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Media as Mirrors: How Popular Culture Reveals Zoological Witchcraft
Media examples serve as effective tools for illustrating complex theory by providing familiar cultural landmarks that resonate across diverse audiences. Despite frequent dismissals of media studies as illegitimate or lowbrow scholarship, the field's importance extends far beyond mere entertainment analysis. It reveals how our morals, values, and societal beliefs are shaped through daily exposure to various media forms, from television and film to social media and advertising. Media studies examines the popular landscape, grounding itself in society's communication patterns, evolving cultural understandings, and the subtle ways ordinary people are influenced and sometimes manipulated by media messages.
The Netflix horror-comedy "Santa Clarita Diet" offers a particularly nuanced example of how animal corpses function as signifiers of white supremacy in contemporary media. When the protagonists visit a white supremacist named Boone, they encounter a carefully curated display of taxidermied animals throughout his home. The positioning is deliberate - as they gradually uncover Boone's Nazi affiliations, the camera repeatedly frames Joel in front of a mounted buck, creating visual parallels between hunting trophies and racial violence. This careful set design choice demonstrates how seemingly decorative elements can carry deeper ideological significance.
Taxidermy's role within white supremacist thought extends beyond mere decoration, functioning as a powerful emblem of "dominion, courage, vigor, undaunted determination, triumph over the 'untamed,' and eventual victory of patriarchal values." This symbolism appears consistently across media representations, from reality TV shows about hunting to social media posts celebrating trophy kills. In modern Western contexts, a specific visual language has emerged around certain white identities - camouflage clothing, hunting imagery, mounted animal heads, and taxidermied specimens form part of a recognizable "uniform" that often signals particular political and racial ideologies.
This symbolism appears in other media contexts as well. Films like "Get Out" use mounted deer heads as ominous background elements in scenes involving racial tension. Reality TV shows featuring hunting families often unconsciously reinforce these connections through their portrayal of "traditional" values and relationship to wildlife. Even social media influencers who post hunting content frequently frame their activities within a broader narrative about heritage and identity that echoes these themes.
The persistence of these visual motifs across different media forms demonstrates how deeply embedded these associations have become in our cultural consciousness. Understanding these symbolic relationships helps reveal how media both reflects and reinforces existing social hierarchies and power structures through seemingly innocent aesthetic choices.
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The Bachelor's White Romance: Race, Love, and Animal Symbolism
The Bachelor, a reality dating show that premiered in 2002, reveals profound racial dynamics that reinforce white desirability and love. In twenty-three seasons, there has never been a nonwhite male bachelor, and the show faced a class-action lawsuit for racial discrimination in 2012. Women of color who compete are typically eliminated in the first few rounds, functioning similarly to the horror film trope of killing off the Black character first.
Following Rachel Lindsay's groundbreaking season as the first Black bachelorette, The Bachelor franchise selected white bachelor Arie Luyendyk Jr. with a predominantly white contestant pool-what could be interpreted as racial backlash similar to Trump's election following Obama's presidency. The show's racism operates through what Stuart Hall calls "inferential racism"-unspoken and naturalized representations with hidden racist premises.
Among Arie's contestants was Kendall Long, a white blonde woman introduced as "quirky" for her love of taxidermy. During her hometown date, she brought Arie to a warehouse filled with taxidermied animals where they stuffed rat corpses together, dressed them in wedding attire, and enacted a mock Bachelor rose ceremony with the dead animals.
This seemingly random activity takes on deeper significance within the show's framework of promoting segregated romance and white love. The taxidermied rats become vehicles for enacting white fantasies, a form of "zoological ventriloquism" where nonhuman corpses serve as props. Following the first Black bachelorette season, the producers saturated Arie's season with signifiers of whiteness-from casting predominantly blonde contestants to orchestrating taxidermy dates. The animal corpses functioned as racial signposts reassuring viewers the show had returned to whiteness.
