But a major problem remains: While the reproductive freedom movement clearly arises from and speaks to the experience of women of color, many people of color and some progressive whites eye the animal defense movement with suspicion. The animal defense movement is thought to result from and enact forms of race and class privilege, providing an opportunity for some whites to ignore issues of social oppression. Do white animal defenders put themselves in the place of the animals, thus allowing them not to deal with the privilege they have vis-à-vis other humans? Do white animal defenders identify with animal victims of human privilege because this is a privilege they are willing to foreswear, but not with victims of race and class privilege because these are privileges they wish to maintain? Do white animal defenders betray a lack of empathy if a factory-farmed pig or vivisected monkey can be empathized with but not humans whose faces are at the bottom of society’s well?2 Moreover, because animals’ voices cannot be a part of the theorizing of the animal defense movement, has animal defense developed a resistance politics vis-à-vis animals that in relationship to oppressed humans might enact paternalism? Can resistance be translated to solidarity?
Granted animal defense currently is characterized by a “whitened center”—its theorists and national leaders are white, and many are men.3 All whites are bonded by racism, as bell hooks points out,4 and it is understandable that when a group of white people come together, the suspicion will arise that it is this whiteness that is the bond that brings people together. But, while predominantly white, the animal defense movement is not a monolithic movement, nor is it necessarily inscribing any “culture of whiteness” in its efforts on behalf of animals.5 However, anyone not actively resisting racist oppression can be seen as condoning white supremacy. If white animal defenders fail to support challenges to social oppression, the people who will be hurt are those who lack resources. White animal defenders cannot ignore the piece that each is a part of in relationship to others who suffer social oppression.
The Politics of Otherness
I have argued that the paradigmatic cultural relationship in the West is one of subject to object. The power differentials that allow some subjects to treat other subjects as objects rotate upon the concept and function of otherness. Otherness unites those with power who can declare their similarities to be decisive. Simultaneously, otherness establishes as irrevocable whatever differences have become markers of this otherness (i.e., differences based on sex, race, or species). The process that Zuleyma Tang Halpin observes in scientific objectivity is generalizable to the view of any one in a dominant position in a class-, race-, sex-, and species-stratified culture: “The ‘other,’ by definition, is the opposite of the ‘self,’ and therefore comes to be regarded as intrinsically of lesser value.”6 Caroline Whitbeck identifies this as a “self-other opposition that underlines much of so-called ‘western thought.’ ”7
Concerning the construction of otherness through race, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues: “Racism helps create an illusion of unity through the oppositional force of a symbolic ‘other.’ The establishment of an ‘other’ creates a bond, a burgeoning common identity of all non-stigmatized parties—whose identity and interests are defined in opposition to the other.” Crenshaw points out that this dynamic of otherness is enthroned within the maintenance and perpetuation of white race consciousness because, “by focusing on a distinct, subordinate ‘other,’ whites include themselves in the dominant circle—an arena in which most hold no real power, but only their privileged race identity.”8 The designation of otherness empowers by affirming a superficial sameness within one’s subgroup.
The Animalizing Discourse of Racism
If otherness provides entitlement to those who position themselves as the same, the concept of the beast functions to justify perceiving some people as other and disempowering them. The marker of attributed beastliness, of less-than-humanness, exists to constitute whiteness as well as human maleness. One cannot discuss the idea that some people are situated between man and beast without acknowledging the way that white supremacist beliefs depicted people of color in general and Africans and African-Americans in specific: as not (white) man and (almost) beast. Although all people of color have been bestialized, I am going to focus on the experience of African-Americans because that is what I have had personal experience with. While I do see the bestializing racist discourse against African-Americans as representative and instructive, I do not believe nor do I wish to imply that the experiences of all peoples of color are interchangeable.
Euro-American human maleness used the “less-than-human” definitions to demarcate racial as well as sexual differences, to institutionalize racism as well as sexism. Regarding the term “nigger,” Toni Morrison observes that it “occupies a territory between man and animal and thus withholds specificity even while marking it.”9
Delores Williams asserts that the antiblack arguments of the 1800s, in which blacks were classified with monkeys, (though as “the noblest of the beast creation”10 ) helped “to mould an American consciousness abo ut the Negro that even today regards black people as beasts, female and male. Therefore, black women (and black men) can be abused and treated like animals rather than like humans.”11 In the prevailing dualistic ontology, equation of any human group with the other animals serves to facilitate the humans’ exploitation. As Halpin points out, “Even when groups labeled ‘inferior’ are not explicitly equated with women, they are often compared to animals, usually in ways designed to make them appear more animal than human (using white males as the prototype of humanity).”12
By viewing African-Americans as black beasts, Euro-American men created two pornographic scenarios, one about rapacious black men lusting for white women, and one about lascivious black women available to anyone, man or beast. Both concepts interacted with the notion of white women as pure, virginal and sexless: “Black womanhood was polarized against white womanhood in the structure of the metaphoric system of female sexuality, particularly through the association of black women with overt sexuality and taboo sexual practices.”13 Black men were seen as beasts, sexually threatening white womanhood, a white womanhood defined to aggrandize the sense of white manhood. Black women were seen as sexed, as not able to be violated because they would enjoy anything—including sex with animals. Kimberlé Crenshaw explains how “rape and other sexual abuses were justified by myths that black women were sexually voracious, that they were sexually indiscriminate, and that they readily copulated with animals, most frequently imagined to be apes and monkeys.”14 Indeed, Winthrop Jordan concludes that “The sexual union of apes and Negroes was always conceived as involving female Negroes and male apes! Apes had intercourse with Negro women.” 15 Such representations excused as well as invited sexual exploitation by white men.16 These representations still animate racism today, from the fact that “men who assault black women are the least likely to receive jail time,”17 to the continuing strength of the image of the black male rapist of white women (in fact this is statistically the least likely rape situation).
