant tool for creating conceptual blueprints for tomorrow.”
Aph touches on a lot of things and the video in itself is impactful, so I recommend just watching it all the way through (content warning for racial violence and imagery), but I’ll try to sum up some main points:
Intersectionality as “social layerism”
Racial and animal oppression
Afrofuturism and imagining freedom
Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model
Intersectionality as “social layerism”
I think we need to re-evaluate the ways that we think systems of oppression are connecting, because currently, I can tell that some activists are struggling to articulate how and why these issues are entangled, and instead, they try to engage with a type of analysis that I call "social layerism", […] when activists try to enact a type of intersectional analysis, but they just end up superficially layering these issues on top of one another without any meaningful connection or analysis. So that basically means that a lot of people are saying anti-racism, feminism, speciesism, all in the same sentence, which is a really big deal, but there's not really a lot of work being done on connecting these things conceptually.
Aph mentions a popular video, On Intersectionality in Feminism and Pizza, where Akilah uses pizza made from animals’ products and animals’ bodies to explain intersectionality, as an extreme example of social layerism. Akilah is literally talking about a pizza with toppings and not making any connections between feminine and animal oppression (see Carol J. Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat), or any other type of oppression, instead explaining intersectionality as additional layers of issues that aren’t connected or entangled. Although intersectionality has become mainstream, its meaning hasn’t really translated into our social movements.
Aph explains how the compartmentalized, single-issue movements of today – feminism, anti-racism, animal rights, etc. – prevent more meaningful connections between oppression to take place. She brings up the the issue of physical borders as a concrete example of citizenship politics, and also as an analogy to the policing that happens within different types of activist spaces. She gives examples of the vitriolic reaction against Black Vegans Rock that white and non-Black minorities have had.
A lot of vegans who believed that veganism was in their possession, in particular, a part of white citizen identity. A lot of white people felt like they unquestionably had access to, and could be the gatekeepers over, veganism, and that Black people who talked about race in conjunction with veganism were crossing a border […] that white folks created, and our racialized discussions about animal rights were threatening them and their current citizenship to the landscape of animal rights. Our attempts at talking about race and animal at the same time was viewed as deviant, wrong, and barbaric. We had to do it "the right way". We had to go through the right channels to become a proper animal rights activist, which meant adopting Eurocentric ideas about animal oppression, Black oppression, and more. If you do talk about race as a person of color, or if you create your own project, your citizenship to the animal rights space is interrogated, and you're viewed as not belonging, and being inhospitable as a guest to their white space. You're basically told to "go back from where you came from," which were these, like, weird, Brown, anti-racist spaces, 'cause white people didn't talk about race in the vegan world, right? It was, leave your race out of this, this has nothing to do with race.
Aph also talks about the hyperresentation of certain Black folks in veganism and animals rights that are held up as examples of "proper citizens” who’ve been “rehabilitated” and have “transcended race talk”. In essence, “Eurocentric post-racial veganism is being used to superficially show Black bodies in a way where Blackness isn't even really central or discussed, but used as a tool to facilitate a violent form of diversity that serves as a sedative for Black rage.”
Racial and animal oppression
Aph talks about the documentary film, “Always in Season”, that she’s an associate producer on. This was a really emotional part of her talk, since it demonstrated how normalized lynching was not too long ago, and how Black people were (and sometimes still are) considered sub-human and animal.
As many as 15,000 people would be at one lynching. And you have to multiply that by 5,000 documented lynchings that have taken place. And like I said, those are only the documented ones. Experts say there were 2-3 times as many. And this is an image – luckily, you can’t see it too well – but in the center is a 17 year old Black boy named Jesse Washington, who is being tortured and burned in Waco, Texas in 1916. This form of terrorism was so highly organized that they even had postcards they created. […] So this is the front of a postcard, and there’s a guy right here. He was the one sending the postcard. He marked himself in it. They were not afraid to even show their faces. That’s how normalized this was. And at the back of this postcard, to his father, he wrote, “This is the barbecue we had last night.”
This film is about what Black and white people had to live with then, and what they’re living with now. Lynching was like hunting, however, no licenses were required, which meant that Black folks were always in season, which is why it’s titled that way. So I don’t think Black oppression is “like” animal oppression, I argue that it’s a part of it. If Black people are considered sub-human and animal, then what they’re experiencing is also, I argue, animal oppression. So when animal rights activists from the dominating class keep telling people like me that Black people are “centering” ourselves in an animal rights movements that’s supposed to be about animals, you have to realize that Black people intimately understand what it means to be hunted and terrorized. And as long as Black activists are making the necessary connections to animal oppression, then animal oppression will be a product of our racial liberation movements, considering racism, I argue, is also a speciesist thing.
Aph and her sister Syl have argued for an epistemological revolution (see Why Animal Liberation Requires an Epistemological Revolution). Instead of viewing oppressions as manifesting independently and then connecting with other oppressions in the similarity of their material violations, we need to realize that the root of all oppression is due to citizenship in the territory of “sub-human” or “other” that is inferior to the dominant class (“glorified white humans”).
Afrofuturism and imagining freedom
Part of the power that the dominant society has is being able to take away your imagination such that the way the world is given to you is the only way it can ever be, and the only movement you can ever really do in that system is to get more comfortable. The way white supremacist patriarchy has defined us is seemingly all we can ever be as minorities.