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Consuming the Other: White Supremacy's Cannibalistic Nature
White supremacy's most insidious quality is its systematic consumption of oppressed bodies and cultural essences. The Delectable Negro by Vincent Woodard meticulously documents how Black bodies were literally consumed during slavery and its aftermath. The case of Nat Turner exemplifies this grotesque practice - after his execution, he was not only lynched but methodically decapitated, skinned, and his body parts were repurposed into everyday items like money purses and wallets. His flesh was reportedly boiled down into medicinal substances and grease that whites would ingest, believing it held curative properties. This practice wasn't isolated to the antebellum period - a New York Times investigation uncovered a contemporary white family still proudly possessing a purse made from Black flesh, demonstrating how these artifacts of violence became cherished family heirlooms.
The fear of white cannibalistic practices was deeply rooted in enslaved African communities. Olaudah Equiano's haunting firsthand account described white overseers as "human butchers" who engaged in ritualistic torture, including cutting off slaves' ears, broiling them, and forcing other slaves to consume them as punishment. Similar accounts appear in numerous slave narratives, suggesting these weren't isolated incidents but rather systematic practices. This physical violence was only possible because Black people were first conceptually stripped of their humanity - a process scholars identify as conceptual violence necessarily preceding physical violence. The dehumanization process created a psychological framework that justified increasingly barbaric acts.
White supremacist "zoological witchcraft" represents a complex practice where minoritized people are both physically and conceptually consumed, their bodies literally and metaphorically "stuffed" with definitions imposed by the dominant class. This practice effectively renders Black consciousness extinct while paradoxically making Black bodies increasingly visible as props and spectacles. The practice manifested most grotesquely in lynching rituals, where victims' body parts became sought-after souvenirs distributed among townsfolk. The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia illustrates this pattern - after his public burning, crowds fought over his heart and liver as prized trophies. Fingers, teeth, and bones were commonly collected and displayed in homes and stores. As one Black Mississippian poignantly noted in the 1930s: "We was always in season" - a chilling reference to how Black bodies were treated as perpetually available for white consumption, both literal and symbolic.
This cannibalistic aspect of white supremacy extends beyond physical violence into cultural appropriation, where Black cultural expressions are consumed and commodified while the creators remain marginalized. The pattern continues in modern forms, from the exploitation of Black athletes' bodies to the commercialization of Black cultural products, demonstrating how the consumptive nature of white supremacy adapts to new contexts while maintaining its essential character.
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Get Out: The Perfect Metaphor for Zoological Witchcraft
In "Get Out," Jordan Peele masterfully frames white supremacy as zoological witchcraft through the story of Chris, a Black photographer who visits his white girlfriend Rose's family estate. The film meticulously reveals that the Armitages are part of an insidious racial cult that kidnaps Black people, hypnotizes them using Rose's mother's teacup and spoon ritual, and banishes their consciousness to "the sunken place"-a terrifying dark void where victims become mere passengers in their own bodies. Through a disturbing auction process disguised as a garden party, Black bodies are sold to wealthy white club members who undergo the "coagula" procedure, surgically implanting their brains into Black skulls to achieve a twisted form of immortality.
Peele's brilliant use of symbolism permeates every frame. The mounted taxidermied buck on the wall serves dual meaning-both as a hunting trophy and as a reference to the racial slur historically used against Black men. The arrival of guests in black cars mirrors how Black people are viewed as mere "vehicles" for white consciousness. The clinical yet ritualistic elements in the basement surgery room, with its carefully arranged surgical tools and burning candles, evoke both medical precision and occult ceremony. Chris's struggles against leather restraints and his desperate act of pulling cotton stuffing from the chair arms creates a powerful visual connection to both the historical bonds of slavery and the contemporary exploitation of animals for leather and other products.
The film's layered commentary extends beyond its obvious critique of racism. The Armitage family's seemingly liberal facade-exemplified by Dean's claim that he "would have voted for Obama a third time"-masks their fundamental view of Black bodies as commodities to be consumed, much like how modern society often disguises its consumption of animal bodies behind a veneer of sophistication and necessity. The character of Jeremy Armitage, who specifically seeks out Black victims through physical combat, represents the more overt violence of white supremacy, while Rose's careful cultivation of Black romantic partners shows its more insidious, calculating nature.
