When we are children, we don’t pay attention to the race/gender/ or species of others. The family dog can be your best friend, rooming freely around the house with you taking part in adventures. You could care less about the race or gender of your playmates on the playground. The ability to distinguish these traits is taught to you while you are growing and learning. The world around you starts to get smaller as people around you teach you what you should believe. (PICTURE 1)
“I was shocked that I had forgotten that human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.” (760A) Alice Walker expresses this idea beautifully in her story Am I Blue. Relating the treatment of animals, specifically a horse named Blue, to the treatment of slaves. She describes the relationship of adolescence and equality to the conditioning the person faces by the times/parents/ and peers on how to treat those that are different. “About slavery: about white children, who were raised by black people, who knew their first all-accepting love from black women, and then, when they were twelve or so, were told they must “forget” the deep levels of communication between themselves and “mammy that they knew… many more years later a white woman would say: ‘I can’t understand these Negroes, these blacks. What do they want? They’re so different from us.’”(760B) Racism is defined as “a belief that human races have distinctive characteristics that determine their respective cultures, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.” (762) Slave owners taught their children that they were better than the slaves they owned. Had their parents not told taught them, they would have continued to have a lifelong love for their “mammy” and slavery would have ceased to exist.
http://www.southern-style.com/short%20stories/I%20Remember%20Mammy.htm
Animals can feel the despair of lose just as family of slaves when a loved one is taken from their arms. In the story Am I Blue, Blue’s mate was taken from him at a time where he seemed the most tranquil. “Blue was like a crazed person. Blue was, to me, a crazed person. He galloped furiously, as if he were being ridden, around and around his five beautiful acres…It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human, I almost laughed to think there are people who do not know that animals suffer. People like me who have forgotten, and daily forget, all that animals try to tell us.” (760B) We are taught as we grow up that we are human, and that animals are different from us. This is called speciesism. “Speciesism: a belief that different species of animals are significantly different form one another in their capacities to feel pleasure and pain and live an autonomous existence, usually involving the idea that one’s own species has the right to rule and use others.” (762) We forget that we ourselves are animals, sharing this planet with other species. What power are we given that other creatures aren’t? Do we have a bestowed right to treat animals as objects? “The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer?” (757) The answer is yes! Blue’s eye told the story of his pain, and he never trusted the human’s that took his partner away. Animals feel the pain of lose, and we choose not to acknowledge that. Even a goldfish can feel loss. My 7 year old goldfish stopped eating and continued to swim back and forth in his tank for days after the death of another gold fish. I realized that he was mourning the loss of his “friend”. I did find another goldfish to add company to the lonely tank, and after a week my goldfish started to eat again. Though a story of a goldfish isn’t one that should in itself sway you, it should serve as an example that even a goldfish can express loss.
“Comparing the suffering of animals to that of blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notions of what animals are like. Those who are offended by comparison to a fellow sufferer have unquestioningly accepted the biased worldview present by the master. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power. It is to continue actively struggling to prove to our masters, past or present, that we are similar to those who have abused us, rather than to our fellow victims, those whom our masters have also victimized.” - Spiegel (766)
A final thought: “ Dale Baum, a history professor at A&M, said UT’s statues and fountain inscription make it arguably the most Confederate campus in the South.” (784) Taking a walk down the great lawn and past these statues, do you ask yourself about the racism embodied on the Campus of the University of Texas?
Images
- 1. http://www.harrycutting.com/photos_people/photo_14_FC5170.htm
- 2. http://www.southern-style.com/short%20stories/I%20Remember%20Mammy.htm
- 3. http://www.verbotomy.com/jimage400/goldfish.gif
