SuperWeed

Over at RaceWire, there’s an interesting commentary on a controversy I missed. Evidently, otherwise righteous defenders of evolution are going around comparing creepy Creationists to “welfare queens.” Rinku Sen cheers Stephen Colbert for challenging Kenneth Miller on such rhetoric and calls for more white people to do the same.

That reminded me that I once wrote a piece about the “queen” slur as applied to black women, first by Ronald Reagan to recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and then to other black women like Lani Guinier (the “quota queen”) and Jocelyn Elders (the “condom queen”). I wrote the piece for an LGBTQ newspaper, calling on gay men (also often called “queens”) to be creative in showing solidarity with black women.

Thinking about that piece got me motivated to finally do what I’ve been getting ready to do for more than a year: Start posting my old pieces from print-only and defunct web publications online. So (drum roll)… on the new “texts by pattrice jones” archive… from waaaay back in 1993… here’s “Warlords & Condom Queens.”

It starts in Somalia and ends with Radical Faeries, which was pretty typical of my style back then. Check it out then (here or there) tell me what you think. I’ll try to remember to post a notice here when I post more golden oldies but please do subscribe to that blog if you want to be sure to be notified when new-old essays, interviews, book reviews, chapters, and feature articles go up.

Arguing that “hamburgers and radical feminism are mutually exclusive,” Twisty over at I Blame the Patriarchy has bid farewell to bacon.

Meanwhile, over at AfroSpear, thefreeslave argues that “you can’t be a revolutionary and eat the white man’s food.”

Check out the comments steams for both of those posts. Also of interest is the ongoing problem-solving comment stream over at La Chola, where brownfemipower and the kids want to go veg*n but the other adult in the household does not. Issues of race, class, and gender have all come into the discussion. The discourse has been very thoughtful and blessedly free of the flaming that broke out at Black Looks when, after Sokari announced her veganism, a commenter directed her to the Vegans of Color blog and a white vegan took offense at the very existence of such a blog.

As a white vegan who spent several years doing antiracist work exclusively and who tries to integrate awareness of race into all of her work, I have a lot to say about the obliviousness of some white vegans to their own privilege but that will have to wait for another day. I’ve been mostly posting links and snippets lately because I am shockingly behind on several writing deadlines. Suffice it to say, for now, that if we want to counter the factually false argument that veganism is an inherently elitist “white thing,” we must be willing to see and act to end whatever class and race-based privileges we really do have.

I’m still busy writing other things (one of which you will see soon) and [grrr] grading, so let me send you elsewhere again.

The Black Looks blog is a collective effort of several African and one African American blogger. According to the blog’s founder, “I wanted to primarily focus on anything to do with African Women - a very broad term for a whole continent - and the African Diaspora that is socially, politically, racially, culturally, ethnically and sexually diverse. I also wanted to look at human rights, to challenge stereotypes and discuss issues such as gender, sexuality and racism and how these are constructed and manipulated by culture.” Recent posts have covered topics such as deceptive anti-poverty projects, police repression of LGBT activists in Uganda, and the ongoing 16 days of activism against gender violence.

I don’t know the orientation of the bloggers but this blog turns out to be one of the best sources of news about LGBTQ issues in Africa and within the Diaspora. But what I like best about Black Looks is that the diversity of issues covered really does reflect the stated mission. Often, activists and bloggers here in the USA say that they work within an understanding of the intersection of oppressions but then go on to act and write within an implicitly single-issue focus.

So, for example, anti-racist bloggers and activists have been all over the issue of the Jena 6 — six African American males who were disproportionately prosecuted for an assault perpetrated in the context of white hate crimes against them and their peers –while remaining comparatively silent on the issue of the four African American lesbians who received prison sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years for fighting back against a homophobic attack while the memory of the homophobic murder of their friend Sakia Gunn was still fresh in their minds. (Similarly, African American Sakia Gunn’s murder received much less attention from LGBTQ organizations than did the homophobic murder of white male Matthew Shepherd.)

Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, Patreese Johnson, and and Renata Hill were convicted by an all-white jury for fighting back against a man who choked, spat on, and threatened to rape them because they were lesbians. Why aren’t anti-racist activists marching for them with at least the same fervor that they defend six young men who jumped a white young man who had previously participated in acts of hate against them but was not at the time threatening them? Because they’re women? Because they’re lesbians? Because they’re lesbians who don’t conform to gender norms? Because the man who attacked them, like the man who killed their friend Sakia, was African American? Because it’s all just too complicated?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we shouldn’t defend the young black men collectively known as the Jena 6 from unjust prosecution. I just want to know why these young black lesbians don’t deserve the same protection from anti-racist activists who claim to oppose all forms of discrimination. And excuse me if I get emotional on this one but, while these four weren’t among them, some of Sakia Gunn’s grieving friends were my students a couple of years ago. It could easily have been them sitting in prison while their community and its alliies rally, yet again, to defend men. When are we going to see that it really is all connected, that an injury to one really is an injury to all, that none of us ever will be free so long as some of us are sitting in prison for defending ourselves, other animals, or the earth?

But I’m ranting again and all that I wanted to do was send you over to Black Looks for the antidote to the kind of thing that provoked this rant.

Also of interest today is this Center for Strategic Anarchy post on swarm intelligence. That’s the collective process that allows ants, bees, and other swarming animals to perform complicated cognitive and mechanical tasks without anybody being in charge. Besides providing links to several very interesting articles on the topic, this post explains its relevance to those of us interested in anarchist practice. It’s not such a stretch as it may seem! Way back in 1902, Peter Kropotkin wrote the book Mutual Aid, arguing that natural selection tends to favor cooperation over cut-throat competition. The more we learn about other social animals, the less “natural” warfare and other relatively late developments in the history of our species seem.

Second of seven talk summaries from AR2007

I was on this panel with Jacquie Lewis of SPEAK (Supporting and Promoting Ethics for the Animal Kingdom), who presented a fabulous slide show tracing the changes in what we know (or think we know) about animal cognition. (SPEAK offers presentations at schools, civic groups, and public forums, providing information about animal rights. Check out their website for more information.)

I was a last minute replacement, asked to appear on this morning panel sometime after midnight the night before. Since I had only that morning given a talk on “nurturing activism” (I’ll summarize that one soon… or you could just read my book) in which I had stressed the importance of saying “yes” to requests for aid from other activists whenever possible, I was hardly in a position to say “no.” And I didn’t want to say “no”! I was thrilled to have the chance to share some of my reflections on that subject as well as some of the things I’ve learned from the birds here at the Eastern Shore Sanctuary.

Since this session wasn’t taped, this will be our only record of it. So, I’ll try to reproduce rather than just recap what I said.

The duck called “Seagull” checking on an injured young “broiler” hen

Who are animals? What is cognition?

Whenever I think about “animal cognition,” I right away start wondering what we mean by “animal” and what we mean by “cognition.” Obviously, we animal liberationists ought not be talking about “animal cognition” as if that’s something other than what we do. Animals are us and we ought not talk about “them” as if that weren’t true. Instead we can talk about how different animals, including human animals, perform the functions that we collectively call “cognition.”

I put it that way so that we won’t think about “cognition” as some sort of natural category. The distinction, for example, between thoughts and feelings, between what we call “cognition” and what we call “emotion,” is not at all clear. It’s important to remember that those are just words that some people made up to categorize various nervous system processes. That way, we’ll be less likely to slip into the unjustified assumptions that often come along with those categories, such as the idea that emotion is lower, feminine, and animalistic while cognition is higher, masculine, and human.

A perennial question about cognition is how we know it happens. We experience our own cognition, or at least some of it, directly. But we can only infer cognition in others from our observations of their behavior. That’s made it easy for people to deny that cognition occurs in those they want to exploit, be they animals, women, people of other races, or people with disabilities.

In other instances, we’ve attempted to study the cognition of subjugated human or nonhuman animals by means of unethical experiments. Apart from the immorality of such experiments, we ought to recognize their invalidity as measures of cognitive abilities. There’s a big difference between the cognitive capacities of members of a species and the capabilities of members of that species kept captive under conditions of intellectual and sensory deprivation. We see this at the sanctuary in the difference between the birds who come to us from factory farms and those who grow up here. While the factory farming survivors do very quickly recover or develop many of the capacities that had been stunted by the socially and intellectually impoverished settings in which their young brains developed, they are rarely as clever, curious, or courageous as the feral chicks who grow up with their siblings, attended by their mother, in relatively natural surroundings in which they have plenty of motivation and opportunity to exercise their minds and bodies.

