Aphro-ism Essays on Pop Culture by Aph Ko, Syl Ko by Unknown

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(2) According to the volume of critical messages I receive by email about the view I ' m developing, most activists are very resistant to and even disturbed by theorizing racial oppression alongside animal oppression. Interestingly, these messages are never written by people offended by this sort of theorizing on behalf of racialized populations . Rather, they are offended that animals “ can ' t even get their own space ” in theories devoted to examining speciesism. 3

What this tells me is that in mainstream or standard articulations of animal oppression/speciesism, we actually theoretically and discursively encourage a gap between human and animal oppressions, which then creates a need to try to superficially close this gap, and misguided people think this can be done by presenting crudely drawn and elementary images or analogies of oppression. 4 Not only are these types of comparisons or connections absurd — even worse, these simplistic characterizations miss the ways in which these struggles and these wounded subjectivities relate to one another.

In other words, those who are most eager to juxtapose these kinds of images or discuss how animal slavery is relevantly “ like ” human (black) slavery many times are the same people who tend to be dismissive of or resistant to views in which animal oppression and human oppression are thought about together and in the same spaces with the aim of taking to task racism, sexism, speciesism, ableism, and so on — or coloniality in general — in tandem .

It ' s no surprise that the general public isn ' t buying it (and are offended by it for various good reasons). Most animal rights activists don ' t really believe it , regardless of how many times they reproduce superficial slogans of alleged comparisons and connections.

Maybe when you are viewing these practices from a distance, you tend to not even think of them as being relevant to these terms, no matter how obviously relevant they might actually be. But I think if you experience it yourself, if you belong to an animalized group, if you ' re marked with a certain kind of social history and position, it ' s hard many times not to think of these terms — human and animal — with respect to something other than just species membership. They ' re not just metaphors. They really mean you ' re not one of them: you ' re not human. It ' s hard to think of these terms as being shaped only by how we interact with or use other species. It ' s hard not to see how racial practices have also shaped these words. 8

So, although this debate continues to play out in terms of whether or not making these comparisons or connections is offensive, I think it obscures a far more interesting point we should be discussing: this debate only makes sense on the assumption that we continue to understand speciesism as independent and animal-specific and, as such, a phenomenon that requires connection to other struggles.

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