The Brainhole

Every sensate biped with half a working nerve cell in its skull can scold a careless, way-lamer-than-he-thinks-he-is writer for ESPN.com. My concerns today have little to do with Linsanity and the number it’s doing on (L)institutionalized bigotry in America. The guy can ball, and if you’re still among the doubters (I’d only give you a pass if you just started tuning in with today’s abysmal showing against Deron Williams - I mean the Nets) I can’t help you.

Ultimately, sports are an often pleasurable distraction from real life. And while a Taiwanese-American is currently galvanizing basketball (at least in the Tri-State area) and making subtle but significant strides for the Asian-American community, in real life the shit runs a lot deeper. So before we continue, take a peek at this little gem from the internet’s biggest strip of molding flypaper:

http://huff.to/woyBnI

I’m going to bet that if you’re a non-Asian American sniffing around for hints of racism in that article, you’re either going to a) find nothing, or b) think it’s unfair how white people seem to scrutinize President Obama’s most meager decisions with unprecedented laser-like focus (not least because all animal rights activists are white, or, barring that, animal rights are a “white” concern - right?). On both counts, you’d be missing the point.

The new face of racism isn’t concerned with black or white. It doesn’t thrive on overt hostility or pointed accusations (see again how quickly that sad writer for ESPN.com was dealt with). Its currency is in marginalization, its metric of success in irrelevance. It dwells in those spaces of our minds that we evaluate least frequently, nurturing logical inconsistencies we fail to question to the point where the idea of questioning them at all seems passé; i.e. the notion that shark finning is “one of the cruelest animal treatment practices on earth.”

Look - as a vegetarian, I find the idea of shark finning as abhorrent as any other form of animal cruelty. But the real meat (sorry) of the issue here is, who’s making the above judgment? I’d say if you’re a non-human on planet Earth, there are a lot worse ways to go. It just so happens that shark finning is traditionally practiced by a nationality of people who aren’t white (or as casting calls for movies say, “All-American”), and it’s easier to pretend you’re on higher ground if you can turn the members outside of your identified in-group (what up undergrad sociology) into barbarians.

I’d say it’s actually a pretty easy mental exercise to go about proving that shark finning is a less cruel means of killing compared to the way most animals bred for consumption in America meet their ends. Video footage of finning might be jarring, the casual disposal of the sharks back into the sea might seem gratuitous, and it’s probably true that while the shark is trying to swim fin-less it’s experiencing a great deal of pain. However, it’s also true that in a short amount of time after its having been discarded, the shark is going to be dead, and most importantly prior to the incident of being caught and pulled into a boat, every shark that has ever been finned was going about the business of being a shark in the ocean - which is to say, eating what it’s always craved, in its natural habitat, mating with reckless abandon sans our intervention (I say this having not encountered any material on the subject of shark farming. Feel free to correct me if you find evidence of it somewhere).

The same can’t be said for most cows, pigs, and chickens in America. We know for a fact that they live increasingly protracted lives of incessant consumption to a degree that makes walking impossible. Even if they could go anywhere, the dimensions of their pens (or cages) are so prohibitive to movement it wouldn’t matter. Turkeys are popularly farmed in such a way that natural reproduction is impossible, as the birds can’t stand and hop onto one another to do the dirt. Put plainly, farmed animals in America live in the worst conditions they’ve ever historically endured, and worse still, we haven’t found a method of guaranteeing their swift deaths (see the wide-ranging reports of cows being hung up, stunned improperly, and eviscerated while still living).

If any of this seems crude, then the concept of “animal welfare” means something to you. And like it or not, if welfare means something, suffering means something as well. Already, most people out there aren’t operating on this level because thinking about our relationship to animals is uncomfortable and arbitrarily dictated by social custom. So it’s fertile ground on which the aforementioned logical inconsistencies fester. But ask yourself, honestly, which would you take, if these were your options: a normal life terminated in great but short-lived pain, or a miserable life with the chance of the same, or a sudden loss of consciousness before you’re dead? In other words, which seems less cruel to you? I submit that while it’s not ideal, our answers would collectively err towards the former scenario.

To return to my main point: you should check yourself the next time you write a culture off as primitive or backward - chances are, your team’s doing something at least as bad. If you’re going to eat a cheeseburger, you definitely have no soapbox to stand on when it comes to Chinese restaurants that keep shark on their menus, and it makes literally zero sense for you to be comforted by the fact that at least you’re not eating like those crazy Chinese (who’ll “eat anything,” as I’ve often been told by incredulous black, white, and Latino acquaintances). The mere fact that our treatment of animals is being rated on a scale of what is “less cruel” proves that the practice as a whole is morally questionable. More relevant to this writing, when considered in broad enough terms we’re all on the same team anyway. The idea of America has never been enriched through unchecked dismissal. It’s a loss for us all when any community, no matter how large or small, is made out to be ridiculous - especially for practices we’re all guilty of indulging in as a species. So let’s be good to each other, let’s grow together, and let’s get off the president’s back for ordering some takeout, shall we?