This, when you think about it, is consistent with the developing logic of the “antiracism” scam and The Great Stupid. The legal theory that the impact of a reasonable policy could be deemed racist if it had “disparate impact” on a minority group gradually metastasized into the Bizarro World belief that black community cultural pathologies had to be granted immunity from negative consequences in the interests of fairness. This, in turn, encourages cultural pathologies, which further disadvantage the black community and undermine societal values generally.
It is one of the intrinsically terrible ideas that once would have gained no traction with those possessing any critical thinking skills whatsoever, but after sufficient indoctrination and propaganda, almost any idea can begin to seem reasonable. But does it go this far?
Researchers with the University of Denver’s Institute for Human-Animal Connection argue that animal control policies and pet adoption requirements perpetuate racial inequities. Their “Punishment to Support: The Need to Align Animal Control Enforcement with the Human Social Justice Movement” argues that animal control enforcement and punishment disproportionately hurt people of color and low-income communities, and thus constitute “systemic racism.”
The authors, led by Kevin Nolan Morris, who holds an endowed chair, point to racial biases in requirements of “responsible pet ownership,” you know, little matters like leash laws, rabies vaccination requirements, anti-tethering laws, responsible handling of “at-risk” animals, providing shelter, behavioral training or veterinary care, and investigations of cruelty, abuse and neglect. This is all discriminatory, because African-American lifestyles, attitudes and culture often don’t mesh with such habits. Thus “racism, classism, and the White dominant culture” mandates animal treatment standards that are “largely unobtainable for anyone in the U.S. other than white, middle, and upper-class individuals,” the paper argues.
That’s right: a large number of blacks can’t or won’t treat animals with kindness and due care, so requiring such conduct of those who choose to own animals is racist.
Stupid enough for you?
Published in October 2020, the paper was apparently too stupid for animal rights activist Nathan Winograd, who posted a blog essay headlined “The Racism of Low Expectations.” The woke researchers “ignore that rescuers and shelters have a moral and institutional obligation to the vulnerable animals they serve to ensure those animals are not placed in harm’s way; which can and should be done using standards that don’t focus on a potential adopter’s skin color or size of their bank account, but on their ability to provide for an animal’s physical and mental health,” Winograd noted. I can make it simpler than that: if you can’t take care of a pet humanely, don’t get a pet.
The same rule holds for having children, and, of course, requirements of responsible child-rearing may also be “racist.”
A jaw-dropping op-ed from the Albuquerque Journal [behind a paywall, unfortunately] is called “End racial bias in animal adoption; people of all colors love pets.” “Many animal welfare groups as a whole try to protect animals up for adoption by requiring everything from a fenced yard for dogs, to ownership of a house, to meeting age requirements for adoption of a young puppy. […] The excuses [we] have heard for adoption denial of an animal [have] led to more people of color going to breeders and pet stores,” is among its fatuous arguments. It is an example of the increasingly faddish, “If doing something responsible motivates irresponsible people to do something irresponsible, then it’s irresponsible to be responsible.”
Morris and his team wants a full removal of adoption requirements. After all, The Institute for Human-Animal Connection explains, what the racist dominant white culture calls neglect or abuse cases are simply the misinterpreted, benign practices of a pet owner in a different culture.
For example, my rescue dog Spuds [above] was forced to live most of his day in a locked bathroom, sleeping in his own excrement, and filling his stomach with sticks when he was chained in the back yard without being fed. Hey, his owners still loved and cared about him! They were just part of a different culture!
A book, “The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals,” published by Stanford, even lists dog-fighting as one of those cultural differences in pet ownership that are unfairly discriminated against by “white culture.” Providing high levels of care are, the book explains, behaviors characteristic of “whiteness.”
The ethics takeaway from this madness is as follows: while the argument that preventing cruelty to animals is “racist” is a particularly throbbing version of the “disparate impact” trick, it is no different from the rest. With a little attention and responsible reporting, deranged extensions of the values-rotting low-expectations excuse for black community pathologies may speed our currently addled society back to reality.
If a culture is cruel to animals, the problem is with that culture, not those who are attempting to minimize its damage.
________________________
Facts: College Fix
Ethics Alarms 
Disproportionate impact analysis needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Using it to excuse aberrant behavior does not allow the society to progress. Instead, it retards development.
Again, this is racist only because some pathetic twit has decreed it so.
Years ago, I served on the Board of Directors of an animal shelter in southern Maine. In addition to handling local strays and surrenders, the shelter became and continues to be part of a network bringing homeless dogs north from places in the South and even Puerto Rico.
Why? Because we could find homes for them. Even before the pandemic, which greatly increased demand amongst those shut-in by government decree, our shelter – and others in the region – could take dogs that had “limited out” in their local shelters and would otherwise have been put down. In many places in the south, shelter space is outstripped by demand and dogs that don’t adopt out within a week or two are euthanized. In the north, shelters generally have enough demand that only dogs deemed unadoptable due to behavioral issues (and, to a lesser extent, medical conditions – though there are no small number of angels here in the north that will adopt dogs replete with massive ongoing vet bills) are put down.
In the south, not so much The southern folk might be fond of their hounds, but in the north dogs are usually house pets and in the south, it’s not unusual for dogs to live isolated in kennels or on chains. That’s the way many of those folks grew up. The relationship between dogs and humans is simply different.
The race of those who do so is immaterial. It’s simply a question of local culture, not one of skin color.
