Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out

by Aph Ko

In this scintillating combination of critical race theory, social commentary, veganism, and gender analysis, media studies scholar Aph Ko offers a compelling vision of a reimagined social justice movement marked by a deconstruction of the conceptual framework that keeps activists silo-ed fighting their various oppressions—and one another. Through a subtle and extended examination of Jordan Peele’s hit 2017 movie Get Out, Ko shows the many ways that white supremacist notions of animality and race exist through the consumption and exploitation of flesh. She demonstrates how a critical historical and social understanding of anti-Blackness can provide the pathway to genuine liberation. Highly readable, richly illustrated, and full of startling insights, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft is a brilliant example of the emerging discipline of Black veganism by one of its leading voices.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Vegan, Social Justice, Feminism, Politics, Animals

173 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Aph Ko is an American writer, vegan activist, and digital media producer. She is the author of Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out, co-author of Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters, and creator of the website Black Vegans Rock.

Reviews

[Dr. Breeze Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished Aph Ko’s newest book, “Racism as Zoological Witchcraft”. Here is my review.

In this book, Aph Ko offers the reader to consider the space of ‘animality’ as a more productive framework in understanding the limits of mainstream animal rights rhetoric as well as traditional methods of USA mainstream anti-racism movements.

Animality, a site of white supremacy and bedrock of the US racial caste system, is explored through two popular media: The Bachelor and the movie “Get Out”. Ko examines the usage of taxidermy in the ways that white imagination about both non-human animals and nonwhite (mostly Black people) are fundamental to articulations of power, privilege, entitlement, and control over nature/the Other. Taxidermy, a marker of white supremacy in Bachelor and “Get Out”, involves hollowing out the authentic essence of an sentient being, and then stuffing that being to take on the desires of the dominant (White). I don’t want to give a way too much, but Ko’s analysis of taxidermy and racial power/dominance are refreshing.

Ko also argues for why using ‘intersectionality’ is not as effective as other concepts that do not work within colonial logic and identity labels, which is how intersectionality, as a buzzword now, is utilized. Instead, she gives us ‘Afro-futuristic’ possibilities that do not rely on a Eurocentric animal rights and anti-racism rhetoric which have been accepted as ‘the only way’ by most in the USA. Ultimately, she urges the reader— especially minoritized racial groups in the USA, to ‘get out’ of the psychological traps of adhering to only Eurocentric and colonial methods of liberation, no matter how ‘benevolent’ these methods may at first appear to be.

https://www.amazon.com/Racism-Zoologi...

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unpacking the film Get Out (2017)...

Since I cannot seem to finish any of the 40 political economy books I started, stepping out of my comfort zone with this recommendation (film/cultural analysis)…

Highlights:
--Thesis: activism on race and animal rights are siloed and fragmentary, thus an “intersectional” fix between these two fragments does not capture a broader concept: white supremacy’s use of “minoritized bodies and animality” to construct its racial superiority.
--Note: this brief book seems to be written in an accessible manner for activists, and requires a lot of further exploration.

1) Animality and racism:
--It's easy to have an uncomfortable feeling at the suggestion of synthesizing critical race studies with critical animal/animality studies (representation of "animal" in culture).
...While the author makes the point that animality is already experienced in racism (thus not an additional burden), I still found it difficult to imagine explaining this to someone unconvinced without great efforts in reframing.
...We juggle many social issues all the time (there are not separate issues without interactions), from local inequalities to imperialist wars to ecological crises, so we should avoid a trolley-problem approach which re-enforce the zero-sum game imagination (a key tactic by reactionaries).
--Of course, this hinges on establishing the significance of what animality studies can bring to understanding racism. The author illustrates this using 3 case studies in popular media, with the analysis of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out being the centerpiece. I'm usually less engaged with popular media analysis (ex. Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Adam Curtis' messy "documentaries"), they seem to suffer from so many biases (I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That); however, this film had plenty to offer and it’s clear why it inspired this book.
…Side note: taxidermy, which links the 3 cases together, is so messed up. It never ceases to amaze me, the range in human potential from the heroic to the atrocious...
…While the media examples present intriguing metaphors, my bias requires more systematic historical analysis to ground this argument; this was brief. Digging into the references to learn more on colonialism’s construction of animality and its alienation and consumption, some seemed several layers deeper than I’m ready for, ex. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture. I’ll first retreat closer to political economy and revisit Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital which had some good summaries of the ideologies of racism/colonialism and its relations with capitalist development.
...Some more dives:
-Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century
-The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