Rather than thinking about “cognition” as an entity, it might be more useful to think about the functions served by what we call cognition. These include communication, mapping, navigating, counting, learning from mistakes, etc. Animals evolve mechanisms to accomplish such tasks as needed. All social animals communicate extensively. Like us, most use a combination of sounds and gestures to symbolize meanings. While none seem to use language exactly as we do, none use dance exactly as bees do. I think it’s safe to assume that different kinds of animals evolve the communication strategies that work best for animals with their physical make-up within their particular ecological setting. Dolphins use sonar to communicate underwater while elephants stomp to send messages over many miles of land.

The same holds true for other cognitive functions. Some animals need to navigate over long distances; others don’t. Those that do use different methods depending on their own physical make-up and the specific navigational tasks that they need to perform.

A good metaphor here is mathematics. All human cultures count and calculate but not all use the same methods of achieving the aims of mathematics. Most of us have a hard time imagining what it might be like to think in a different base system much less imagine different ways of solving the spatial problems that we have been taught there is only one right way to solve. And, indeed, in the history of Western imperialism, cultures that did maths differently were assumed to be primitive peoples who had no concept of maths and had to be taught the correct Western way of thinking about quantities and geometry. Similarly Eurocentric biases dismissed indigenous methods of mapping that were, in fact, much better suited to telling the people what they needed to know about their environments than were the kinds of maps drawn by Europeans.

So, just because somebody — be they human or nonhuman — doesn’t draw maps like you do doesn’t mean they aren’t using some other cognitive method to achieve the aims of mapping. Just because animals don’t do calculus doesn’t mean they don’t use other mental maneuvers to calculate the things they need to know to build dams or spin webs.

Almost all of the cognitive functions involve remembering. That raises another important point. Because we are so very verbal, we tend to only count as “memories” mental images that we are able to express in words. But those of us who deal with trauma know that many memories are stored as sensations or feelings that are not linked to words. These “body memories” seem to be stored in a different part of our brain than our verbal memories. But they are memories just the same. Similarly, it’s quite clear from their behavior that nonhuman animals are doing what we call remembering, however differently their bodies may store and recall the memories they need.

Bird Brains

Many of the most interesting recent observations of nonhuman animal cognition have involved birds. Despite the epithet “birdbrain,” birds actually have rather remarkable mental capacities. You may be familiar with the intelligence of ravens, jays and other Corvids (which, by the way, are the subject of an excellent book called Bird Brains) but I’m here to tell you that chickens are smart too.

Let me tell you the story of “The Rooster Who Cried Raccoon.” Roosters are the sentinels of flocks. All day long, they scan the skies and the horizon, looking for trouble. (This tends to make them relatively high-strung, by the way. As it happens, in contrast to the myth of masculine stoicism, it’s roosters rather than hens who are the most expressively emotional.) Roosters have two different alarm cries that they use to alert the other birds. The alarm cry for an aerial predator sounds a lot like the word “hawk.” When a rooster raises that alarm, all of the birds instantly run for cover, into the underbrush, under trees, or in buildings. Any other rooster who spots the potential predator also raises the alarm. Nobody comes back out into the open until the rooster who raised the original alarm crows to signal “all clear.”

In contrast, when a rooster makes the sound that alerts the flock to a potential ground predator such as a raccoon, everybody freezes and looks around, ready to run in any direction if they should spot the predator. Again, nobody relaxes until crowing signals that the danger has passed.

At the sanctuary, there’s a former fighting rooster called “Hoppy” who had an intractable infection (from an old fighting injury) that eventually led to the amputation of one leg. Probably because of the chronic pain he felt before the amputation, he was especially high strung. One day, he gave the alarm cry for a ground predator and then just kept it up, even though no predator was in sight. After a while, with all of the other roosters crowing, the flock figured out that they were safe and went back to their daily routine. He did it again the next day. And the next. And every day thereafter. After the first few times, the flock ignored his false alarms, only glancing around to make sure they were safe before going on with their daily routines.

Think about what that means: Not only can chickens routinely distinguish between the aerial predator alarm, the ground predator alarm, and the “all clear” signal and not only can they routinely distinguish the different voices of different roosters, but in this instance the flock learned “this is the guy who gives the false alarms” and adjusted their behavior accordingly. (I’m happy to report that Hoppy is much happier since his amputation and there are no more false alarms from him anymore.)

