T.O.T.: Animal Planet And Race

A few months ago I posted a link about Food Network and its annoyingly blatant whiteness.  Since I moved to San Francisco and relaxed my channel restrictions, I have rarely watched it.  Perhaps because I feel even more acutely that I am not allowed to have a pet in this dog-mad city, I am turning frequently to Animal Planet.  As is typical for someone who expects to see persons of her race depicted with regularity on television (see: privilege, white), it took me a long time to notice that something was wrong.  I was finally struck with full force during an episode of Escape From Chimp Eden, when another white sanctuary owner was explaining to our white sanctuary owner protagonist that "the natives" killed chimps and thus she had to keep them within her walls.  It is not that "the natives" are bad people per se, you see, just that they are ignorant and superstitious.  Our protagonist makes a point to attend a market looking for bush meat, presented as barbarically as possible, to further illustrate how far 'these people' have to go.  The fact that native Africans may be eating monkeys because they are hungry, and why they might indeed be hungry (or, for that matter, why people keep clearing forest land for their farms), is never discussed. Nor is the idea that white people coming in and walling off parts of African land to protect African animals from Africans is perhaps a tad paternalistic. 

This is the crux of Animal Planet's racial politics, wherever the shows are set.  All the 'Animal Cop'-style programs present owners who are mostly poor, and many of them are black or Hispanic, and this is never addressed or considered as a possible mitigating factor, or as some sort of structural problem which might be ameliorated in order to help the treatment of animals.  The problem is presented as one of individual pathology, no matter what the situation.  Needless to say almost all the ASPCA officers and vets portrayed, the population of professionals which 'deal with' these personal responsibility lapses, are white.  The one exception is Detroit, and although some of the officers and staff are black, an even larger percentage of the offender population is also black and receives the same type of narrative treatment (They shoot dogs!  Those barbarians!).  The issue only gets more stark as Animal Planet films internationally, where one would think it would be difficult to avoid some sort of diversity.  Yet there is not a single one of its international wildlife shows, that I know of, that focuses on a protagonist of color.  Be s/he scientist, preservationist, vet, or volunteer, s/he is almost always a young, conventionally attractive white person, except in rare cases when she is an eccentric older white living in Africa, or, more rarely, South America or Asia.  The message is always the same: whites save animals.  Natives threaten animals, or at the very most provide manual labor for whites in their efforts to save animals.  The network is particularly tone-deaf in the matter of Chimp Eden, which is set in South Africa for heaven's sake, and yet the sanctuary staff's racial makeup or history is not considered worth noting. 

It goes without saying that no one should shoot or otherwise be cruel to a dog, and that endangered species should be protected and nurtured.  It is also probably true that Caucasians are currently overrepresented in the animal-based professions in America and Europe, just as they are overrepresented in the professions generally.  PBS, which is usually pretty attuned to racial representation, shows a lot of whites on its nature programs too.  But there are ways to present a certain unbalanced reality in ways that do not normalize or exacerbate it (and there is a large international population of animal professionals of color to be portrayed as well).  Perpetuating colonialist notions of an ignorant and cruel populace, whether foreign or domestic, completely ignores contextual realities that might actually help solve the problem if they are acknowledged.   
 

Comments

[eloise]

I am so glad you brought this up, because I notice it every time I watch Animal Planet, or Discovery and NatGeo, for that matter.

[Katie]

great post. really on point. the food network often has a similar dynamic, in that seemingly only white people can really appreciate the native foods.

[Anonym]

Stop watching TV. Just try for two months.

After that time, you will spread the same word.

Stop watching TV.

[Fat Louie]

In other words, close your eyes and you won't see the racism anymore! It won't go away, because there will be no one to protest against it, but "la la la I can't heaaar you." Brilliant.

[Lucia]

This is something that has been getting to me for sometime now. I have looked online to see if there were other people that noticed the "funny" race relations on AP. Nothing! So thank you for talking about this.

[Fat Louie]

Yep, there seem to be lots of us. Thanks for reading!

[Noah]

Anon has a point--it's not about closing our eyes, but about re-programming our brains. (Sort of like how people who watch Fox News actually know less about what's going on in the world than those who watch no news at all.)

As this post illustrates, most TV shows are racist, and subjecting ourselves to that stuff programs racism into our brains. Subconscious biases are very powerful. See: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo

It's one thing to discuss it after the fact, but if we are bombarded with negative images of people of color, that is what stays with us. If I watch TV, I have racist dreams based on what I saw, so I know that I am affected.

Consequently, I make a conscious effort to avoid negative representations of people of color and instead seek out positive ones (generally this means from writers/directors/artists of color).

[Fat Louie]

But then there's Media Matters, an entire organization dedicated to watching Fox News and calling it on its bullshit. Without it, the misinformation would just go to the public unprotested. If people who know how to identify media racism don't watch the shows and identify it, the shows will continue to perpetrate it unchecked because the only people watching won't notice the problems. Also, it's insulting to tell people to deprogram their minds who are pretty clearly aware of these issues, you know? We always have more to learn but we're all on a journey.

[johanna]

Here via the Vegan Ideal (http://theveganideal.blogspot.com/). Great post -- thank you for talking about this.

[barbelle]

I also have noticed the troubling racial dynamics of Animal Planet's shows and wondered about the message they were trying to send.

Fantastic post.

[Fat Louie]

So glad people are enjoying the post! Thanks for reading.