2) Speciesism and animal rights:
--Returning to reactions from the unconvinced, the question of speciesism and animal rights/liberation (so much more to explore here) is another issue. The historical analysis of white supremacy and animality was brief, so there is much to explore; I'm also interesting in comparative analysis with alternative relationships.
...Without this, it seems difficult for those unconvinced to move beyond just the recognition that factory farming is cruel (which the author points out is only symptomatic of animal oppression, thus critiquing narrow animal rights activists in missing the racial/species dimensions).
...I found this a compelling next step: Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

[Martin Rowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm the publisher of this book and wanted to share a few thoughts about it. In one sense, RACISM AS ZOOLOGICAL WITCHCRAFT is a deeper exploration of post-colonial philosophy and theory surrounding the animalization of the black body that Aph and her sister Syl lay out and discuss in their book APHRO-ISM. In another sense, it's a book of cultural criticism and media studies—particularly around the presentation of black bodies in popular culture. In still another sense, RACISM is a remarkably sinuous and convincing critical appreciation of GET OUT, the 2017 smash-hit movie by Jordan Peele. In still another sense, it's a passionate call to re-imagine veganism and animal rights as philosophical constructs and social movements. Yet, while this extraordinary work is all those things (and more), it's true strength lies in how it weaves these themes together—AND how it offers a brilliant example of precisely the kind of engaged social, cultural, literary, and philosophical theorizing and analysis that Ko is asking of activists and theorists alike. I've been reading and publishing animal rights books and books on philosophy for decades. I don't think I've ever been as excited or intellectually engaged, or as inspired, as I have while reading RACISM AS ZOOLOGICAL WITCHCRAFT. I very rarely give five stars to any book, let alone ones I publish. No book is perfect, and this one is no exception. However, the scale of its ambition and what it does with its material is so impressive that it deserves that extra star. I highly recommend it.

[Josh Issa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating new approach to racism and animal rights using the movie Get Out as a way of showing what Aph means. The connection between non-white humans considered as animals & the consumption on animal flesh is connected well to show how anti-racism and animal liberation are contained within each other.

Another important thing that is brought out is the rejection of intersectionality for multi-dimensionality. Rather than seeing someone as a oppressions as independent intersecting axes, multi-dimensionality sees how oppressions are composed within one another. This helps Aph bring out a more nuanced understanding of the racialization of Black men specifically.

The witchcraft aspect comes from considering shamanistic practices of the consumption and usage of human flesh to empower and vital the user. Aph highlights how taxidermy of animals is a key insight to how white supremacy operates in its metaphorical and literal consumption and usage of non-white bodies.

[Mark Robison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how Aph Ko does it. She's like your kind and generous older sister with a PhD who re-states academic social theory in a way that makes it relevant to your life. She still uses phrases like "decolonial Black epistemic frameworks," but never leaves you hanging there confused. She puts things in the context of "The Bachelor" and the horror film "Get Out," which is used throughout the book to describe the ways that white supremacy exploits and consumes black and brown bodies as well as animals.

As with her great book "Aphro-ism" (co-authored with sister Syl Ko), one of my favorite parts is how she explains that intersectionality is not a good method for analyzing oppressions. Excerpt:

Although activists are accustomed to taking “race,” “gender,” and “class” and making them intersect, most people don't question how they have been trained to understand what “race,” “gender,” and “class” are to begin with. The reason why Black women are excluded from both the anti-racist movement and the feminist movement is because our cultural understandings of what constitutes a “Black person” and what constitutes a “woman” are already tainted and separated at the root. The mainstream public thinks of a “Black person” as a man and a “woman” as a white female. Making these two spaces connect doesn't discursively birth a Black woman.

Or she discusses how black men are excluded from positions of power in the Black Lives Movement as well as from stories of race-based sexual violence. I didn't know, for example, that Trayvon Martin might've thought George Zimmerman was a rapist. And I didn't know the long history of whites literally consuming slaves, making them into purses and even eating them, and how taxidermy has been used as a symbol of white supremacy.

Anyway, if the following passage speaks to you, you'll love this book:

How is it possible that we live in an era in which anti-racist activists are acutely aware of how white supremacy treats people of color “like animals,” but are discouraged from examining how literal animals are casualties of this racial caste system as well?

While I loved the book from the beginning, I read it fairly slowly because of the big words. When I switched to the audio version, I raced through. Both were helpful — the former so I could highlight parts I wanted to think upon later, and the latter so I could simply enjoy the discussion of how our society deals with race, gender, and animals.

Grade: A

[Corvus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gettin tired of goodreads randomly deleting my reviews! Copy paste from when I read this in 2021.

Once in a while, a theorist comes along and helps you realize just how stuck in a paradigm your thinking is. There is a long history of our movements often being categorized by waves or generations- a practice that often puts white voices in the spotlight. As times and society change (and while many things stay the same,) daring authors, activists, thinkers, and others break through what is accepted at the time to create something needed and new. These people are critical to the evolution of thinking and activism. Aph Ko is one of these people.

