Transferring the Blame

Let’s talk about transfer of blame. One of the many problems in our society is that we tend to blame people with no power for societal ills, rather than  the people with power motivating those behaviours. Let me use an example.

In Physical Anthropology, we were talking about the Jane Goodall Institute and about the plight of non-human primates. Poachers in Africa and South America (and to a lesser extent, Asia) kill adult female primates, steal their infants and then smuggle them in dangerous ways that usually kill most of them, like putting them in hubcaps or stuffing them into the bottom of luggage. People in my class gasped with horror and one boy asked, “So what can we do to stop those people from doing that?” The answer is simple and obvious: Stop demanding exotic pets.

Blaming poachers for the illegal animal trade is totally ignoring the root of the problem, and trying to stop it by legislating against the actual smuggling is like trying to get rid of a bush by pruning it. What us Whitey Whitebreads want to ignore is the fact that the industry of animal smuggling, the supply, is created by the demand for exotic pets from white Europeans and North Americans, not the other way around. Why do we blame the impoverished non-whites doing whatever they can to stay alive and feed themselves for a problem created by rich, powerful, mostly white interests?

Even more troubling to me was another problem raised in that class. One girl put up her hand and expressed her concern that “Native tribes in South America eat chimpanzees!” After I stopped laughing hysterically (for, you see, I don’t think that Native South American tribespeople could afford the shipping costs on chimp meat from Africa), I realized that my professor was expressing his concern over the practice of hunting primates, saying, “Sometimes the rights of endangered species need to outweigh cultural rights.”

WHAT THE FUCK?

First of all, since when is sustenance hunting considered a “cultural right”? What the hell does he expect these people to eat? How many supermarkets does he think there are in the fucking Amazon? These people need to eat, monkeys are an incredibly nutritious source of protein and fat, and they have precious few other options. I tend to think the lives of human beings should be valued over the lives of other animal species when it comes to situations like this. How DARE he blame native people for utilizing a traditional food source?

Besides that outrage, how can we blame small social groups of humans hunting for food for wiping out an entire primate population when corporations owned by rich, powerful white men are coming in, chopping down the ancient rainforests and polluting the air and water indiscriminately?  Just because the guys in suits aren’t going out into the forest and strangling howler monkeys with their bare hands doesn’t mean that their proverbial hands are clean. They are the cause of extinction in these monkeys, NOT people just trying to feed their families. Actually, people feeding their families at McDonald’s ARE contributing to the wiping out of rainforests, levelled to provide grazing land for cattle…

But even that is a transfer of blame to a powerless group (ie. lower- and working-class North Americans).

Let’s try to stop doing that, shall we?