How we can view racism as a zoological phenomenon

After I saw Jordan Peele’s film Get Out in 2017, I remember leaving the theater feeling as if I were in a trance. As a theorist who regularly writes about anti-racism and animals, I was amazed at how well Peele wove together themes about anti-Blackness and animality in such a creative and deeply moving theatrical way. Get Out’s effect was similar to a slow-release tablet. Over time, the messages of the film started to reveal themselves to me and sparked a type of creativity that I, as a writer, had not felt in a long time.

Get Out succeeds so magnificently because it tackles large and complex theoretical subjects in a creative and imaginative way. It presents issues of racism and animality through a different genre; Peele shows us how we do not necessarily need to serve up stories about white supremacy through histories of slavery, or photographs of lynching, or traumatic modern-day narratives about police violence. We can use science fiction and comedy to highlight the uncomfortable layers to our experiences as racialized subjects.

Peele’s film served as a creative wellspring for me when it came to thinking about how I wanted to present issues relating to animals and race to a public that has largely been trained by the media to view these two issues as perpetually in tension with each other. As I continued to think about Get Out and all of the layered messages in the film, I stumbled across the scholarship of James Perkinson, an activist and professor of ethics and systematic theology. His work completely changed the trajectory of my own. His essay “European Race Discourse as Witchcraft” (2004) and his book Shamanism, Racism, and Hip-Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion (2005) presented issues of racism through a framework I had never encountered.

Perkinson constructs racism and years of colonial consuming as a modern-day Eurocentric witchcraft practice. At first, when I saw Eurocentric racism being called “witchcraft,” it made me laugh: I wasn’t accustomed to hearing something as normalized as white supremacy framed as a witchcraft practice. However, after I explored Perkinson’s scholarship, I realized how his thinking is a cornerstone to understanding the inner workings of white supremacy. Like Peele, Perkinson presents a common issue (racism) in a completely genre-bending way. In particular, Perkinson examines the ways in which Christianity was historically used as a colonial tool to bolster white superiority. He writes:

What [Jamaican-American philosopher Charles W.] Mills calls . . . “the Racial Contract,” I am underscoring, out of its historical emergence, as a white witch pact. It creates an in-group of flesh consumers who share a secretive power/ knowledge designated . . . as “whiteness.” It is, in fact . . . a form of “theological blackness” or witchery, rewritten as ontology and anthropology. . . . It is the dissimulation of modern white supremacy, it is racial discourse itself that is the witchcraft practice. . . . (2004, 622)

After I read his work, I realized that Perkinson was creatively linking white supremacy to something beyond just a “system” or a “framework.” White supremacy is so pervasive, and colonialism so consumptive and violent, that the word system does not seem to cover how expansive and conceptually penetrative it is. 

I think most of us, as members of the public, have become numb to the popular ways in which racism has been represented in the news and media. In part, this is due to the fact that we keep referring to white supremacy as just a “system” or “institution,” rather than a living, insidious, expansive, colonial force that works to “get inside,” consume, and destroy. It is not just a system - it is a form of witchcraft. It is a cannibalistic, violent living force that seeks to tamper with the bodies and souls of the oppressed.

The ways in which the dominant class gets to determine whose life matters and whose doesn’t, as well as who is human and who is animal, constitute a zoological sport. 

I’m reminded of Dean Armitage’s quote about killing deer in Get Out: “You know what I say? I say one down, a couple hundred thousand to go. I don’t mean to get on my high horse, but I’m telling you, I do not like the deer. I’m sick of it; they’re taking over. They’re like rats. They’re destroying the ecosystem. I see a dead deer on the side of the road and I think, ‘That’s a start.’”

Viewers may think Dean is referring only to literal deer, but it becomes obvious as the plot progresses that this comment has racial undertones. In fact, most people of color are accustomed to hearing about Black and Brown people “taking over” white communities in much the same way. This fear of white human territories being “taken over” or encroached on has become the basis for many instances in which white people have called the police on Black and Brown citizens who are seen as being threatening or not belonging. 

Animals are also casualties of this racial system and the term “animal” is often employed to signal the compulsory elimination of certain bodies the dominant class perceives as being less than. Within this analysis, the goal isn’t to compare violence against animals to violence against black people. The goal is to demonstrate how white supremacy is a multidimensional system that is both anti-black and anti-animal. White supremacy is a zoological machine that thrives off of a fictional human/animal binary and hierarchy that impacts us all. This is, perhaps, why you might hear minoritized people stating that they are treated “like animals” when describing their own experiences with racism. What would our racial analyses look like if we actually included an analysis of literal animals in our anti-racist spaces?

In Get Out, Jordan Peele demonstrates how white supremacy is maintained by anti- Black zoological attitudes and that a cornerstone of white supremacy is its fetishistic desire to consume the oppressed. He shows us a multidimensional white supremacy that reflects what Claire Jean Kim (2017) calls the “zoologo-racial order.” There is a rich history through which to track the consumptive desires of white supremacy as an exercise of colonial mastery and power 

In my new book, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out, I argue that if we want to “get out” of this oppressive setup, we have to properly understand how we got in. We have to get to the root of the racial system, which is the human-animal binary. I advocate for a form of afro-zoological resistance to fight the colonial order. You can read more about this in Racism as Zoological Witchcraft, which you can find on amazon.