I have followed Ko's work since Black Vegans Rock and Aphro-ism and also had the privilege of seeing her speak at an Intersectional Justice conference (of which her talk was one of the best, if not the best.) I have been regularly blown away by her ability to use the knowledge we have to create new things, rather than only repeating or strengthening ideas that already exist. In "Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out," Aph Ko takes many belief systems regarding anti-racism, animal liberation, intersectionality, feminism, and other kinds of radicalism and dissects them mercilessly. While reading Ko's work in this book especially, I was moved by her unapologetic passion. Ko tells the truth and creates thought exercises that stimulate the mind and create change even if a particular concept is not fully fleshed out. Ko has clearly considered things outside the box so intensely that her excitement about the evolution and change of our movements shines through the pages.

This book is well organized and fairly short at 126 pages, not including notes and sources. Normally, I would read something this short more quickly. But, Ko introduces so many complicated concepts and discusses so many intense and serious things, that I put the book down frequently. This book requires one to take their time and think. Ko begins from the premise that many of our movements are colonized and static in how they approach the subjects at hand- focusing mainly on racism and animality (though me dividing the two into separate camps for the sake of clarity goes against Aph's thesis.) Ko has a background in media studies and uses her experience to analyze these topics in various media- the movie Get Out being central to the text.

I actually decided to rewatch Get Out after reading Ko's first analysis of it in the book. I am a person who often pays attention to how other animals intersect with humans' stories in media. However, I did not realize just how intertwined the constructs of "human" and "animal" were in Get Out until reading Ko's analysis and rewatching the film. Ko highlights how human and other animal suffering and exploitation are not just metaphors for one another, but are intimately intertwined as part of a much more insidious system of what she refers to as Zoological Racism. She weaves this analysis throughout the book as a cohesive thread.

There was one section of the book that I struggled with and that was a chapter titled Moving from Intersectionality to Multidimensional Liberation Theory. Ko previously coined the term social layerism to describe "the ways in which intersectional activists and scholars often pile oppressions on top of one another without an "intersection" or "connection" ever really taking place." This is basically a colonized, white veganism version of faux intersectionality that is separate from the concepts promoted by Black lesbian feminists like the Combahee River Collective. It seemed to me through reading this chapter, that Ko was addressing social layerism rather than actual intersectionality. The idea of multidimensionality is central to intersectionality. It is not that Black women experience racism on top of sexism or vice versa, but that the intersection creates a multidimensional experience different from either oppression on its own. Now, it's clear that Ko understands this. She even goes on to say at the end of the chapter that some people will make the argument I just made and that it is incorrect. She claims that we are so steeped in intersectionality being the accepted theory that that stands in the way of us being able to grasp multidimensionality liberation theory. That said, I still found myself searching for the difference between the two.

Ko goes on to explain multidimension liberation theory using a very helpful analogy, complete with illustration, of different kinds of houses. This is where her theories did begin to separate from and evolve past intersectionality for me. She explains that we currently look at oppressions from the front of the house seeing only the front doors as an entrance to fighting it. What oppression really is is a multidimensional house with many different entrances. We must find and explore those in order to most effectively fight oppression.

I also was both enlightened and confused by her example of Black mens experiences as being gendered and sexualized. This also seemed to be in line with or expanding upon intersectionality to me, (i.e. the intersection of being Black and male creates a unique set of struggles.) It is undoubtedly important not to place Black men in the same patriarchal category as white men, but I think she took it a bit far. She quotes mens studies theorists Johnson and Curry throughout this section. While I did understand some of what she was saying- such as Black men needing to be included in the history of white sexual violence against Black bodies, the importance of dismantling the Black male predator trope especially with their history of victimization, and the horrific history of lynching enforced through the power that both white men and women have held over Black male bodies- some of the text seemed to border on the whole #notallmen/men-get-X-too phenomenon that is often used to silence women discussing struggle and violence at the hands of men- including Black men. I am not saying Ko was silencing women. On the contrary, I believe she is trying to expand upon often one-dimensional theories about race and gender in important ways. However, I was left saying to myself, "I would never claim that I lack white privilege due to the fact that my being trans, queer, disabled, etc causes me not to experience it in the same way as a white cis het man." Is Blackness in particular the oppression that overrides any other advantage? If a disabled man is violent towards a nondisabled woman, do we discount the patriarchy and misogyny involved because he is disabled and she is not? Perhaps it is that white supremacy and animality are the central tenets and the same thinking would not apply to all marginalized people.