Antiracist Encounters with the Animalizing Discourse
I myself witnessed the way that the “neither man nor beast” figuration that racializes and animalizes gender while engendering and animalizing race is enacted toward black men and women. In 1977, I became the director of a not-for-profit agency that worked predominantly with welfare recipients, farm workers, and resettled farm workers. I formed an advisory board consisting of representatives from these groups to create some accountability for my work. When, at the first meeting, I asked what concerns existed in the community, the issue that predominated was the need for decent, affordable housing. Simultaneously, a low-income housing project slated to be built in a largely white part of town was turned down by the white city government. I learned that whites had gone door-to-door in the neighborhood where the housing was to be built, asking “Do you want your daughter to be raped by black men?” Here was the archetypal rape scenario for white racists—the spe
cter of the black male rapist that had been used as an excuse for lynching black businessmen and other independent black men earlier in the century—called into service to defeat needed low-income housing. It became the organizing, but rarely acknowledged, mythology in our community.
This scare tactic, of course, did not tell the truth about rapes: the most frequent form of rape is rape by acquaintances—husbands, exhusbands, lovers, and boyfriends.18 Women have the most to fear from men we know. The racist mythology makes black men the scapegoats of the dominant culture’s refusal to acknowledge the fact of women’s lack of intraracial safety. And in the force of the mythology of black-on-white rape, the material, emotional, and spiritual needs of rape victims who are women of color are usually neglected. The fear of random black-on-white violence triumphs over the fact of intraracial woman-abuse and white-on-black rape as a form of racial terrorism:19 “When Black women were raped by white males, they were being raped not as women generally, but as Black women specifically: Their femaleness made them sexually vulnerable to racist domination, while their Blackness effectively denied them any protection. This white male power was reinforced by a judicial system in which the successful conviction of a white man for raping a Black woman was virtually unthinkable.”20
Paul Hock’s White Hero, Black Beast observes that “The threatened assault of the ever erect black buck on the chaste white lady has dominated the mythologies of the American south for more than three centuries.”21 But in fact, these events were unfolding in a small city in upstate New York. My ten years of activism against the racism of this community and in solidarity with African-American leaders began at this time. Predictably, racist, sexist whites responded to my involvement in this antiracist work with venom. Two examples stand out as I reflect on the way they positioned black men as neither man nor beast. At one of the organizational meetings of whites who were opposed to the housing, white men were heard discussing “Carol Adams and her big black bucks.” [Buck: “The adult male of some animals, such as the deer, antelope, or rabbit. . . . Offensive. Used as a disparaging term for a Native American or Black man.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)]
One of the local radio stations was owned by a man involved with this racist white group. A small-town Howard Stern, his freewheeling talk show included discussions about me. One caller conjectured that the reason I had kept my maiden name upon marrying was because I was married to a black man (white racist logic for why a white woman would disavow her husband’s name!). The dilemma I then faced was this: if I said “no I am not married to a black man,” this response would be interpreted as perpetuating a form of racism for it would appear that I was disavowing the idea that I might marry a black man. On the other hand, if I reacted by not dealing with it, by not responding to this salacious interest in my life, this nonresponse would allow it to remain a secret. As a secret, it would then feed their speculation about my motives. Either way, their concern was “what kind of man is she attached to?” Their desire was to place me within a male-identified environment, while also looking for a way to discredit me.22
White racists could only explain my activism by salaciously sexualizing both my black colleagues and me, seemingly confirming Joel Kovel’s observation about racism being inherently sexualized. Citing the charges of rape against black men for touching, approaching, looking at, being imagined to have looked at, talking back to, etc., a white woman, Kovel reports, “A mountain of evidence has accumulated to document the basically sexualized nature of racist psychology.”23 Neither the African-American men nor I could be granted the notion of acting out of motives other than sexual ones. Because of my antiracist work, I could no longer be positioned as an innocent white girl, like those in the white neighborhood who supposedly stood ready targets for the rapacious black man. I was now, not virgin, but whore. But still, I, a white person, was given “possession” (through the possessive “her” in the reference to “her big black bucks”) of the African-American men in these white men’s fantasies. I, a white woman, was granted greater subjectivity and individuality than the black men being referred to. Completely erased in these white racist discourses were the black women, who were, in fact, the majority of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. These were forms of our community’s unsophisticated “low-tech lynchings.” Indeed, George M. Fredrickson argues that “the only way to meet criticisms of the unspeakably revolting practice of lynching was to contend that many Negroes were literally wild beasts, with unconventional sexual passions and criminal natures stamped by heredity.”24 By animalizing blacks, the dehumanizing and destructive violence of lynching could be justified. And just so today, any racism that bestializes its victims enables its own self-justification.