We’ve also seen plenty of evidence of empathy both within and across species here at the sanctuary. You may have heard of the recent observations of scrub jays, which demonstrated not only that they remember where they and others have hidden food but also that they base their food hiding behavior on inferences about what other birds will do. In other words, they are able to put themselves in the place of another bird, imagine what they would do if they were that bird, and then adjust their own behavior accordingly. This often involves a kind of trickery, which also requires the kind of complex recognition of self in relation to others that many people mistakenly assume is unique to humans.

At the sanctuary, there’s a muscovy duck called Seagull and her brother Buddy, both of whom have inserted themselves between disputing roosters in order to break up fights. We have a number of former foie gras factory inmates, including long-time boyfriends Jean-Paul and Jean-Claude. The ducks are very sociable among themselves, of course, but also involve themselves in the lives of the chickens, often showing quite tender compassion for the young “broiler” chickens who sometimes arrive very banged-up after falling from transport trucks. Many times I have seen them adjust their behavior so as not to frighten a fragile new resident. For example, even if it is well past their usual bedtime, they will hang back, rather than rushing past, if a new bird is standing in confusion at the door, quite sensitively waiting for the young bird to orient herself and go inside before carefully following behind. This demonstrates not only what we call compassion but also empathy in the technical sense of being able to accurately discern what somebody else might be feeling.

If only people were better able to use that cognitive capacity!

You won’t want to miss the new anthology coming out this fall called “Sistah Vegan! Food, Health, Identity and Society: Black Female Vegans in North America.” Trust me, this is going to be a very important book. Editor Amie Breeze Harper gets all the connections, as you can see in this interview in Satya magazine.

Visit the Sistah Vegan Project online to get a taste of what’s to come. (Be sure to scroll down below the links to read Breeze’s account of how the controversy within the African American community about PETA’s comparison of human and animal slavery led her to begin to compile the voices of Black female vegans and how this in turn led her to new and more complex questions about how “white racialized consciousness shape[s] mainstream veganism” and, in contrast, how some Black North American women practice veganism “to decolonize their bodies and engage in health activism that resists institutionalized racism.”

Also on the website, you can read sample contributions from the anthology and listen to Breeze talk about “decolonizing our diets.” While you’re there, be sure to click on the link to sign up to be notified when the anthology is available.

Finally, you can help Breeze publicize the anthology by downloading and printing this flyer to hang or distribute at your local health food store, independent bookstore, or other suitable location. The publisher of this anthology is a very small press, so we’re all going to have to do our part to spread the word about this groundbreaking book.

The exhibit area at the annual national animal rights conference is always somewhat surreal. There you are in the icy ballroom of a fancy hotel, brushing shoulders with a tatooed anarchist whose tshirt is emblazoned with a pair of bolt-cutters. The anarchist stands next to a conservatively attired humane educator exchanging contact information with a black-clad member of the Sea Shepherd crew. All four of you are female, as are most of the people in the room. Look left, and you might see festive vegan cupcakes. Look right, and you might see a photo of a vivisected monkey in excruciating pain. Suddenly a booming male voice from a slight young man cupping his hands to shout above the crowd: “The people of color caucus will be meeting in five minutes! The people of color caucus will be meeting in five minutes!” The Asian-Pacific woman from Hawaii with whom you’ve been chatting about cockfighting asks, “People of color? I’ve always wondered: What does that mean?”

Welcome to the most diverse of the animal advocacy conferences, where people from very different places — physical and political — come together in often surprising configurations to learn from, try to understand, and figure out how to work with (or at least not against) each other. Many animal liberationists come to the movement, as I did, from other progressive movements, bringing with us a comprehensive analysis of race-class-sex oppression within the context of environmental and animal exploitation. For others, animal liberation is their first foray into activism. Some come in as disaffected youth already mistrustful of authority. Others come in as otherwise satisfied citizens for whom the abuse of animals is the first glimpse of a violent algebra of exploitation that they would rather not see. All share the unselfishness implicit in the willingness to give up something — time, money, pleasure, power — in the service of freedom or fairness for beings that are not even of your own species, much less your own identity group. But the differences — of privilege, of perspective, of political orientation — are often profound.