Johnson's quotes used by Ko were the ones that I felt uneasy about, but wasn't sure exactly why. As a result, I decided to read some of Johnson's posts online in case the small quotes out of context led to a misunderstanding on my part. Reading more from Johnson only bothered me more. He makes valid points about the oppression of Black men, but the way he frames them is from a staunchly anti-feminist viewpoint where he constantly devalues the voices of of women and often seems to suggest that Black women are oppressing Black men by asking that women be centered. He believes that Black men are incapable of having male privilege or patriarchal advantages because of their oppression based on race. He uses anecdotes artfully to paint a false picture that Black women have it easier than Black men. It is as if he does not understand the various reasons Black feminisms came about and reduces almost all of them to extremist misandrists. He demeans sensitive and gentle men, claims women actually want "hypermasculinity" "behind closed doors," and refers to hypermasculine men as real and others as just pandering to feminism. All in all, the messages about the needs of Black men to be included are overshadowed by the anti-feminism and low-key misogynoir in his writings. I could write more about this, but this was such a small section of the book that I don't want my opinions about this guy who did not write it to dominate. Also, having said all of that, I haven't stopped thinking about this. So, perhaps some of these things will settle into my mind and I will feel differently. Perhaps there are things I don't understand yet due to the phenomena that Aph Ko describes in which we are stuck in one way of thinking.

In wrapping things up, Ko discusses "Afro-zoological resistance" as the solution to these conflicts arising from the static nature of our current understandings of oppression. She states, "Animal is part of the vocabulary of white supremacist violence; it signifies the rhetorical and social branding of certain bodies, which white supremacy wants to consume, exploit, and eliminate without question." She reminds us that single-issue and "two-dimensional" intersectional movements are colonized and locked in place requiring that they be upended in order to fully understand the scope of oppression. She also discusses how this fits into animal liberation in particular stating, "...veganism isn't just about kicking a meat-eating habit and getting some veggies into your diet... It's a powerful rejection of a racist food system and a racist, cannibalistic politics that characterizes animals and nonwhite people as disposable and consumable."

Overall, Aph Ko provides the needed upheaval of current systems of anti-oppression thought and activism that is critical for the growth of all movements over time. I am very excited to watch the ideas she explores grow and affect change over time. This book raises more questions than it answers and I believe that was part of Ko's intention. I still have quite a lot to think about.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a heady book. I am happy I read it and it gave me a lot to think about. I am going to keep this review short, because I am not Black and my experience is irrelevant to the arguments made in this book (aside from the fact that I obviously am always striving to be as anti-racist as possible, which means I was open to the discourse in this book and I got a lot out of it). My mind struggled to grapple with the thesis about white supremacy being akin to zoological witchcraft, because there is so much to unpack in nearly every word in that sentence. My one complaint about this book is that it isn't longer. I would have liked to have more explanation of the concepts, perhaps broken down more simply at first, and then giving more detail. Barring that, I appreciate this book for the perspectives it showed me, and I know I will be mulling its concepts over in my mind forever.

[Isobel · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this for class and very much enjoyed it - lots of complicated ideas explained in very accessible language using media analysis. would highly recommend!

[Courtney Kruzan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to read everything Aph Ko ever writes. This short, easy, and enjoyable piece of theory just shifted my whole paradigm.

Truly everything I want. Some critical media studies to explain the colonial project of the human-animal binary *chefs kiss*, AND Multidimensional Liberation theory, I am BIG thirsty to know even more about it.

[Marley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book poses questions to the mainstream discourse of both the animal liberation and black liberation movements and explores the multiple dimensions of white supremacy. Ahh Kho explores how we can address white supremacy from its many roots and truly reach collective liberation.

[Xavier Roelens · Rating 2 out of 5]

De centrale these van dit boek onderschrijf ik volledig, namelijk dat er een onderliggende oorzaak valt aan te duiden voor de onderdrukking van vrouwen, zwarten en dieren. En dan ga ik er ook in mee dat feministische groeperingen, Black Lives Matter-bewegingen en dierenrechtenorganisaties als PETA en Gaia van elkaar kunnen leren en zouden moeten samenwerken om die gemeenschappelijke oorzaak aan te pakken, iets wat ze zelf in haar boek als 'white supremacy', 'Zoological racism' en 'Eurocentric worldview' omschrijft, en wat je ook kapitalisme of de jagermentaliteit zou kunnen noemen. Daarbij gaat ze in tegen modewoorden als 'intersectionality' (omdat het de mogelijke vormen van onderdrukking als naast elkaar bestaande problemen voorstelt zonder naar de gemeenschappelijke oorzaak te kijken) en 'speciesism' (omdat die term volgens haar gemunt is om naast racisme en seksisme, zonder naar de gemeenschappelijke oorzaak te kijken).
Jammer genoeg komt ze een boek lang niet verder dan op diezelfde nagel slaan en tot een oproep om zich die nieuwe perspectieven, die nodig zijn, te gaan verbeelden. Maar ze slaagt er niet in haar om die zelf te verbeelden. Ze projecteert haar ideeën op de film 'Get out', ze geeft voortdurend aanzetten, maar ik mis de echte creativiteit, een begeesterende visie op een manier om in verzet te komen.
'I hope this book serves as a small light to bring us closer to getting out', is de laatste zin van het boek. Een lichtje brengt het boek, maar ook niet meer dan dat, jammer genoeg.

