Here we go again

Critical Race Theory professors desperate to publish amplify their calls for dogs to perish

Over the last several years, professors who subscribe to Critical Race Theory and its offshoot, Critical Gender Theory (collectively, CRT), have falsely pitted animal protection and human dignity against one another.

This includes books and journal articles that:

• Argue against prosecuting animal abusers like Michael Vick, claiming black dog fighters are the real “victims”;

• Criticize placing dogs who survived dogfighting in caring, family homes because “they were effectively segregated from Blackness”;

• Call for more animals to be killed in pounds or left on the streets instead of placed in homes so as not to promote “settler-colonial and racist dynamics of land allocation”; 

• Claim that viewing animals as family members, letting them sleep in the house, providing medical care, and showing affection are “white” values, while people of color treat animals “as resources, whether protective (as in guarding) or financial (as in breeding or possibly fighting)”; 

• Call for permitting dogs to be left on chains 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if they belong to people of color; 

• Call for humane societies to partner with dog fighters by providing free vaccinations for dogs who will be used as bait and ripped to shreds rather than rescuing the dogs and having the perpetrators arrested and prosecuted;

• Promote defunding the police and releasing all prisoners convicted of animal neglect and abuse, even in cases of torture and killing, because anti-cruelty laws are “racist” and support the “carceral” state; 

• Criticize the use of technology, like wheelchairs, to give disabled animals mobility, claiming it “erases” disabled people; 

• Legitimize the harpooning of whales and clubbing of seals because of “native cosmologies”;

• Defend backyard breeding as promoting “queer affiliations”;

• Claim that animals want to die and do not mind suffering when they do if the hunter is “Indigenous”; 

• Advocate against rescuing and finding homes for disabled dogs because doing so stigmatizes disabled people by reinforcing “oppressive norms”; and,

• Advocate for “pansexual” relations with animals — the rape of dogs, horses, and others — in the name of “queering the human-animal bond.”

As I have repeatedly written, we should never confuse the racist tropes and cruel policies peddled by professors seeking to make a name for themselves in CRT academia with the cause of animal protection or human dignity. They are not the same, and they never have been.

A study published in Social Psychology Quarterly, “When a Name Gives You Pause: Racialized Names and Time to Adoption in a County Dog Shelter,” proves the point. In that study, two CRT proponents claimed that shelter dogs with “white” sounding names get adopted more quickly than dogs with “black” or “Hispanic” names. They blamed racist adopters. They then concluded that shelters should not change the names, even if it means dogs die “because this would be akin to leaning into bias. We cannot alter our behavior as a society to accommodate those with racist inclinations, even when those inclinations manifest in unlikely places.”

In other words, if it is true that dogs are at risk of becoming collateral damage because of the troubled race relations between human beings, the cost of “justice” must be paid in the body count of innocent bystanders. Commit a thought crime about a shelter dog’s name, and the dog must die. To do otherwise would be “racist.”

Ultimately, the only prejudice the study established is that the authors hold the rights of at-risk companion animals in such low regard that their very lives do not matter. To them, the animals staring down the gas chamber or the barrel of a needle filled with an overdose of barbiturates if they don’t get out of the shelter alive are not marginalized victims lacking legal rights who face the possibility of execution for the “crime” of being homeless. They are pawns in a game of “woke academia” that has abandoned all pretensions to truth or objectivity. 

Indeed, their own data disproved that adopters were being racist. The study group tasked with assigning names into categories couldn’t agree on whether they sounded white, Hispanic, or black. The authors acknowledge that “relatively few names in our data set were consensually perceived as Black and Hispanic.” The lack of consensus had the effect of “suppressing the effects of these names” and, thus, confidence in the results. In some cases, confidence was at or near zero.

As a result, there was no statistically significant relationship between the perception of a name being black or Hispanic and the number of days a dog spent in the shelter. Indeed, dogs with names 90% of people considered Hispanic-sounding were, in many cases, adopted twice as fast as dogs with names most thought sounded white. Instead, the data pointed to a different cause — the dogs who took the longest to get adopted had unfamiliar, nonsensical names, like “Wigglystuff,” “Flufferton,” “Fruit Loops,” “Skittles,” and “Sir Pupper.” 

