“Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBose and Cecil the Lion”
“The story has gone viral because it offers a strange alchemy of arrogant privilege, an animal’s being lured out of safety and slaughtered, and something onto which we can project outrage without having to contend with the messiness of humanity. Animals are not stained by original sin.
On Twitter, I joked, “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.”…
apologies… place an emotional burden on the recipient. You ask the marginalized to participate in the caretaking of your emotions. You ask them to do the emotional labor of helping you face the world as it truly is… there are actions that would accomplish more than offering an apology to those who cannot provide you with the absolution you seek…
When others share their reality, don’t immediately dismiss them because their reality is dissimilar to yours, or because their reality makes you uncomfortable and forces you to see things you prefer to ignore.
Avoid creating a hierarchy of human suffering as if compassion were a finite resource. Don’t assume that if one person says, “These are the ways I am marginalized,” they are suggesting you know nothing of pain and want.”
There is a lot of wisdom here.
The Cecil thing feels frustrating because it’s clear that there IS anger and even outrage that can be tapped into in the general public, quickly and decisively and actionably, but it’s sort of glided around when it comes to a lot of social justice issues. I think it comes down to: the Americans reacting don’t feel implicated in the histories and systems that lead to lions being hunted in a cruel and exploitative manner, they feel no kinship or sense of recognition with that random dentist. BUT many Americans, at some level, sense the ways they benefit from histories and systems of racism that lead to police officers killing a disproportionate rate of black people (and other manifestations of widespread, violent implicit racism); there is some kinship with the experience of feeling threatened by the presence of Black people.
And also, it feels to me like there are people out there who have anger and outrage around social justice issues — people who might sort of want to go to a #BlackLivesMatter march, who read some of the articles and thought pieces— but who don’t feel comfortable engaging the issue, and so they are spending that energy on this lion.
And also, I am so, so there on the apologies thing, even just for everyday life — I sort of want to try removing the words “I’m Sorry” from discourse, so that people can’t rely on that script and have to construct individual reactions to their guilt. And so that maybe we can think
Related: (also NYT, huh) a Zimbabwean biochemist on how Cecil isn’t a big deal in Zimbabwe
“Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.”