[L Martos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy recomendado!! Este libro es muy potente teoricamente y además considero que es bastante accesible para todo el mundo, lo cual es de agradecer y ayuda a que estas reflexiones no se queden en una especie de élite académica. Aph Ko hace una reflexión sobre cómo las conversaciones sobre la animalidad son necesarias y útiles politicamente si queremos abordar la lucha antiracista y viceversa.

[Shamiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. Put language to feelings and practices that have long been standing.

[Anzu S]

79: p7
He showed him the greatest sign. Yet he denied and defied it; then he turned away to try his best.

[Graham Knight · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book looking for new approaches after realising the separatism proposed by groups such as Anonymous for the Voiceless were not a way forward. This was obvious after their appalling responses to the Black Lives Matter movement.

In this book the author is looking for a new approach to politics, specifically outside of the “colonised” anti-racist and animal liberation movements and the limitations of intersectionality. She proposes seeing oppressions as symptoms of a larger system which she identifies as white supremacy. She write that the solution has to go beyond simply linking different social justice movements together but in conceptualising a new multidimensional approach.

I valued her insights into the current thinking behind the vegan and animal liberation movements and her discussion into the animalisation of black people. I found her analysis of the film Get Out particularly interesting and it's prompted me to see the film again.

The book gives no solutions however and does not claim to. I don't know what a multidimensional liberation movement would look like in practise or if it's possible. Analogies are constantly employed and I found these sometimes complicated the points she was trying to make rather than make understanding easier. Long explanations are needed to explain why white supremacy is witchcraft and why it consumes black people. I was not always convinced at her attempts to link these explanations to the system of the exploitation and abuse of animals.

Because her approach places oppression with a system of white supremacy I wasn't sure how useful her critique of intersectionality was. I was struck by later coming across a critique of intersectionality made by Mary Davis in her article Class Politics vs Identify Politics which I felt gave more clarity,

"intersectionality relegates class to a mere aspect of identity, defining it as just another cultural construct rather than the most significant determining force of an individual’s position in and experience of capitalist social relations. Stripping its adherents of a systematic understanding of capitalism, intersectionality makes it impossible to understand the social sources and significance of the very identities it celebrates, and it undermines the possibility of collective struggle against the system which fosters discrimination, division and exploitation: capitalism."

Seeing oppressions as symptoms of a bigger system was a useful approach but the system she locates them in is white supremacy. I kept wondering when capitalism would be mentioned or the relationship of white supremacy to capitalism but it never came. Capitalism is the system that sets down the conditions for white supremacy and (as Adolph Reed notes) our identity movements are an expression of neoliberalism.

Ultimately, I felt that Aph Ko stopped her analysis short at white supremacy rather than taking the final step of locating it within capitalism. This led to her discussion of intersectionality and liberation movements as being colonial rather than expressions of neoliberalist individualism. I felt it was a stretch to use the analogy that white supremacy was witchcraft but then this unusual claim was the reason I read the book!

[xenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, powerful exploration of 1) white supremacy as a cannibalistic project that consumes animalised black bodies whilst projecting its cannibalism back onto its victims, and 2) a call to go beyond the prescriptive and simplistic politics of animal liberation, black liberation, or sexual liberation, alone.

Concerning the first point, Aph Ko gives powerful accounts of white land owners who would (literally) consume the bodies of black slaves, tan black skin into leather, eroticise and rape black men and women, and brutalise black bodies unto death. The myth of the cannibalistic native is turned on its head, and the ugly projective landscape of white capitalist exploitation is given its full judgement. Absolutely phenomenal and disturbing work.

Aph Ko argues that white supremacy operates through zoological witchcraft, an emptying out of black bodies, culture and consciousness, which grants spiritual power to the colonial project of whiteness. By reducing black folk to animals, and conversely reducing animals to black bodies, both are dominated by whiteness, unto their physical and mental desolation.

Concerning the second point, Aph Ko argues that intersectionality has been utilised to stack oppression after oppression on top of one another, without systematically connecting such oppressions together. Each oppression is seen as an entirely new time and energy sink, a whole field of literature and activism. Sexism, racism and speciesism are understood as individual fronts, whereby fighting for any one front occurs to the abandonment of all others - a sort of zero sum emancipation. This blinds us to how all these oppressions are connected.

