Who's Afraid of the Big Black Wolf? : My personal perspective on being black and an animal
First things first, I'm an animal. Period! I'm not a human with the heart of an animal. I’m not a human who identifies as an animal. I'm not a human that should have been born an animal. I am an animal that should have never been born human. That distinction is REALLY important to me and why I’m not really fond of labels like “therian”, “otherkin”, or “alterhuman” being used on me. I’ve found their definitions to be very human forward in a manner that makes me uncomfortable. It’s as though they give a quiet disclaimer that at the end of the day, I’m just doing “role-play” when that couldn’t be more insulting. I've known this to be my reality since I was a kid. My memories of childhood are mostly lost, but I DO remember creating makeshift tails with leather belts, communicating to my friends at school through chirps, hisses, and bared fangs, taking on the form of different creatures on the playground, and always asking to be the pet when others insisted on playing house, a classic. I was an only child that was left to entertain myself for long stretches of time throughout the week, so about half of my animal expression was through art (I’m sure I went through multiple trees worth of printer paper....) and maladaptive daydreaming, often both at once. I had this ritual where I would daydream and speak the dialogue out loud while drawing what I was seeing and experiencing internally. I could do this for hours!! All of this is to say, I don’t remember a time where I felt human, and I don’t remember a time where my body didn’t feel like a prison I was trapped in, so adopting a label that assures everyone else that I know that I'm bodily human frustrates me, no offence! I literally come online so I DON'T have to acknowledge that.
2nd thing you must know about me is that I’m black, and after years of painful baggage over this, I can finally say that I’m proudly black. And this is where things get complicated, because to acknowledge one’s race is to acknowledge one’s humanity, as animals don’t have human concepts of race, right? Well, yes...but also it’s complicated! And that’s why I’m writing this. I want to try to articulate why it’s not so easy to make space for both...and how I’ve messily done it anyways. Emphasis on messily!!! This is going to be a very personal essay, so strap in, and be open-minded ok?
BIG FAT DISCLAIMER RIGHT OUT THE GATE.
I'm going to be comparing my plight to that of animals further down! This is a huge no-no in every single context, but a complicated problem often calls for a complicated solution. This is MY way of integrating both identities, but if you're also black and that makes you uncomfortable you should probably skip this one, sorry!
Honestly the disclaimer sums up what I’m about to say pretty neatly. When you’re white and your skin isn’t currently politicized in the way mine is, you’re essentially a blank slate to be whatever you want to be without any internal conflict. To put it bluntly, to half of the world I don’t have to delude myself into believing I’m an animal, I’m already that and worse to them. Knowing that, how can I hate this body? My loved ones went through hell just for me to willingly, happily, dehumanize myself? I suppose one could argue that they gifted me with the choice to embrace animality, sure. But it’s the choice itself that I’m criticizing, not my ability to make it.
It’s morbidly brought me a lot of closure to understand that humans treat and think of children the same way they do animals, to the extent that treating someone “like a child” is dehumanizing in itself. So...if being compared to a child, a human, is also a form of dehumanization...then it's necessary to peel back the word when used in this context and actually understand what it’s trying to say. Minorities that have been compared to animals historically were in-fact treated as LESS than animals. It was a concentrated effort to humiliate and shame them, to strip them of dignity and individuality, rendering them unconscious objects that existed only to be overpowered. All of this is of course predicated on the deep-rooted belief that humans are distant from and “above” animalia rather than being a part of it themselves. In simpler terms, I believe there is a world of difference between the "dehumanization" done by someone who identifies as an animal or uses it/its for example, and the same done to marginalized peoples. One comes from a place of love and carries with it the understanding that things that are not human aren't lesser and are deserving of honor and gentleness like any other living being, and the other aims to treat those it deems inferior as objects, as "children", to justify cruelty leveraged towards them. By internalizing this, it has brought me peace to exist as I am, knowing that the way I feel is not a betrayal, but a radical form of self-love that allows me to feel like I am a part of something complex and beautiful rather than a detached participant.
With that being said, I can now talk about how I have unintentionally honored both these parts of myself.
If you don't know me or haven't poked around the rest of my site, this is where I come clean with another big disclaimer. I am a menagerie, a collective of animals, or just “someone with DID” to be less esoteric. Because all of us are animals ourselves, I simply take this to mean that I, collectively, am an animal that is comprised of incongruous animals (Perhaps the site name makes more sense to you now?). I mention this to explain what I meant by "unintentional", as what I'm about to delve into are ideas a traumatized brain latched onto to make sense of what was happening to it, but I've since adopted it to be a roundabout way of referencing my blackness.
