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11 - Listening to animals
- Edited by Anthony Morgan
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- Book:
- What Matters Most
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 18 May 2023, pp 99-106
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Summary
The Philosopher ran a series of three events in partnership with Adam Ferner's and Darren Chetty's podcast “Do You Even Vegan?” scheduled to coincide with each of the three daily meals, and the “breakfast guest” was Dutch philosopher, novelist, and artist Eva Meijer, a pioneering thinker on the political rights of animals. In this conversation, Meijer argues that the political turn in animal philosophy allows us to look at animals not just from an ethical perspective but also from a political perspective, which opens up many new and difficult questions about how to form democracies with other animals and how to conceive of them as political groups. For Meijer, a true interspecies democracy will only be possible if humans begin to listen in a different way to animals and to the natural world. Crucially, such a listening is not just for their survival but also for our own.
EVA MEIJER is an artist and postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and the author of many books, including Animal Languages and When Animals Speak.
DARREN CHETTY is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children's literature and hip hop culture.
ADAM FERNER is a writer and youth worker based in London. His books include The Philosopher's Library (with Chris Meyns) and Notes from the Crawl Room.
Adam Ferner (AF): You argue that humans massively underappreciate the extent to which non-human animals are engaged in intelligent and meaningful communication. For example, you describe Prairie dogs meeting each other with a “French kiss” and the extensive greeting ritual monogamous seabirds perform with their partners when they return to their nest, with the males often bringing gifts for the females such as flowers to decorate their nest or to use as a necklace. These descriptions offer a picture of non-human animals with human characteristics – French kissing, gift giving, and so on. But does this not run the risk of flattening non-human animal interactions by likening – or reducing – them to human interactions?
Eva Meijer (EM): The first answer would be that denying certain capacities to non-human animals is an ideological construction that has been very popular in animal research. The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal called this “anthropo-denial”
20 - Derrick Bell and racial realism
- Edited by Anthony Morgan
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- Book:
- What Matters Most
- Published by:
- Agenda Publishing
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 18 May 2023, pp 185-192
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Summary
Part of what it means to live in the end times is to realize that some things will never change. For Derrick Bell, we must acknowledge both that anti-Black racism in America is permanent, and that we all have a moral obligation to resist it. This paradoxical formulation lies at the heart of his influential and controversial thesis of “racial realism”. This conversation looks at Bell's thesis in the context of a supposedly post-racial America heralded by the election of Barack Obama as president. Critically engaging with the racial progress narrative, Golden argues that racism has in fact worsened since Obama's presidency, simmering away until unleashed by the Trump administration. As Timothy Golden concludes, the letter of the law may have changed in some domains, but there have not been corresponding changes to the hearts and minds of people.
TIMOTHY GOLDEN is Professor of Philosophy at Walla Walla University, Washington, USA. His areas of scholarly research include African American philosophy and critical race theory.
DARREN CHETTY is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children's literature and hip hop culture.
Darren Chetty (DC): Who was Derrick Bell and what did he mean by “racial realism”?
Timothy Golden (TG): Derrick Bell was a legal scholar, activist and public intellectual who lived from 1930 to 2011. The expanse of Bell's oeuvre is truly impressive, worthy of extensive scholarly treatment in law, philosophy, social and political theory, and theology. In the current political climate, Bell is probably best known for being one of the originators of critical race theory. He advanced a trenchant critique of liberalism, seeing it as a handmaiden in maintaining the structural and material conditions of white supremacy, such that white supremacy is made “legal” through abstract notions of “rights” removed from the concrete political realities of Black life in America.
Turning to his thesis of “racial realism”, it can be summed up as follows: on the one hand, anti-Black racism in America is permanent, but, on the other hand, we all have a moral obligation to resist it. This is Bell's most controversial thesis – both during his lifetime and beyond. Bell's claim about the permanence of American anti-Black racism is an inductive, empirical claim.