Aph Ko argues instead for a model of dimensionality, whereby instead of viewing oppressions as intersecting, we view each oppression as another side of the master's house, also known as domination. She uses her analysis of blackness and animality as an example of how black liberation and animal liberation alone fail to fully capture their shared colonial roots. Instead of seeing black maleness or white middle-class veganism as privileged, we have to locate privilege at the site of colonial inscription - in other words, in the hands of those who have the power to produce unequal segmentations of our populations, material resources, and cultural narratives. Privilege is the power of material division, a process in action, not an essentialised identity such as man or white folk. That's just a lazy and unproductive framework, most likely informed by neoliberal identity politics, the very system we have to dismantle.

My only gripe with Aph Ko's critique of intersectionality is that intersectionality, as it was originally theorised by Kimberle Crenshaw, was multi-dimensional. It was very much about showing that the intersection of race and gender (black woman) created a unique experience and social position not experienced by the normative subject of either race (black man) or gender (white woman) alone. Crenshaw's model was trying to reveal the absent(ed) experience of intersectional identities. It was the uptake of intersectionality by neoliberal identity politics that reduced it to a simplistic and reified bring. I nonetheless agree with Aph Ko's critique of our contemporary political movements.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out, author Aph Ko describes the consumption and disposal of non-white bodies as a ritual necessary for the continuation of white supremacy. If this assertion makes you feel something, anything—confusion, excitement, discomfort—you owe it to yourself to read this book immediately.

This book is not a plea to white people to address their racism, nor does it argue for its readers to become vegan. Rather, it examines the Euro-centricity at the heart of the movements for animal and black liberation. By recognizing how the constructs of race and species have been invented to justify the exploitation of anything that is not white, Ko envisions an activism that deconstructs the notion of animality—that is, to be something other than the Euro-centric definition of white and human—in order to achieve liberation from white supremacy.

I first heard of Aph Ko in an episode of the (excellent) podcast Citations Needed, and I've already started her other book, which she co-authored with her sister Syl Ko. I'm really excited to read more—her accessible writing style and pop culture references make it easy for the weight of her ideas to be fully appreciated, and while listening to Zoological Witchcraft in its audiobook format, I often found myself transfixed by her words, momentarily unable to engage in whatever activity I had been carrying out. I'll be getting a physical copy to keep on my shelf, no doubt.

[Prince Hazel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed my outlook on tons of structures of power, the framing of animality and Black people, relations to power, and how to view compounded marginalized identities in individuals outside of intersectionality and its shortcomings (speaking of which wow this book really tore into intersectionality in a way that I just didn't know was coming.)

Where it lost me though is how to navigate with this new outlook in regards to subgroups within marginalized communities/identities, and how to tackle intercommunity struggles within the framework of this. It loses me because this new outlook doesn't seem to truly be able to grapple with that. Obviously this isn't the goal of this book, but it's honestly hard not to see the vacuum the book left after it dissected and left intersectionality to the wayside and not be left wanting for a new way to deal with what it tore apart. I know this is vague but listen/read this book. It's phenomenal, graphic, and life-changing but it has blind spots too.

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a quick and enjoyable read about the possibility of interleaving antiracist and animal-rights theoretical approaches. Ko anchors her argument in a sustained close reading of Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out, alongside other contemporary pop cultural artifacts, convincingly demonstrating the violent continuities between animal consumption and white coloniality. The work itself is meant for general readers in activist spaces and is written in a mostly conversational style without being bogged down by academese. This, in my view, might be the book’s one major shortcoming as I missed a more sustained (and by necessity, academic) exploration of the consequences of thinking antiracism through animals. Folding decolonial and animal studies approaches together leads to posthumanist and ecological antiracism (of which there exists a mature literature). I was surprised that Ko didn’t arrive there.

[Christiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aph Ko does very well in explaining the connection between the anti-racist and animal rights movements. I love how she uses popular media such as the film "Get Out" and the dating show "The Bachelor," which made these complex theories understandable, thus, more accessible. This was a refreshing perspective, and I hope it becomes one of our classics.

I had to update this review upon 2nd reading because I better understand her critique of intersectionality now. With life experience, comes growth, and I am so glad that I read this again.

2025 update: With each reread comes new insight!

[Ninette · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I do agree with the premise that it is a problem that social movements are so siloed and seem to yield increasingly little results, I was hoping for a little more insight. I feel compelled to clarify this mainly due to the very defensive tone of the introduction, which takes up pretty much a third of the book. I was a little baffled by this as I picked this book up precisely because I was already on board and I have trouble imagining anyone who would read a book with such a title and not be.

So by that point already I was doubting I would get what I was hoping for, which was basically a deeper analysis of how animality functions in oppressive systems and maybe also how it interacts with other binary concepts like disability and sexual objectification, where one part of the binary is positioned as superior to and supposedly "naturally" controlling the other. My feeling is that oppressors will tend towards employing animality and sexual objectification more when they want to think of themselves as conquerors and disability/infantilization when they want to fashion themselves as benefactors. So I was hoping for more of an insight in that direction.

