Topic: Today's "You Can't Be Serious".
- Mar 27, 2006 03:34pm by Reach. - Peace and oneness,
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New PETA Campaign Sparks Outrage
[img:e939148918]http://www.tolerance.org/images/dynamic_assets/images_150w/peta_150x150.jpg[/img:e939148918]
By Dana Williams | Writer/Editor, Tolerance.org
The lifeless bodies of two noosed black men, dangling from trees as a mob of whites sheepishly surveys the scene.
The smoldering corpse of a black man, burned alive atop a pile of wood.
The terrified face of a slave, wearing only a piece of cloth about her waist as a man presses a hot branding iron to her back.
Alone, the images evoke the kind of gut-wrenching horror that makes people want to look away.
But place them alongside photos of slaughtered cows, burning chickens and branded pigs, and for many, they evoke a different emotion ý pure outrage.
Such is the juxtaposition of a new PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) exhibit, "Are Animals the New Slaves?"
For Vakiya Courtney, executive director of America's Black Holocaust Museum, some images in PETA's new campaign strike an especially painful chord.
Dr. James Cameron, founder of America's Black Holocaust Museum, survived an attempted lynching after he and two friends were falsely accused of murdering a white man in Marion, Ind., in 1930. Cameron, 91, the nation's only living survivor of a lynching, watched a mob of whites beat and lynch his two friends ý the same two men shown hanging in the PETA exhibit.
"I just cannot believe they would do this," Courtney said, gasping as she viewed the exhibit on PETA's website. "Dr. Cameron was supposed to have been the third man in this picture."
Courtney, who is vegetarian, said that while she, too, is against animal cruelty, comparing the suffering of human beings to animals is unthinkable:
"How can you possibly compare the brutality that our ancestors experienced here, and the brutality that people like Dr. Cameron had to overcome, to animal cruelty?"
Public outcry follows tour
PETA's traveling "Slavery" display, which began a 10-week, 42-city national tour last month, supposedly aims to foster public sympathy for the plight of animals.
But in some places, public outcry over the campaign, which directly compares the enslavement and lynching of blacks to the harsh treatment of farm animals overshadows any such aim.
A showing of the exhibit this week in New Haven, Conn., for example, fueled a protest so heated police were called to monitor the situation.
"I am a black man! I can't compare the suffering of these black human beings to the suffering of this cow," protester Michael Perkins was quoted by the New Haven Register.
Scott X. Esdaile, president of the Greater New Haven NAACP, showed up and demanded the exhibit's removal.
"Once again, black people are being pimped. You used us. You have used us enough," Esdaile was quoted. "Take it down immediately."
James Griffin, president of the Greater Waterbury NAACP and member of the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, shares Esdaile's outrage.
Griffin has followed local media coverage of the controversy and said he is "disgusted" by images he has seen on television and the Internet.
"I'm highly offended by the whole thing," Griffin told Tolerance.org.
"To think that in this day and age, one would compare the suffering of humans in slavery to harsh treatment of animals is outrageous. It shows how little respect [PETA has] for the feelings of other groups and individuals."
Trading one Holocaust for another
That PETA finds itself embroiled in a controversy over one of its ad campaigns should come as little surprise. The group is well known for its edgy and provocative animal-rights ads.
But some are surprised the organization would employ a tactic so similar to one it apologized for three months ago.
The group's 2003 Holocaust on Your Plate campaign, which compared farm-animal slaughter to the murder of Jews in the Holocaust, stirred furor among several Jewish groups.
In May, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk issued an email statement that read: "I have decided to apologize for the pain caused by the 'Holocaust on Your Plate' campaign."
Newkirk went on to explain that the campaign meant to show "the logic and methods employed in factory farms and slaughterhouses are analogous to those used in concentration camps."
Courtney of the Black Holocaust Museum said that while PETA may have discontinued the exploitation of the Jewish Holocaust and offered an apology, they now simply are using a different Holocaust to further their cause.
"They are just substituting one peoples' suffering for another," she said.
PETA, for now, isn't apologizing for its "Slavery" campaign, nor does it plan to discontinue the exhibit anytime soon. The display is being featured in Scranton, Pa., and Baltimore, Md., this week. After the 10-week tour ends, the exhibit will travel to college campuses around the nation.
Dawn Carr, director of special projects for PETA, said that while the organization has heard its share of negative reactions to the exhibit, more often than not, people walk away "with something to chew on."
"People have shouted at us for comparing black people to animals. But the exhibit also compares other cruelties ý women being denied the right to vote, children forced into labor," Carr said.
"Obviously, the circumstances are different, but the lack of compassion that allowed humans to be enslaved and lynched and for women and children to be mistreated is similar to the lack of compassion that makes it possible for animals to suffer cruelty today."
Perhaps no one disagrees with that statement more than Dr. James Cameron.
"They may have treated us like animals back then, but there is no way we should be compared to animals today," he said. "You cannot compare the suffering of human beings or the suffering that I experienced to the suffering of an animal."
- Mar 27, 2006 03:40pm by Dropjaw - Dropjaw
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Thats extreme
- Mar 27, 2006 03:46pm by Reach. - Peace and oneness,
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They've since rethought this campaign.
They won't go through with it now.
- Mar 27, 2006 04:40pm by Atilla_Beatsmith - [email protected]
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good....that campaign was horrible.
- Mar 27, 2006 07:17pm by JDFlow - [url=http://www.my.rawkus.com/profile/jdflow]JDFlow on Rawkus[/url]
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I never understood PETA. They're battling nature. We are natural predators as mammals, and might I add damn good predators. We're at the top of our chain. It's a fact that our biological makeup catagorizes us as carnivores. So what's thier problem? Do they find it sad when a tiger rips another animal apart? I'd say that image is just as inhumane and inflicts the same ammount, if not more pain than we do on other animals.
- Mar 27, 2006 07:46pm by Lucidialect
We're natural predators. But for whatever reason we've been endowed with sympathy and compassion, and the critical reasoning with which to examine the methods in which these animals are treated and killed. Don't get me wrong, I eat as much meat as any blue-blooded American. But the ways in which alot of the animals are slaughtered, and treated til the point of slaughter are utterly attrocious. I'm also not a black man in this world and don't have a lineage of enslaved or oppressed ancestry, but I find my sympathy to be weighed similarly in both scenarios. Both burden my heart to think about and make me feel like human nature has innately brought on bad ways of doing thing, always. To me, I think PETA's symapthys are simply weighed heavier, or equally to humans and I don't see a problem with that. They could have just as well used Jews, or Japanese.
