quercus

The staff members that are assigned incarcerated workers often appear to act as if the humanity of these workers begins and ends with their labor. Once, an educator I worked for entered a hallway full of residents and said, “My God, I just wish I could load you all up in a bus and take you to my house.” Everyone smiled, some cheered until she continued: “I need so much work done in my yard. Y’all could fix it right up.”

Having worked in social services, dehumanizing clients was not an uncommon practice. My former clients were not incarcerated but seniors in low income housing. The mentality was the same, like something had to be inherently wrong in a person to end up on the other side of the desk.

Thank you for sharing. After reading, I found a local group working on food justice and prison abolition.

I listened to the audiobook and it felt bogged down at times. But the argument for claiming and using fictional stories to promote leftist ideas is interesting, especially framed around such a large pop culture phenomenon.

The blog posts condense Harris' arguments pretty well. They joke around a lot in the TIR interview, which is how I was introduced to the book.

Me too. It was the springboard from which I dove headfirst into mystical anarchism, political praxis as spiritual practice and vice versa. The when and why being uncannily similar to Christman's experience.

Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:

“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”

“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”

The above map doesn't include fishing, it's showing land use. This shows fishing:

Here is another one about land animals:

Interactive map

Honey bees were domesticated, selectively bred like all other livestock, to be more docile and dependent. The relationship you describe was created by humans for the benefit of humans.