Instead we pick apart the somewhat obvious connotations and implications of some pieces of popular media (but mainly the movie Get Out) with a focus on how white supremacy/colonial politics work kind of like witchcraft and how we should have a more holistic understanding of specifically the human/animal binary and listen to our instincts and our ancestors.

I guess I should have taken the title more literally. Sure it's neatly ironic that the very charge of witchcraft can itself function kind of like witchcraft, but I am not really invested in the semantics here. You may call this witchcraft, you could just as well call it mental gymnastics or strategies and effects of coercive control. The concept of residual benefits vs. privilege does make sense and is an important takeaway. Still we seem to be stuck grouping and analyzing casualties not really getting into how the oppression works much less how to counter, resist and deconstruct it.

Even the concept of multidimensionality still just rearranges the social movements according to a view on the injuries and casualties the oppressive system produces on respective populations. Its like approaching a battlefield just looking at injuries and casualties of arbitrarily separated groups trying to figure out how to somewhat shield each respective group without any kind of comprehensive understanding of the tactics and weapons the oppressive system uses. Worse jet, we do not at all address the fact that we usually try to achieve this shielding by essentially petitioning the oppressive system often very much on it's own terms to maybe hurt/exploit us a little less or only within certain parameters.

I would say that so long as we are not able to build solidarity in order to build or take back enough of our own infrastructure and support systems so that we even have a hope of threatening the system's supply of resources and labor, we do not have anything to bargain with and will get not only fewer concessions than we have gotten so far but probably see those few concessions we have gotten rolled back.

Also I feel that can not move on without pointing out this baffling statement:

"White people in the film don't mind sharing space with black people, so long as black people are stripped of their context and forced to endure grotesque psychological and physical abuse. Rather than forcing black folks into slavery or servitude, the white people in Get Out construct an entirely new, sadistic form of social death whereby black people are forced to become passengers in their own bodies."

I am sorry, what now? This is literally how you enslave someone: strip them of their context, inflict psychological and physical abuse and exploit their labor and/or body! A plantation setting and costumes are not an integral part of the process.

[Rachel Grey · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How is it possible that we live in an era in which anti-racist activists are acutely aware of how white supremacy treats people of color “like animals,” but are discouraged from examining how literal animals are casualties of this racial caste system as well?"

I ripped through this short book over a couple of evenings, after finding it on the shelf of a grad student I was visiting. I thought from the title that it would be wacky, but instead it made a great deal of sense. Yes, it makes sense to think of racism and superiority as practices (like witchcraft). And yes, of course the way some people consider animals to be "lesser" and the way some people consider some people off other races to be "lesser" are so intertwined that they're the same thing. If you need proof, just think of the last time you heard "Those people are animals" or "Human animals", and how that statement is never a compliment. There's a reason why Black people took it as an insult, 14 years ago or so, when some of them were categorized as monkeys by Google Photos... and that reason, ultimately, is that part of white supremacy is thinking that monkeys are inferior.

The breakdown of Get Out is compelling and should be accessible to anyone who's seen the movie. It's interesting that I'd never thought of taxidermy as a signifier of whiteness before, but Aph Ko makes a compelling case for that too.

Four stars because the book may have limited its reach by being written for already-engaged activists rather than for a rider audience, and I would have liked a deeper dive into animal rights, but it was a quick read with an excellent and thought provoking premise.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first two chapters were spot on and provided an excellent explanation of white supremacy and animality. The book is worth reading for the first two chapters alone.

Where the author founders is in her analysis of intersectionality. She rejects intersectionalify and discusses the concept of multidimensional oppression as though she's hit upon a bold new idea but like Patricia Hill Collins already did all that in 1990 when she discussed her theory of a matrix of domination and interlocking systems of oppression. Aph Ko insists that her concept of dimensions is different than intersections but if she really intended to make that point that chapter should have been longer than 20 pages. It just really read like she had only a surface understanding of intersectionality as a concept. In fact, in her notes, she explicitly states that she isn't examining intersectionality in its original context but "through the larger cultural framework in which it has become a synonym for any connection between any and all oppression". Then you aren't arguing against intersectionality. You're arguing against a strawman version of it.

That being said, the book is good even though there was also an unexpected preoccupation with taxidermy.

[Lies · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Similarly, veganism isn't just about kicking a meat-eating habit.. It's a powerful rejection of a racist food system and a racist, canniblistic politics that characterizes animals and nonwhite people as disposable and consumable."

