Q&A: How does race intersect with animal welfare activism?
Christopher Eubanks is a social justice advocate, public speaker, and nonprofit director dedicated to doing advocacy work to promote vegan ethics. He is the founder of Apex Advocacy and helped to co-organize Atlanta’s first ever animal rights march. We spoke to him about his work organizing animal welfare activists of color and fighting both white supremacy and animal exploitation at the same time.
CA: You are trying to specifically focus on building a community of BIPOC animal activists. Do you think animal welfare activism has had a "whiteness" problem and why is that?
Eubanks: I think the world largely operates under a white supremacist culture and it impacts much of our everyday lives. When we look at who controls the majority of the world’s wealth, who’s in positions of power in the most powerful countries, who has access to the best healthcare, etc., it leans toward the benefit of cis white males, which empowers white supremacy. So I think animal welfare, much like most aspects of our society, falls under the larger umbrella of being a product of white supremacy.
There are incredible people of color around the world doing advocacy and amazing organizations not led by white people doing great work for animal welfare. But the general landscape of the animal welfare space is shaped by the rules of white supremacy, which impacts what types of work get funded, who gets access to resources, primarily focusing on initiatives based in data and metrics that often discounts the efforts of people of color who may focus more on community-based work.
CA: Some people would say that with so many injustices facing human beings (genocide, racism, patriarchy, economic exploitation), animal welfare is a distraction from these struggles. But you see them as complementary. Why?
Eubanks: Social justice issues are intertwined because humans and animals unfortunately face so much oppression together. If you look at factory farming and the trillions of animals killed each year, humans are also harmed in the process. Slaughterhouse workers often have few options in life to make a living wage and often the largest factory farms often look towards people who have just been released from prison as potential employees. These are typically people from Black and brown low-income communities and slaughterhouse workers work in some of the harshest conditions of any job on earth suffering high rates of injury due to them working with equipment and processing chemical intended to dismember bodies.
This matters because factory farms are a huge contributor to climate change, and those impacts disproportionately hit communities of color. When natural disasters happen, animals suffer alongside humans. Families lose their companion animals (pets) in floods and fires, and wildlife are practically defenseless. Even in global conflict, humans and animals suffer together. With the genocide in Gaza, people are being bombed and intentionally starved, while animals also face immense suffering as buildings, homes, and hospitals are destroyed.As long as our society sees other species as less worthy of existing and devalue their lives, we’re feeding into the same narratives that allow us to perpetuate discrimination. That mindset not only justifies harm to animals but also carries into how we mistreat each other.
CA: What is important about an "intersectional" approach to advocating for animals?
Eubanks: What’s important about an intersectional approach are two things. First, animals are abused and exploited in countless ways. Society kills trillions of animals every year because we see their existence as something for us to consume. Human systems of oppression also show up in the exploitation of animals. Female cows’ and pigs’ reproductive systems are constantly exploited for dairy and meat production. They’re forced to be pregnant every year so their bodies can produce products for us. That’s not just exploitation of animals but also of female reproductive systems for “society’s benefit.” Baby male chicks are killed minutes after birth because they can’t lay eggs, which shows how millions of lives are ended because their bodies aren’t “useful” for production.
Second, even though mainstream animal welfare is viewed as predominantly white, there are amazing animal advocates all over the world who also face discrimination. Many deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression both inside and outside the animal welfare space, because no social justice movement is free from discrimination. So intersectionality isn’t just an “approach” to advocating for animals. It’s a broader understanding that while oppression affects humans and animals in different ways, it doesn’t happen in isolation. We are all attacked by the same mindset that views some lives as superior to others.
This Q&A, along with dozens more, is published in the special "Animals Issue" of Current Affairs.
