11/18/2017
Messge from Del about our next meeting and movie nights!
PS
We changed our name to the Beloved Community In Action Discussion Group
"Hello Folks,
For the last three years, KBOO has hosted a collectively run group by some KBOO volunteers that meets every 1st Saturday of the month from Noon-2:30PM to study oppression and anti-oppression strategies, practice interrupting oppression and acts on supporting the creation of a Beloved Community at KBOO.
This group has decided to change its name to Beloved Community In Action Discussion Group and will continue to meet on the 1st Saturday from Noon-2:30pm. Everyone is welcome!
We are scheduled to meet next on Saturday, December 2nd from 12pm-2:30pm at the Social Justice Action Center, 400 SE 12th Ave, just 3 blocks from KBOO.
This month we will be discussing the concept of "species-ism" and you can find information and a list of the resources we will discuss at the bottom of this email!
Please bring a dish to share if you are able!
NEW!!! Beloved Community In Action MOVIE NIGHTS!
This group has decided to organize a monthly movie night on the 3rd Thursday of each month starting in January at KBOO in Studio 1. Everyone is welcome!
Here is the schedule for the first half of the year:
Month Movie Monthly Discussion Topic
January 2018
The Mask You Live In Toxic Masculinity
February Reel I***n Toxic Masculinity
March Refugee All Stars Cultural Appropriation
April 13th Refugee experiences
May From Suffering to Satori Racial Justice and the Prison Industrial Complex
June ?
Species-ism
Hope to see you all on Saturday, December 2nd!
Bellow is a message from Dab who will facilitate our next meeting about resources and reading material.
Cheers,
Del
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Hi Friends,
I’ll be leading the discussion group on December 2nd. Our topic will be “Species-ism”. Below are two short readings which would be good to review before we meet, and also links to the 3 videos (about 30 minutes total) which we will be viewing together.
Additionally, there is a link to 13 related quotations by “ high-minded individuals” which are germane to this topic.
I’m looking forward to giving you a glimpse of how I see the world..and hearing about your view!
-Dab
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Reading #1
DEFINITION OF SPECIES-ISM (Wikipedia)
Speciesism (/ˈspiːʃiːˌzɪzəm, -siːˌzɪz-/) involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership. The term is sometimes used by animal rights advocates, who argue that speciesism is a prejudice similar to racism or s*xism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. Their claim is that species membership has no moral significance.[1]
The term is not used consistently, but broadly embraces two ideas.[2] It usually refers to "human speciesism" (human supremacism), the exclusion of all nonhuman animals from the rights, freedoms, and protections afforded to humans.[3] It can also refer to the more general idea of assigning value to a being on the basis of species membership alone, so that "human–chimpanzee speciesism" would involve human beings favouring rights for chimpanzees over rights for dogs, because of human–chimpanzee similarities.
Reading #2
Combating speciesism in a time of racism
BY Ingrid Newkirk
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, August 21, 2017, 5:00 AM
Conscious creatures
Conscious creatures
(Todd Maisel/New York Daily News)
I’m an animal rights advocate, stuck with the problem of how to discuss discrimination based on species at a time when the news is dominated by stories of discrimination based on skin color.
When human rights hang in the balance, we who speak for animals are always told to zip it. We don’t have time to worry about other species, the argument goes, until we handle homo sapiens’ problems.
But we can’t put animal rights on the back burner when racism is on the front burner. In fact, the conversation becomes only more urgent now. Not just because the vast majority of the hate mail that animal rights groups like PETA receive is from self-identified s*xists, homophobes, grinning trophy and “varmint” hunters, and people who spell out hateful messages with the bodies of rabbits and coyotes they’ve shot.
We know so much nowadays about animal intelligence and the cruelty hidden in the slaughterhouse, the circus and trophy hunting that it can’t be right to put that aside. In fact, by recognizing that obligation, we may even learn something about how to treat those who are closest to us.
Henry Bergh, founder of the ASPCA, who also brought and won the first court case about child abuse, said that if you teach a child to care for a caterpillar, you do as much for the child as you do for the caterpillar. And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” when he was criticized for objecting to the Vietnam war by those who thought he should restrict his activism to fighting racial discrimination.
Bullying and violence don’t stop at the human door any more than they stop at the race or gender door.
If ever there were a time to examine the principle behind our objections to the practices and beliefs that result in disrespect toward and discrimination against anyone — women, people with disabilities, people of various races and religions, and other living beings — it is now.
Watch old films like “The Thin Man,” and you will shake your head at scene after scene of all-male decisionmakers, women treated like and referred to as “dolls” and “cutie pies,” black men visible only as subservient shoe shiners and waiters, black women appearing only as maids, stereotypes of Asians directed to use phrases like “No tickee, no laundry.”
Most of us are ashamed of those earlier times of limited understanding of “others,” and are glad they are behind us. So how, then, can we justify treating other sentient, thinking, feeling, living beings, as meals on the hoof, future handbags, cheap burglar alarms and slaves as many do today? We can’t, and that demands a broader discussion about prejudice.
Longtime PETA supporter Russell Simmons says, “I went vegan more than 15 years ago because cruelty is cruelty, whether it’s to blacks, whites, children, the elderly, dogs, cats, pigs or chickens.” He echoes the words of Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose family fled the Holocaust and who said, “I didn’t become a vegetarian for my health. I did it for the health of the chickens.”
And of Alice Walker, who wrote, “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”
It has been a few years now since over a dozen prominent scientists and philosophers issued the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, calling on humanity to recognize the rights of other species, with the words: “The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing then neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess (them).”
Animal rights proponents embrace the words of civil rights activist and feminist Audre Lorde, who believed, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.”
Those of us working to break down the prejudices against animals are the same people who are advocating for human rights and challenging hate groups. Because we know that prejudice in all its ugly forms is wrong. It doesn’t matter who the victim is, but when we witness oppression, we should never let it go unchallenged.
Newkirk is president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
© Copyright 2017 NYDailyNews.com. All rights reserved.
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LINKS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr26scqsIwk (TED Talk by Lesli Bisgould)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8KEF8oid0 (Richard Dawkins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti-WcnqUwLM (Peter Singer & Richard Dawkins)
https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/16-quotes-from-famous-thinkers-who-got-it-right-about-animals/ (Quotes)
“All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life.” -Buddha
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