Conceptualizing Freedom—The Anthropocentric and Racist Way
In a hierarchical social order, being associated with animals functions as a marker of a group’s disempowerment and their availability for economic and social exploitation. Winthrop Jordan argues that the Negro-ape association functioned “as a means of expressing the social distance between the Negro and the white man.” He cautions, however, that “American colonials no more thought Negroes were beasts than did European scientists and missionaries; if they had really thought so they would have sternly punished miscegenation for what it would have been—buggery [i.e., bestiality].”25 No, what white American culture required was a people whom they could compare with animals, but who were not animals.
A people who are treated like animals but who are not animals, a people of color who were unfree in a country that proclaimed as its central principles freedom and democracy, such marked people offer potent self-referential possibilities for white people. As Toni Morrison asserts, “For in the construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me.”26 Morrison identifies “the parasitical nature of white freedom”27 : white Americans knew they were free because of the enslaved Africans in their midst. White freedom and black slavery were interdependent. Morrison explains, “The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery.”28 As Alice Walker’s epigraph to this book observes about Blue, the horse: “And it would have to be a white horse; the very image of freedom.” Morrison makes this painfully and unavoidably clear.
The debasement of the other animals is so complete that, unlike racially-marked humans, they offer no such conceptual counterweight to notions of freedom. Notions of freedom applied to animals? The idea seems preposterous because many think animals have no consciousness to render such a concept meaningful or applicable to them. (This of course also explains why arguments for “animal rights” and “animal liberation” are so often ridiculed.) The potency of the interdependent nature of freedom and slavery derives from the fact that enslaved humans reflect back an enhanced human status to those who are free, an enhancement the species barrier clearly prevents objectified and exploited animals from offering.
It is conventionally said that oppression dehumanizes, that it reduces humans to animal status. But oppression cannot dehumanize animals. Animals exist categorically as that which is not human; they are not acknowledged as having human qualities that can then be denied. The presumption of an ontological absence of such human qualities has a priori defined animals as nonhuman.
Resistance against oppression for humans involves recognizing and preserving their “humanity.” But, it is a humanity established through a form of negating: just as white Americans knew they were free by the presence of enslaved blacks, so oppressed humans affirm their humanity by proclaiming their distance from the animals whom they are compared to, treated like, but never truly are. A litany of protests erupt from those struggling against oppression, proclamations that assert “we are not beasts, we are humans, not animals!” Given the anthropocentric nature of Western culture’s primary conceptualizations, this response is not surprising.
As I indicated in the preface, this has been an assertion upon which feminists early staked their appeal for our rights and freedom.
Racist and sexist attitudes expose an elastic, mobile species definition that always advantages elite white males by positioning others as almost beasts. Will antiracist and anti-sexist theory so conclusively accept the inescapable anthropocentricity of the human/animal divide that the result will be a fixed species definition that clearly demarcates once and for all, all humans as human beings, thus tacitly but firmly positioning all other animals as “animals”? Consider the synonyms for beast offered by The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Third Edition): “brute, animal, brutish, brutal, beastly, beastial. These adjectives apply to what is more characteristic of lower animals than of human beings.” Will oppositional movements insure that these adjectives always ap ply only to animals, and thus inscribe as well the hierarchy that positions animals as lower?
Interlocking Systems of Domination
In the preface I argued that an alternative to liberal feminism would be a progressive feminist position that calls the human/animal dualism into question, rather than resituating any of the players from one side of the dualism to the other. But a radical resituating of players actually is called for—it just doesn’t rotate upon the human/animal dualism in such a way that it affirms universal differences and absolute otherness. Rather, in and through this resituating, color will lose its character as a barrier, just as “animals” will lose their otherness, and join human animals as a “we” rather than a “they” or a collective of “its.” The questions we will need to address in the face of such radical resituating will not be about what constitutes “animalness” and who is an animal. But, given that some people and all animals have been cast as “others,” the question will be how to think of ourselves as a “we” without being imperialist or essentialist, without disregarding the particularities of our lives.29
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