Week 8: intersectionality

This week, we read an interview with accomplished activist Barbara Smith about her work in the black feminism movement of the 1970s. There were many great lessons to be learned from Smith's stories and experiences. However, one thing that particularly stuck out to me, and that came up repeatedly in our posted questions and class discussions, was the concept of intersectionality. I get the impression that, at the beginning of Smith's activist career, activism was a lot more segregated than it is today. You could consider yourself a feminist, a gay rights activist, a black liberation activist, and so on, but you had to choose the one cause you dedicated yourself to. Now, however, "intersectionality" is a hot topic and almost a prerequisite for successful activist groups and movements. Smith discusses how intersectionality was not a coined term at the time, but was something she and her contemporaries evoked in spaces like the Combahee River Collective.

With that in mind, I am thinking about intersectionality in the animal rights movement. I've learned so much about the movement through creating my timeline. I know that principles of animal welfare and moral opposition to animal cruelty and eating meat have existed basically for all of human history -- vegetarianism can be traced back to at least 3300 BCE. However, the modern animal rights movement does not have very inclusive roots. The first animal activists, those involved with organizations like the RSPCA, were pretty much exclusively middle-class or wealthy white people. The movement was inclusive of women, but most people of color and poor people at this time were fighting so hard just to survive that they had no time or energy for activism.

Today, there is still a widely-held notion that animal activism and veganism are "for white people" and a plant-based diet is expensive. However, there are many activists in the movement with an intersectional approach to animal activism. To me, there are countless ways animal rights intersect with equality for humans. For instance, jobs in slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants are extremely demanding and traumatic, yet are low-paid and "unskilled," making farm animal welfare a classism issue. Many vegans have criticized the promotion of milk as an essential part of the diet, as many people of color are lactose intolerant and physically cannot digest it. Apparently there's even a link between milk and white supremacy!

This whole unit, and especially Barbara Smith's interview, have shown me how important it is for modern activists to know their movement's history. Only by acknowledging and confronting the exclusive origins of the animal rights movement can we make it inclusive and intersectional.