When the system steals your imagination, they have arrested your future. Most of us are so caught up in the fight today, especially in intersectional circles, we’re so caught up in the fight and the language of oppression that we’ve kind of forgotten that this fight is supposed to be temporary. We cannot start building homes in our trenches. We are only here temporarily. Eventually, the goal is, we want to climb out and build a new landscape, because, remember, that’s the goal. It’s not just to stay in the fight just to fight, but it’s to get out and find a space that’s revolutionary.
Aph introduces Afrofuturism as a path forward from becoming a decolonized being to shaping society after liberation has been achieved.
Liberation isn't the end, it is merely the outcome of revolution. However, we can't forget to start planning for the day after our liberation comes, because that's the day when we have to build a new system, and a new society, and we have to start working on that blueprint today. And the day after liberation is the day that we're most vulnerable, so we need to create some conceptual architecture for tomorrow.
Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model
So in a lot of our movements today – even our intersectional movement – we assume that white people are at the center of our solar system, and we orbit them. And so this has produced, in my opinion, a "Dear white people," type of activism – and that's a film – where the only way minorities can get any rights or anything done is through white people. And in order for liberation, we have to educate them. This is even why people say "women and people of color". Where does that leave me? “Women and people of color.” Even in intersectional movements, we say this because these are descriptors for bodies that are not white men. So this is again: they are at the center of our universe. And I'm arguing that we need to move to a model that's similar to the heliocentric model, which says that we do not orbit whiteness. White supremacy orbits us, and inferior beings, in order to exist, grow, and thrive. There is no white supremacy if there is no anti-Blackness. Just as the earth needs the sun's light to thrive and grow, systems of oppression need sub-humans in order to feel superior.
I know many in the room would call that intersectional. I'm calling that an Afrofuturistic politic. And what's interesting about the heliocentric model, again, is that the sun is a conglomeration of all beings that are labeled inferior, sub-human, and animal. And my sister Syl […] says, "Racism, sexism, ableism, speciesism, classism, and so on… These are real phenomena, of course, but as philosopher Sylvia Wynter warned, we should avoid mistaking the 'maps' for the 'territory'. The territory is the massive domain of Others, whose scope can only be grasped when we dig deeper to go beyond the constraints of the specific -isms and see ourselves as – following Frantz Fanon's words – damned beings by virtue of lacking of full 'human' status." And that's what connects a lot of us who are labeled oppressed: in addition to non-human animals, we're viewed as sub-human.
Aph explores the reimagination of citizenship within an Afrofuturistic framework for everyone labeled inferior. With this framework, racial liberation movements will tackle animal oppression – those with citizenship in the same domain of Others, with their intimate knowledge of what it means to be sub-human, will be the authors of change, creating new conceptual architectures for the future.
The power of Afrofuturism is that it's model-less. There is no model. It's ambiguous. And its power lies in that ambiguity because there are no structures, there are no leaders, there are no hierarchies, which I would argue are the foundational elements for systems of oppression. It's about reimagining your citizenship beyond white supremacy and patriarchy.
Animal Liberation: Devastate to Liberate, or Devastatingly Liberal? by Anonymous
By liberating ourselves, from the oppressive chains of causes, identities and ideology of group politics, we may stop walking round towns looking for animal abuse and instead aim for how to rid ourselves of the behaviour which currently reproduces the state and class divided society in our own activity.
27. Of course the idea of a cruelty free product is a carefully crafted illusion. No such thing can exist — all commodities are cruel. Every single thing that can be bought, every service, every item of food, every household good, every house, road or car has been produced with the forced slavery of working class people. The predominance of middle class people who make up the animal rights movement ignore this because they tend not to have to suffer half as much in society themselves. Even if you were only interested in cruelty in regard to animals (a trait with a perplexing popularity amongst the human members of the animal rights movement), how could you avoid using animal in rubber, glues or on photographic film? This isn’t mentioned to make anyone feel bad about taking photos or whatever but merely to show that the notion of being a “true vegan” in this society is an impossible goal. We didn’t choose for it to be that way, we don’t use such things deliberately for that reason — under this economic system we simply have no control over such a thing.
55. It tends to go without saying but there is every reason to combat hierarchy when it rears its ugly head because hierarchy is precisely the trait which keeps humans in a dominating position over animals. The concept of speciesism, like racism and sexism, is nothing other than a specific application of authoritative power. If it were approached as such then perhaps, perhaps, the animal rights movement wouldn’t be so full of the liberal / fascist nonsense it is today.
62. As soon as any movement around a specific cause develops committees, officers, group contacts etc, it starts to develop a division of status and its campaigners begin to behave like governments. As long as the issue is seen to be animal rights then hierarchical tendencies will crop up and be tolerated. As long as individuals refuse to think about what exactly hierarchy is, and recognise that hierarchy is the crucial king-pin holding all of us, and animals into the roles of the oppressed, then the well-meaning efforts of libertarian liberationists will continually be in vain.
This was something that I came across at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair a few weeks ago, and I think it speaks a lot to the animal rights movement and social movements in general that this anonymous author’s critique of animal rights in England in the early 1990s is basically the same problem of citizenship politics that Aph critiques in her talk in 2016: “It's all about where you fit in. Who's doing it right, who's doing it wrong, whether you're an abolitionist or a welfarist, whether you're intersectional or decolonial. It becomes less about the actual oppression, and more about power. Who is right, and who is wrong? Who belongs, and who doesn't?”
Our movements reproduce the same power structures that underly the oppression that we’re fighting because we’re operating under the same Eurocentric, capitalist models. Recognizing that the human/animal divide – that hierarchy and power gradients – is the linchpin of oppression is the first step in imagining a future for ourselves.