Phoenix has a major problem with (try not to laugh) literally packs of Chihuahuas marauding neighborhoods on the now predominantly Mexican west side. They are allowed to run free and are not spayed. And of course, the Mexican gang bangers love to get their pit bulls really mean and intimidating because that’s evidently cool.
Hunting dogs, certainly in the South, are not house pets.
This is particularly depressing. Why are any standards now racist? It doesn’t take much to adopt a pet anyway, so arguing that those minimal standards are too high seems like we are on a dangerous road to living with two sets of laws: one for those who are “white,” and ones for those who aren’t (except for Asians? maybe?). So, if you are white, you have to follow X, Y, and Z to adopt a pet, but if you aren’t, have at it, I guess.
This is what happens when people misdiagnose problems. Solutions based on the wrong definition of the problem are going to inevitably lead to dumb policies. If X group acts a certain way, and Y group acts a certain way, and X’s group behavior leads to better outcomes for society as a whole, then we need to find out why Y group is acting poorly. Are there cultural issues? Educational issues? What’s going on?
These woke arguments always strike me as racist because they seem to suggest that African Americans somehow “can’t” meet the standards that everyone else has to meet. African Americans can’t help committing crimes; African Americans can’t figure out how to get an ID to vote; African Americans can’t, can’t, can’t. I reject that sort of racist nonsense completely. People have a tendency to live up or down to the expectations of those around them. If there are cultural pathologies in any group, those can be changed. People can do better.
If these people would even stop for a second, they would see how well Asians do in America, better than whites in most circumstances. That means Asians are doing things other groups aren’t doing, or they are doing some things in a better way. People should focus more on learning from each other and doing their best than trying to play the victim in every single circumstance.
Well put.
It’s called the quiet racism of low expectations.
Well, why not? We’re already headed towards having two different holidays, two different flags, and two different national anthems depending on the color of your skin. Why shouldn’t there be two different sets of laws and standards for the two different peoples?
The fact is that living up to standards isn’t always easy. Living within the rules is not always easy. One of the dirty little secrets is that, although black people in this country pay lip service to Dr King as a sort of secular patron saint, They Don’t really follow a lot of what he had to say. A lot of what he had to say was similar to what Booker T. Washington said, that black people needed to show that they were not a threat and were in fact an asset. Dr King gave a speech at a church, I believe in which he told the assembled people that although they migt not be able to afford fancy perfumes, they could afford soap. He also said that it was necessary that they make it clear they were not thinking about sex all the time. Dr. King was saying that his people needed to learn to fit in. Unfortunately, fitting in required some effort. Being angry and claiming victimhood requires a whole lot less effort. Unfortunately, too many on the white side of things buy into the victimhood narrative. That’s why we are where we are, and that’s why there might as well be two sets of laws, depending on the color of your skin. Come to think of it, I remember someplace far to the south of here being like that…
This is what you expect if you assume that all of the left’s ‘Minority Champion’s’ went from wearing white hoods one day to preaching civil rights on behalf of minorities the next. Only if they view minorities as inferior can white leftists justify on speaking on their behalf. I am assuming Kevin Morris, who wrote this article is white, (look at the group photo, the only 2 non-white people are women), so how can he justify writing this? Why not let a black man or woman write this and explain how the black community thinks these policies are unfair. Why is it up to Mr. Morris to do it? Mr. Morris may believe they are incapable of doing it, so its up to him to ‘save’ them from these racist policies.
https://socialwork.du.edu/sites/default/files/styles/hero_image_1356_x_538/public/2019-11/ihac_hero_aboutusgroupshot.jpg?itok=quOrfQ_R
They didn’t. They went from screeching against the Vietnam War on college campuses up north one day to taking buses down south to show black people how to register to vote, under their guidance, of course, the next. They thought they had all the answers and that if the world wasn’t going to listen, they’d just go ahead and remake it in their own image. These were the same white people squawking that Clinton getting his knob polished in the Oval Office was nothing and turning out in droves for Obama. More than a few of them, together with their brain-washed, brain-dead grandkids, were the ones trashing the country last summer.
No, Joe Biden was siding with segregationists. Obama and the Clintons list Robert Byrd, Exalted Cyclops of the KKK, as one of their role models. The Clintons used unpaid black inmates as servants when he was Arkansas governor (slavery is legal as punishment for a crime). It was Republicans that ushered in Civil Rights, the Democrats just woke up and realized they needed a new way to control the black vote.
Even the Huffington Post acknowledges that the Democratic Party doesn’t care about blacks because they believe in equal rights.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-democratic-partys-two_b_933995
The Tuskegee Institute notes that from 1882-1968 3446 blacks were lynched in the South. In the same time frame 1297 Republicans were lynched, mostly for registering blacks to vote. These weren’t Democrats helping black Americans, the Democrats were lynching them.
Link, please? I want to verify those numbers.
P.S. Black still only really turns out for black. That’s why Obama got huge margins here in 2008, but couldn’t save John Corzine in 2009, when the blacks stayed home rather than vote for an unexciting tax-and-spend liberal with a bald head and glasses.
Two words come to mind: Michael Vick
Two questions, and more later. Where is PETA in all this? And where are the black Americans up at arms on this racist analysis? Way too quiet on both fronts. When the steam stops coming out of my ears, I’ll write something more substantive. But actually a third question: Who are these morons who expect to be taken seriously when they write this claptrap?