thinking it was us that carried them

As an activist, I think that breaking down the barriers between groups of people — while still recognizing and respecting individual differences — is a key component to achieving equality and ending oppression.  When we stop thinking of beings who are different from us as the “other,” it becomes more difficult to treat them as “less than.”  I think recognizing that animals have an interest in being alive, not having their children taken away, not being beaten, etc. is the first step in making the choice to not use their bodies for our own purposes.  Similarly, acknowledging that people who have differently-abled bodies or different gender presentation or different ethnicities or insert myriad-other-ways-in-which-people-are-different here still have an interest in health, happiness, safety, bodily integrity, and choice is a first step to creating a world without oppression.

However, I’ve noticed lately that even within social justice activism there’s a pervasive “us vs. them” mentality that can totally undermine that vision of a peaceful world.  Believing that the western world, for example, is infinitely more forward-thinking than less-industrialized nations is one harmful way in which this occurs; even within the context of the United States, thinking that large cities are more progressive and subsequently dismissing the behavior of other cities and states as “backwards” is dangerous as well.  Activists are guilty of this all the time, and I think it creates unnecessary borders and divisions between potential allies.

Doris Lin wrote about this in a January 2010 article concerning animal activists’ propensity to blame an entire culture or an entire country for animal cruelty occurring within its borders.  She writes, “I’ve noticed in various social justice movements that it’s easy to demonize disempowered groups or groups that are considered ‘other.’  Whether the cause is human rights, environmental protection or animal rights, it’s always easy to get some people to agree with you by reinforcing their prejudices against ‘those people’ or ‘these people.’”  This mentality not only unfairly labels an entire culture or country as “backwards” or “barbaric,” but it also dismisses the efforts of progressive, anti-oppression activists within those countries’ borders, as if there’s nothing there worth saving.  Interestingly enough, we rarely see western cultures being described as “barbaric,” despite the fact that plenty of mind-boggling oppression happens right here on U.S. soil.  It’s only those people who are “other” who seem to warrant that label; it’s only appropriate to write off a whole country when our targets are different enough from ourselves to no longer remind us of our own abhorrent behavior.

It’s not just animal activism, either.  After atrocious immigration legislation was passed in Arizona, calls to boycott the entire state started peppering my news feed.  Have we forgotten that plenty of other U.S. states have criminalized, arrested, and deported people of color or immigrant citizens before, during, and after the passage of Arizona’s legislation?  (See this heartbreaking article from North Carolina.)  I reported some really vicious rules for intersex citizens in Australia, and someone commented that Australia is particularly “effed up” when it comes to governmental approaches to sexuality.  Have we forgotten that here in the United States, LGBT folks do not have access to marriage or that gender non-conforming individuals do not have federal protections for housing, employment, or the privilege to safely use a public bathroom?  Female genital mutilation is currently being funded and celebrated at an ivy league institution in the United States.  Transgender individuals are harassed, beaten, and killed in cities as “progressive” as New York and Seattle on a daily basis.  The examples go on and on and on and never fail to discourage me.  We (New Yorkers, Americans, vegans) have to stop thinking that we’re somehow better than other people, other cities, other countries.

It’s not fair to blame an entire population for the oppressive words or actions of a few individuals, especially when nearly every population on the planet is, in some way, committing similarly oppressive acts. And so much work needs to be done in our own backyards that it seems to make sense to focus there before we go pointing fingers at other communities.  This is why LOVE focuses so strongly on community-based activism and a holistic understanding of veganism and anti-oppression.  In my experience, it’s not effective to launch a campaign in a city or drop a hundred leaflets on a street corner and then blow out of town.  We have to listen to each other, respect differences, and work together to eliminate oppression.