You didn’t really respond to my question. Suppose the NAACP “appropriated” the oppression of some other ethnic minority for the end of illuminating racism and advocating against its horrible manifestations. Would the NAACP be doing something wrong? If yes, that seems deeply immoral to me on both consequential and deontological grounds. I asked this same question to a representative of the Anti-Defamation League and they couldn’t respond. If we could use the Holocaust to advocate against genocide in Africa, why would that be wrong? The Anti-Defamation League assumes that human suffering and death is worse; therefore, for the end of ending nonhuman animal oppression, the “appropriation” is wrong. But in my example, it’s okay. Which means they aren’t making a principled point. Are you?

You make a comfortable, albeit irrational, distinction, however, to justify this: PETA does this for a “corporations ends,” whereas in my example, the end would be to address oppression. PETA, like the organization in my hypothetical, is “appropriating” oppressions for the end of ending the thing-status of nonhuman animals.

For anyone wishing to view the 2005 version referenced by Harper in the essay above, visit: http://web.archive.org/web/20050710023410/http://www.peta.org/animalliberation/

I know you don’t oppose making the comparison between human slavery and the enslavement of other animals, as LOVE recommendeds reading Marjorie Spiegel’s /The Dreaded Comparison/. Is your criticism of PETA’s Animal Liberation Project due to PETA’s presentation of the issues or is it based on the fact that it comes from PETA, an organization generally not focused on intersectionality of oppression? Or is it something else?

PETA as a corporation is ignorant about issues of racist oppression: how else to explain their campaign earlier this year where they dressed up as the KKK (self-described as “hilarious”)? Since they have made it clear time and again that they are not concerned with racist oppression, it’s deeply offensive for them to be taking people’s experience of racist oppression and using it for the corporation’s own ends. It is yet one more way to exploit people of color.

Experiences of racist oppression are not abstract, to be valued only when a corporation can get something out of them. They are the painful, lived experiences of real people.

* But since you asked: It’s true that Meet Your Meat only addresses the treatment of non-human animals used by humans and does not question the use of unconsenting beings. While MYM does not perpetuate oppression in an explicit way, by not questioning the exploitive system, the line of reasoning used in MYM falls victim to speciesist ideology that considers it a given the right of humans to use non-human animals.

Consider an organization who uses images of the slave trade to challenge people in such a way as to awake them to the suffering experienced by a group of humans in South America; for the end of provoking action. The use of these images certainly doesn’t justify the slave trade. Indeed, its moral badness is the motive-force-premise. It also doesn’t imply a normative assessment of comparable harms: this is worse than that. Again, the “appropriation,” if you will, is done with the intention of illuminating an example of suffering by reference to another example of suffering that happens to be in our consciousness.

I think consequentially, if showing images of the slave trade promoted activism to alleviate the plight of other beings, your argument is deeply unethical. And deontologically it is almost hegemonic, in an essentialist way: my suffering is of a different kind, worse even, and therefore even if it can be used in such a way as to end other suffering, it is wrong to do so.