Despite these intricate connections between racism and animal exploitation, most critical analyses of the film have overlooked how violence against animals serves as both metaphor for and expression of racism itself. This blind spot reveals how deeply normalized animal consumption remains in our society, even among those who readily critique colonial consumption of marginalized human bodies. The film's genius lies in its ability to make visible these parallel systems of oppression while forcing viewers to confront their own complicity in various forms of exploitation.
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Beyond Intersectionality: Toward Multidimensional Liberation
Ko challenges the common suggestion to make Black Lives Matter and animal rights movements intersect, arguing this approach presupposes each movement's analysis is sound when both have narrow, one-dimensional understandings of oppression. She introduces the concept of "social layerism" where oppressions are piled together without truly intersecting or relating to each other. Using a classroom analogy, she illustrates that merely removing barriers between movements without revising their foundational frameworks creates confusion rather than progress.
Ko continues her critique of intersectionality by demonstrating how it fails to account for how racism itself is sexual violence, not merely intersecting with it. She cites decolonial scholars who argue race and gender constitute rather than intersect with each other. Ko challenges the framing of Black men as "privileged" as irresponsible, quoting T. Hasan Johnson who distinguishes between privilege (which requires institutional power) and "residual benefits" that Black men might experience.
Ko proposes replacing intersectional thinking with multidimensional understanding, using the film "Contact" as a metaphor. Just as the alien message couldn't be decoded in two dimensions, our understanding of oppression requires a three-dimensional approach. She illustrates how we currently view oppressions as separate "houses" (race, gender, class) rather than seeing them as interconnected dimensions of the same structure.
This limited perspective shapes our solutions-two-dimensional activists see only the "front door" of problems (like individual white racists), while multidimensional activists recognize multiple entry points into dismantling oppressive systems. Ko clarifies that her multidimensional theory isn't simply extending intersectionality but represents a fundamentally different approach to understanding oppression.
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Afro-Zoological Resistance: Finding Liberation Through Nature
Ko examines how natural spaces have been framed as "white" spaces in the American imagination, with Black people historically barred from parks and outdoor areas. Despite stereotypes suggesting Black people are detached from nature, Ko argues this is a wrongheaded notion. She cites Diane Glave's work reclaiming Black environmental heritage, noting how enslaved people used nature for liberation-following the North Star, knowing moss grew on the north side of trees, and understanding bird migration patterns.
Nature represented both danger and refuge for Black people, serving as sites of racial violence but also pathways to freedom. In "Get Out," nature functions as this same racial paradox: the Armitage home is hidden in dense forests, using nature to conceal racial violence, while Chris uses natural elements (cotton, the taxidermied buck) to liberate himself. Ko reinterprets Chris's use of these elements as "closing the distance" between his body and the animal-a strategy rarely employed in anti-racist movements but essential to what she calls "afro-zoological resistance."
White supremacy manipulates not just natural spaces but also the natural senses of the oppressed. In Get Out, the Armitages attempt to consume Chris's consciousness through racial hypnosis, submerging him in the "sunken place"-a physical manifestation of double consciousness where Black people become passengers in their own bodies. White supremacy strips Black people of their natural senses, renames them, and fractures their consciousness, making them doubt their own observations.
The film shows how racism operates as a daily ritual that chips away at the confidence of the oppressed, training them to trust the sensibilities of the dominant class. Chris's resistance comes when he begins trusting his own lens and the ancestral whisperings that guide him to use cotton and the taxidermied buck as tools for liberation. The camera becomes a metaphorical technology of Black truth and racial resistance-a mechanical extension of Chris's eyes that helps heal double consciousness.