It’s not always pretty, but it’s always dynamic, which is exactly what social change movements need to be if they expect to effect social change. (It’s always ironic to me when people who want to create change refuse to change.) In the years that I’ve attended the annual AR conference (this was the seventh), I’ve seen the animal liberation struggle to change in response to both internal and external critiques. This is as it should be, as it must be.

All movements seem to start out with a relatively narrow focus which then widens in response to the recognition of the interconnectedness of oppression. All movements struggle with the tendency for societal imbalances in power and privilege to reproduce themselves within groups. The feminist movement has struggled, is still struggling, with challenges associated with race and class. The antiracist movement has struggled, is still struggling, with challenges associated with gender. The labor and environmental movements have struggled, are still struggling, with challenges associated with race and gender. Etc. Etc.

At present, many animal advocates are working hard to integrate a race/sex/class/etc analysis into their theory and practice. Unfortunately, other social change movements have not yet begun to reciprocate by incorporating, or even deigning to think about, the challenges put forward to their movements by animal advocates. These range from highly theoretical ideas about the linkages between speciesism and sexism to profoundly practical facts about the many ways that meat eating and other forms of animal exploitation end up hurting disadvantaged people.

So, I was thrilled to see that two organizations that do not have animals as their primary focus chose to have tables at AR2007. Besides expressing solidarity with the animal liberation movement, those tables helped to educate the animal activists at the conference about other movements.

I just about jumped for joy when I saw that the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective had a booth in the exhibit hall. If you’re not familiar with this multifaceted anarchist project, go to their website right now.

Why do I love CrimethInc? Let me count the reasons. Because their publications are filled with ideas for DIY liberation expressed with equal parts of the love, rage, and humor we all need to survive. Because they put those ideas into action and help others to do so. Because their integrated analyses of oppression always include people, animals, and environment and never exclude anybody by being arrogant, abstruse, or overly abstract. Because, when the talk at the conference turned to the question of whether women ought to sexually objectify their own bodies in order to sell the idea of animal rights, the young man at the CrimethInc table was ready with a handout that said:

They MUTILATE WOMEN and then sell their images to us so that women forever HATE THEMSELVES and men forever lust for AN OBJECT THAT DOESN’T EVEN EXIST. The end result is domestic VIOLENCE, oppressive gender roles, low self-esteem, billions of dollars spent every year on cosmetics and cosmetic surgery, a slew of eating disorders, and a desperate desire to maintain an appearance INVENTED IN THE MINDS OF WEALTHY MEN that ISN’T NATURAL or even humanly possible! Why? So they can make a greasy dollar and reinforce their omnipresent power over women and men. That’s why we need to smash the fucking state, renounce convention and strive for a community of love and understanding!

Go to their website. Read their books. Download and distribute their posters. Join the collective and contribute your own stickers and handouts. It’s never too late to take back your life.

Rainforest Action Network also had a table at the conference, which I was happy to see lots of animal advocates visiting. I remember being very impressed by RAN back in the 1980s but then they kind of dropped off my radar for some reason. Turns out they’ve been doing incredible work while I wasn’t looking.

Lucky for me, RAN representative Debra Erenberg was on several of the conference panels on which I was also speaking, so I got a good education on what RAN’s been up to lately. At the panel on engaging other movements, Debra explained that “movement building” or “solidarity work” is built into RAN’s strategic plan and that RAN will offer resources to other movements even when they are working on issues that do not seem to directly intersect with RAN’s primary focus. This is because RAN understands that all progressive organizations, whatever their focus, are served by having a strong, vocal, vital opposition to the powers that be.

And RAN knows how to be a good ally. As Debra said, “I’ve been part of other organizations that say they want to reach out to other movements, but I didn’t realize until I came to RAN that they were getting it all wrong. They were only approaching other movements when they saw a potential gain — when they had something to ask for. The real key is to engage when you have something to give and you don’t want anything.”

Yah, RAN gets it. Go to their website too.

Were you impressed by my ability to quote another speaker so precisely? Don’t be. I asked Debra for a copy of her talk and she kindly provided it to me. I wonder if SuperWeed readers would like me to do something similar. I can’t say the exact words that I said in my presentations, since I talk from a rough outline rather than from a manuscript, but I could use my notes to summarize the key points. Lemme know if you’d like me to do that.