Once again, CRT professors call for animal harm even though the evidence does not support their claims — and, increasingly, they are willing to cannibalize each other to do it. Given the overabundance of CRT “scholars,” the imperative to publish and the stifling of dissent has encouraged ever more outrageous claims at the expense of good faith discussions that would promote and preserve hard-won gains, whether for animal protection or human relations. That is the nature of a recent response to the “Racialized Names” study by two other CRT professors who criticized it, but not because it misread the data. Instead, they condemned it because it considered the data and, thus, wasn’t “woke” enough. 

In “Strangely Hesitant about Anti-Blackness,” Freeden Blume Ouer and Candice Robinson claim that the original study failed to “divest from white sociology.” To them, that means abandoning objectivity and fact-basis analysis: “As scholars of color… we feel race and are therefore critical of studies that reify white supremacy.”

Despite all their pretensions of rejecting fact-based analysis, they try to engage in it in one part of their article but get it horribly wrong. Specifically, they opine that adoption delays are the result of “white, middle-class women who staff shelters” refusing to adopt to black people and that delays in adopting pit bulls — who are “the animalization of Blackness” — to white households result from what they termed “temperance tests” (by which, they actually mean “temperament tests”). Temperance relates to the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Temperament relates to behavior.

This is no mere typo. It shows how little they actually know about animal shelters or the issues facing the dogs inside them. For example, not only do they fail to provide any evidence for their hypothesis, but they also fail to understand the demographics of many shelters, this particular shelter, and of the adopters in the study, which — given that they are “highly diverse in terms of race/ethnicity” — negates the impact of race, as I demonstrate elsewhere.

Their lack of substantive knowledge about dogs and the risks they face is unsurprising because they simply do not care about them, as they argue that dogs are unworthy of study and do not matter except as they relate to humans. To do otherwise, they argue, “perpetuates a tradition of ‘misplaced sympathy’ for dogs over Black people.” Thus, working to prevent the “mistreatment of dogs” without accepting the view that dogs only matter in terms of how they explain human relations is racist. If you care about dogs, you can’t care about people, specifically black people. How do they know?

They “feel race.”

And based on these “feelings,” they are effectively arguing for the proposition that unless and until we end all race-based suffering, we should ignore the harm to dogs — terrible, often painful, life-ending harm — even though it is within our power to ease it. Not only would they render all progress in helping animals impossible, but ignoring their plight — as the authors would have us do — would do nothing to help people. On the contrary, it would merely add to the aggregate suffering in the world.

Indeed, of all the problems with the Ouer and Robinson article, none is more dangerous than their view that human-animal relations are a zero-sum political struggle involving identity markers like race, which threatens to turn back the clock on animal protection. 

In the early 19th century, cruelty to dogs was not recognized in law because they were considered property. Killing one’s dog was not illegal because a person was deemed to have the right to do what he wanted with his “property.” Likewise, harming a homeless dog was not unlawful because there was no property interest impacted. The animal did not matter in either scenario. Ouer and Robinson once again suggest a standard that excuses harm based on the interests of those causing it. For all their discussion and professed concern regarding hierarchies of privilege, their prescription for human-animal relations could not be more inequitable, uncharitable, and unkind. 

There is no victory in humanity’s moral enlightenment in which some people did not lament the amount of attention paid to that issue because they regarded it as less important than other forms of suffering or harm. In its day, and as Ouer and Robinson demonstrate, prejudice is often seen as a virtue. But it is precisely this attitude that the killing of dogs is somehow unimportant that enables the tragedy.

Moreover, bemoaning expressions of empathy and compassion is entirely counterproductive to the cause, not just of animals but also of people. Love and kindness — however they manifest — should always be welcomed, as they can only make our world a gentler place filled with people who are increasingly intolerant of cruelty. But Ouer and Robinson do not believe such progress is possible. 

To them, society treats people of color no different than it did in 1920 — before Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the dismantling of Jim Crow; before Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and Barack Obama; before all the gains of the last century. To them, white people still systemically consider that “the devil is ‘black,’” that blacks are “savage half-men,” and “the dogs of men” and treat them just as disdainfully, despite copious evidence to the contrary. Why?

Because to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Likewise, to a CRT proponent, everything looks like racism. But not everything is a nail, and not all perceived disparities result from racism. If Ouer and Robinson prove anything, it is only that they have no language for progress and, certainly, no compassion. And to continue standing out from a crowded field of their fellow academics, it’s unlikely they ever will.