This is white people’s fault somehow
When will these whites learn?
There is only one breed of dog: the dog breed.
The Animal Farm Foundation, a non-profit “dedicated to securing equal treatment and opportunity for ‘pit bull’ dogs and their owners”, has launched a new initiative to combat “exclusionary dog breed restrictions in the housing insurance industry.”
In its statement, the AFF cites the work of Ann Linder, a Legislative Policy Fellow with Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program. According to her paper, “The Black Man’s Dog: The Social Context of Breed Specific Legislation”, pit bulls have been unfairly tied to “gang violence by urban youths, as well as the hip-hop music scene.”
This foundation’s staff is made up entirely of ugly white women.
Also referenced is the work of Emory University associate professor of philosophy, Erin Tarver. In her work “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Dog: Race, Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull’,” Tarver applies French philosopher Michel Focault’s notion of “the dangerous individual” to what she sees as modern racialized attitudes towards pit bulls and the “perceived threat to normative whiteness” such animals pose.
Despite accounting for just 6.5% of all dogs in the United States, pit bulls were responsible for 66% of total fatal dog attacks between 2005 and 2017.
Tying the societal perception of pit bulls to anti-Black racism has become a theme in certain American academic circles.
Harlan Weaver, a professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at Kansas State University, gave a talk at Lafayette College last fall about how racial prejudice has driven the negative perception of pit bulls. The college’s student paper states that his work focuses on “racialization, using this interspecies intersectionality to ‘identify troubling dynamics and inheritances…but also to disrupt what is a very common logic in animal advocacy, in which racism is simultaneously engaged and erased through appropriative and substitutive moves.’”
Weaver began his talk by stating that “stigma” aimed at “communities of color” posed a threat to pit bulls, stating that “tacit heteronormative whiteness” is not good for the dogs. According to him, America is “presenting injustices faced by pit bulls as like racism by appropriating the rhetoric and often the effects or emotions associated with race related social justice issues.”
As the event continued, Weaver argued that pit bulls tend to be put in shelters due to “pervasive racism and misogyny, a struggle to sustain a living wage and myriad other injustices”, according to the college’s newspaper.
He concluded the event by stating that in order to achieve racial justice for pit bulls, society must provide “a justice that challenges anthropocentrism, a justice that disrupts the pitting of rational man against racial animal otherness, a justice I term, borrowing from conversation with a range of folks, a multi-species justice.”
Frankly, I’m shocked that they are now literally doing “there is only one breed of dog – the dog breed,” which has been a longtime meme on this website.
It’s also shocking that they’re calling the single most violent and murderous dog “the black man’s dog.” Some of this stuff seems like it has to be tongue-in-cheek at this point.
But I guess it’s not?