'Less Than Human' Labeling is Root of All Evil
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM The Vegan Vine
February 2019

Getting people to choose a veggie burger or vegan ice-cream over the animal-based alternatives is bewilderingly difficult, but not as difficult as getting these same people to engage in the critical thinking necessary to change their views of other animals and to recognize other animals' need for equality and justice.

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

At that time, Thoreau was referring to the hypocrisy of philanthropists who gave to the poor yet ignored how their own lives contributed to the circumstances afflicting the poor.

In the same way, donating to an organization or signing a petition doesn't exonerate us from contributing to society's large-scale problems or, in the case of other animals, the systemic violence and injustice they face.

There are some evils in the world that are conspicuous compared with those ingrained in institutions and traditions that uphold the status quo. The actions of people like Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black Americans during a prayer service, are obviously abhorrent to most. On the other hand, we choose not to "see" the violence we contribute to on a mass scale in daily life. Campus protests erupt over a neo-fascist ideologue with a microphone while destructive and insidious "animal science" programs endure without backlash.

And like Thoreau's philanthropists, there are evils of benevolence that give the illusion of charity. A good example is the donation of turkey corpses to the poor for Thanksgiving. We make a spectacle of such events, patting ourselves on the back for our "generosity."

In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative said: "The great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude: It was the ideology of white supremacy, in which people persuaded themselves that black people aren’t fully human."

In the battle for legal rights for other animals we can similarly assert that the great evil of animal slavery (food production, entertainment, labor, war, science, etc.) is the ideology of human supremacy in which human persons have convinced themselves that other animals are not sentient persons in their own right, but inanimate commodities and property.

Those who "love animals" betray the very beings they claim to love on many fronts. Many animal activists are human supremacists who are no less hacking at the branches of injustice, reproducing oppressive behaviors for all species.

In Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters, Aph and Syl Ko ask us to decenter whiteness and humanism in our lives and work. "Veganism isn't just a diet . . . A lot of us aren't just talking about animal oppression, but animality, which is a Eurocentric construct that has contributed to the oppression of any group that deviates from ideal white homo sapiens. . . . There is no human if there is no animal." said Aph Ko.

Violence against animal bodies is legitimized through their "less than human" status. It is this same "less than human" status that has driven white supremacy for so many centuries. Presently, it is why immigrants of color and their babies are imprisoned along the United States border.

Capitalist government industries that thrive on "goods and services" derived from the life and blood of other animals will not be extinguished until the notion of human supremacy is abolished. While white supremacy continues to show itself in overt violence and discrimination, the signs of human supremacy are hidden in plain sight vis a vis factory "farms," aquaprisons, zoos, laboratories, "furriers," rodeos, racetracks, and other deeply entrenched and accepted institutions of slavery.

Myopic and ephemeral measures to enlarge cages or improve living conditions for those enslaved for food, "science," clothing, entertainment, etc. are not striking at the root of our animal industrial complex. The perceived "personal choice" many humans claim to have over the lives of other animals ("It's my right to eat what I want!")—and therefore, whether they live or die—to fulfill some tenuous human pleasure, amusement or convenience involves an ideology that is no less violent and hateful than any other ism.

Last year Stevenson opened a national lynching memorial in order to "create cultural spaces that expose people to the history of enslavement and lynching and segregation and motivate them to say, 'Never again.' " His hope is that we will make the commitment to respond differently when we hear the echo of similar narratives. Those reverberations are all around us. Just imagine an analogous memorial that addressed all the ways we currently use and discard animal persons every single day with such callous indifference.

"The project of physically liberating the animal has to go hand in hand with the work of freeing them from the [human-animal] binary in our heads," said Syl Ko. Animals did not inform our notion of them, rather, white supremacy informed our notion of "animals."

Getting people to choose a veggie burger or vegan ice-cream over the animal-based alternatives is bewilderingly difficult, but not as difficult as getting these same people to engage in the critical thinking necessary to change their views of other animals and to recognize other animals' needs for equality and justice.

The irony is that until human supremacy is conquered in every heart and deed—until we strike at that root—white male supremacy will continue to exist. Human supremacy is a scourge that affects everyone and everything. It brings suffering to all of us, not just the intended victims it targets.

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