Name: Hutch Hutchins

Social Justice Group: 2021-2022, Global Warming

Date of Fieldwork: March 27, 2022

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Christopher Sebastian McJetters

Type of Fieldwork: Lecture

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :

I listened to an interesting lecture by Christopher Sebastian McJetters which he gave at the Vevolution Festival. He is a writer journalist, researcher and activist who teaches a class at Columbia University called “POP: Power, Oppression, and Privilege”. He focuses on how human relationships with other animals shape our attitudes about racial and political identity.

He talks about veganism as a liberation movement instead of just a diet or way of eating. He was inspired by black feminist theory and Bell Hooks’ writing and applies it to animal rights.

He talked about how all throughout history in America, our white supremacist culture has decided who is human and who is not so that being human is a political identity. When black people weren’t considered human they were exploited and experimented on. It was a time when anyone who wasn’t white, cisgender, male and wealthy wasn’t considered a person.

He talked about the brand of KFC who looks like an old white man dressed as a plantation owner who is selling “dead and dismembered bodies that have been fried”. He wonders how that image is an American icon and how we as a society allow the racist image to continue.

He talks about how the people who work in slaughterhouses tend to be people of color who live in economically depressed areas and that it’s privileged and classist to assume they should be able to do something else especially if there isn’t other work in the community. He shared that in Canada they couldn’t find people who wanted to work in their slaughterhouses so they hired Syrian Refugees. He used this as an example of the intersection of racism and animal violence.

He explained how our society generally accepts hunting but not poaching because people of color are usually poachers in economically depressed places and hunters are usually white and male but really they’re the same thing. They are both killing animals.

He ended his talk by saying our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet.

I appreciated hearing about another way to think about animal rights. Most people just talk about veganism but he talks about liberation.