'.. colonization added a racial connotation to 'animal' and used this as a justification to brutalize different beings globally' << Niet echt onderbouwd

"Animal doesn't just mean 'cat' or 'squirrel' or 'cow'. Animal is a label. It's a social construct the dominant class created to mark certain bodies s disposable without even a second thought."

"Animal is a signifier that is always convenient en changing and any group the dominatn class deems unworthy is immediately branded with this lable"

"The consumption of animals is so routine that even scholars and thinkers who politicize the colonial consumption of margnilized bodies do not realize how they are still participating in the legacy of coloniality by ignoring the institutionlized suffering of animals.
..requires us to reaelize that animal experiences are the invisible framework keeping colonial consumption intact.'

"If anti racist movements properly locate the zoological dimensions of white supremacist violence, then animals have a change of being set free thanks to multidimensional anti-racist organizing efforts." << a statement waarbij ideeën (nog) ontbreken

"It's easy to scoff at members of the public who don't get animal rights or don't see the contradictions in their own behaviors. However, I see almost everyone I meet as a potential animal rights activist; it's just that the dominant modes of activisim and the theories structuring our movements have completely turned them off from ever exploring these concepts further" << Research? or just encounters?

Fair kritiek op Animal rights (P122):
"If we don't have the freedom in our libertion movements to think new thoughts and be messy, what type of liberated world are we actually fighting for?"

[美音 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even as this book seeks to de-center vegans and the animal rights movement in tackling animal rights, I hope this becomes a classic in those spaces! We shouldn't just be reading animal rights books by old British men T_T I most enjoyed chapter two on "white supremacy as zoological witchcraft"--it was so refreshing to see a new perspective on how the historic animalization of Black people connects to animal rights, how it's a hierarchy that must be dismantled at the root, as a framework itself, rather than buying into the colonial narrative of entitled consumption.

I still have much I don't understand, and I wish I could ask questions of the author--about her takes on speciesism, and whether her portion on the messiness of gender and race mean that Black women don't have a worse experience than Black men, even while there are certain things Black men face as a consequence of their gender?

[taleah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the content of the book exceptionally interesting, and I would love to read and learn more if i could. my only criticism is though, is that i found a lot of it confusing at times. maybe because a lot of the metaphors i found hard to visualize, it may just be because of how my brain is wired. there was a lot of concepts in the book i thought to be “Wow! They’re so right with that!” — But I still struggled to understand it well enough that I could not reiterate what I read very well or explain it to others. I think the writing style simply wasn’t compatible enough for me sadly, but I still recommend this book full-heartedly as it will get you to think about a lot of things you have not before! If I could ask for anything… It would be a sequel, or some sort of guide written in another format more direct to the points.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

All I knew going in was that this book would "connect" animal rights and anti-racism. Although I unfortunately think this book will mostly only be picked up by those already concerned with one or (more likely, both) of these topics, Aph Ko provides interesting proposals that I found useful beyond these movements. For example, I particularly enjoyed her critique of intersectionality. I hope that more readers do find this work, particularly as its diagrams and references (mainly to Get Out, but also the Bachelor and the Santa Clarita Diet) make the theory discussed more accessible. It could use a bit more detail (I'm not sure I would consider it a guide), but otherwise I really enjoyed and recommend it, and look forward to reading Ko's other work.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ko offers an alternative framework for thinking about the multiple dimensions of oppression rather than the “intersectional” approach that has become widely popular, and explains her reasoning for why the latter approach in our movements is inadequate to achieving the kind of future we envision.

This is a quick read, and while it left me wanting more, this is a good thing and the references provided are a good jumping off point to continue my inquiry into these topics.

I’ve literally been thinking about this book every day since I started reading it and I’m starting to analyze things in new ways, so I’m grateful to Ko for writing this book because I feel like my brain has been broken open in the best way.

[Viviana Gabriela · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS IS MY BIBLE
anyone who ever mentioned "intersectionality" should grab this book. highlighted heavily.

"Intersectionality feels more like social layerism- a term I use to describe how oppressions are piled up on top of one another though they never truly intersect. Whereas activists mention more and more oppressions in the same sentence, the oppressions don't really have a relationship with one another. Because the oppressions are all loaded on top of one another, they give the illusion that a robust and substantial structure stands before you, yet they are all disconnected, individual pieces that are not fused: nothing holds them together.
(...) We don't need movements to intersect; we need new imaginations of how oppressions manifest themselves at the root."

[Sada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book! It described some pretty complex theories in accessible language and even did so in a short amount of time (125 pages). I consider myself to be active in anti-racist and animal liberation movements as well as other anti-oppression movements, but many connections were made in this book that I had never considered before. Because it is so theory based, I’m not quite sure what to do with this knowledge. Aph Ko explains that this is a book about theory and never claims to make practical applications but I wish there were examples to make it more concrete how to move forward. This was the first book I read by her but am looking forward to more.