When making contact with all of my fellow members for the first time, I was struck by one commonality that we shared. The color of our pelts, all black. I quietly wondered why this might be...The answer is fairly straight forward, but still necessitates some explanation so we're all on the same page!
Animals certainly don’t suffer from racial discrimination, but humans do project biases onto them and treat them in disturbing ways due to these stereotypes...I remember being briefly interested with “black cat syndrome”, that phenomenon where black cats are statistically less likely to be adopted and face higher levels of euthanasia because of their ties to witchcraft...I couldn't help but think of black cat syndrome again while researching the “Black is Bad” effect much later on. For those who don't know, this was a study done in 2016 to expound more on the psychological link between blackness and evil. Going to paste a lengthy explanation of it because it's pretty important you understand the full scope of the experiment.
From Scientific American:
“...participants were asked to choose between headshots to identify a perpetrator. Online participants first examined two different grainy video surveillance images, alongside a brief sentence describing what the man in each image was doing either before or after the image was taken. For one image, they were told that the man had committed a virtuous act, such as risking his life to save someone, or establishing a charity for children. For the other image, they were told the man had committed an immoral act such as murder or abuse. After viewing each image and description, participants were shown two headshots of different men. One headshot had been artificially darkened and the other artificially lightened. Participants indicated which of the headshots represented the man who appeared in each surveillance image on a scale ranging from 1 (definitely Person A) to 6 (definitely Person B).
In addition to choosing between headshots, participants were asked to indicate the “color of the soul” of each man in the surveillance images. (“Soul color” could act as a metaphorical representation of how closely participants associate visual color with badness, apart from either skin tone or race.) Using a color spectrum ranging from black to white, participants clicked on the color shade that seemed to represent the color of the man’s soul who had committed the moral act as well as the color of the man’s soul who had committed the immoral act. Finally, the researchers measured participants’ racial attitudes through a separate survey. Participants were asked how warmly they felt towards White Americans as well as towards various dark skinned minorities, such as African Americans and Muslim Americans.
The researchers found that participants who held more negative attitudes towards darker skinned minorities, such as African Americans, were more likely to choose the darker photograph when asked who committed the immoral act. This finding in itself is perhaps unsurprising. A more startling pattern emerged when the researchers analyzed people’s headshot choices based on what “color” they thought the men’s souls were. Even after statistically controlling for participants’ racial attitudes, the researchers found that participants who thought the man who committed the immoral act had a darker colored soul were also more likely to think he had darker colored skin. In other words, regardless of race, dark skin was associated with evil in the minds of people who saw a link between darkness and badness.
Although psychologists have known for a long time that people associate dark skin with negative personality traits, this research shows that the reverse is also true: when we hear about an evil act, we are more likely to believe it was done by someone with darker skin...”
This is where I found a point of connection. Yes, the color of an animal's fur doesn't carry NEARLY the same baggage as black skin, it's deeply offensive to even compare the two. Yes, the concept of race is about more than skin color, it encompasses ancestry and culture as well! But this idea of "black" as a concept being representative of something dirty, evil, uncivilized, and animalistic IS a building block on which anti-black racism rests and is most likely why the brain of a hurting child latched onto black pelts as a symbol for something evil, othered, and deserving of cruelty. You see "Black is Bad" reinforced EVERYWHERE, in practically all media, especially media for children. The forces of evil and chaos are represented by darkness and its counterpart is a cleansing, pure, gentle light. (It's even in my writing!!! Though, if it wasn't already obvious, it is my hope to subvert this.) I do not think writing that utilizes these concepts is inherently racist mind you. Humans do have evolutionary reasons to fear the dark that surely have fueled these associations, but when blackness is ALSO politicized, it's sometimes good to take a step back and see how all these ideas overlap and reinforce themselves, even unintentionally!
While I find it unlikely that my young brain specifically had skin tone in mind when making us all black animals(?), I hope I've sufficiently explained why the often negative associations placed on these animals feels...familiar and affirming to me as someone who sees myself in them!
Whew! If you made it this far I must thank you for giving me your curiosity and time. I have no clue if anyone else will find my thoughts useful or interesting, but I'm happy to have finally gotten them down somewhere. To end this off, I just want to say to any nonhumans of color who feel as though their race is incompatible with their non humanity, please don't despair! Sometimes it takes patience and creativity to meld the two, but it's sooo worth it. We bring something very special to every community we set paw, talon, or foot in, and our experiences deserve to be celebrated and uplifted, not erased. I hope this may inspire someone who reads it to write something similar or gives them assurance that they aren't alone. <3
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