Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was one of the worst environmental justice disasters in modern U.S. history. It was also one of the first times that I, then a teenager, consciously connected animal justice and racial justice. Kanye West’s declaration “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” is often remembered as the statement on racism in Katrina, but another expression that needed no words circulated among black people in the hurricane’s immediate aftermath: a picture of pets being evacuated on an air-conditioned bus.
While black people were abandoned, dead, and dying on rooftops, corpses floating bloated in flooded streets, people’s pets were evacuated to safety.
Black people have long understood as racist the disparate treatment of nonhuman animals and black people. In 1855, Frederick Douglass wrote that “The bond-woman lives as a slave, and is left to die as a beast; often with fewer attentions than are paid to a favorite horse.” One-hundred-sixty years later, Roxane Gay similarly noted the differing reactions to two 2015 killings: Cecil the Lion by an American dentist (worldwide outcry) and Samuel DuBose, a black man, by an American police officer (no such response).
As an animal lover and, at the time of Katrina, a Los Angeles Zoo student volunteer with plans to become a veterinarian, I felt the odd and emptying sense of dehumanization in seeing that picture of pets on a bus. Caring for animals was one of the most meaningful experiences in my life, one of the ways I felt most human, yet I was struck by the devaluing of black life contained in that very expression of care.
This racism carries new urgency in the age of the Anthropocene. As we finally begin to address humans’ destructive impact on the world, putting 1 million plant and animal species at risk of extinction, we must also confront how white supremacy harms black and brown people with warped, racist notions of “human being” and false, hierarchical models of creation limiting who is in the circle of care. Like on climate change, evidence abounds.
Gentrification—a quiet hurricane demolishing black communities and uprooting black lives—is often foreshadowed by white dog-walkers in Washington, D.C., the city where I live and one of the most intensely gentrifying U.S. cities. More than one clash has followed affluent, white dog owners’ attempts to change neighborhood space for the benefit of their dogs—for an egregious example, google “dog-walking, Howard University, gentrification.” Trendy cashless, plant-based eateries also distort environmentalism by including some lives (animals) and excluding others (largely black, poor people lacking access to credit).
Matthew 10:29-31 affirms that God’s eye is on sparrows and humans, with attentiveness to the former underscoring the latter. Uncoupling this interlinked care harms black people in particular ways, including an internalized racism that pits black humanity against animal welfare.
We must rethink theologies of creation and what it means to be made in the image of God, and live into this image anew. We need new ways to be human, for the benefit of all.
Jeania Ree V. Moore is a writer, United Methodist deacon, and doctoral student in religious studies and African American studies at Yale University.
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