Kapitel 10
Liberating Animals from the Animal Rights Movement
If anti-racist movements properly locate the zoological dimensions of white supremacy, animals might be liberated through multidimensional anti-racist organizing rather than through traditional animal rights activism. The animal rights movement has largely ignored scholarship from anti-racist activists who have meaningful insights about white supremacy's appetite for flesh and power, despite the fact that minoritized subjects have been forced to walk a human-animal tightrope for generations.
The movement has intellectually gentrified and paved over other ways of thinking about animals, swallowing up histories of animal advocacy that existed before the term "vegan" was coined. Resources typically flow to activists focused on physical animal oppression rather than those confronting racialized power systems that hurt both animals and humans. This raises the question of whether a standalone animal rights movement is even necessary if anti-racist activists acknowledge the human-animal tightrope as central to racism.
Ko argues that alternative frameworks outside veganism and anti-speciesism are needed for discussing animals. While proudly identifying as vegan, Ko concludes that the animal rights movement isn't the only advocate for animals-some spaces outside it create better theory about animal oppression.
Social movement identity and categorized thinking harm liberation movements. People assume non-vegans have nothing relevant to contribute to animal liberation, but cross-disciplinary reading reveals valuable perspectives. Ko compares veganism to the natural hair movement: just as rejecting chemical straightening is about challenging Eurocentric beauty standards, not merely changing hairstyles, veganism is about rejecting racist food systems and politics that render animals and nonwhite people consumable.
The animal rights movement has claimed ownership of "the animal," providing newcomers a predetermined ideological package (Animal Liberation, speciesism, documentaries) that's Eurocentric and lacks critical race perspectives. This treats Blackness as merely a diversity strategy rather than an epistemological framework. Ko challenges the movement's rigidity, noting that speciesism has become almost religious doctrine, limiting creative thinking.
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Escaping the Sunken Place: Theory as Revolutionary Practice
Ko argues that theory matters as much as physical activism, comparing social theory to fractal geometry-seemingly abstract but revolutionary in application. Just as fractal mathematics revealed hidden patterns in nature that transformed our understanding of the physical world, theoretical frameworks can illuminate concealed systems of oppression and provide tools for dismantling them. She demonstrates how academic discourse, when properly wielded, becomes a form of resistance itself, capable of disrupting entrenched power structures and challenging normalized hierarchies.
Ko concludes that animal liberation will happen alongside racial liberation through decolonial Black epistemic frameworks, helping us escape the "sunken place" of white supremacy's zoological witchcraft. This concept of the "sunken place" - borrowed from Jordan Peele's "Get Out" - serves as a powerful metaphor for the paralysis induced by systemic racism and speciesism, where consciousness exists but agency is stripped away. Through this lens, theory becomes a tool for awakening and reclaiming autonomy.
By recognizing how white supremacy consumes both human and nonhuman bodies, we can begin to dismantle the foundational structures that enable oppression. Ko illustrates this through historical examples, from the exhibition of Saartjie Baartman to modern factory farming, showing how the same logic of objectification and commodification applies across species lines. This isn't about adding animals to anti-racist work or adding race to animal rights work-it's about fundamentally reimagining our approach to liberation by understanding that the "animal" category itself is a racial construct designed to maintain hierarchies of power.
Through her multidimensional framework, Ko offers not just a critique but a pathway forward-one that doesn't require marginalized communities to take on additional burdens but instead recognizes that confronting animality is central to dismantling white supremacy itself. She points to examples of successful intersectional movements, such as the Black Panthers' environmental justice initiatives and contemporary Indigenous land protection efforts, which naturally encompass both human and animal liberation. By embracing afro-zoological resistance and multidimensional thinking, we can begin to free ourselves from the zoological witchcraft that has consumed both human and nonhuman bodies for centuries.
Ko emphasizes that this theoretical framework isn't merely academic exercise but rather a practical tool for revolution. She draws parallels between theoretical understanding and tactical resistance, showing how deeper comprehension of systems of oppression leads to more effective methods of dismantling them. This approach challenges both traditional animal rights movements and conventional anti-racist organizing by revealing their interconnected nature and the necessity of addressing both simultaneously.
