SeaWorld Slaps Its New Orca Allies In The Face With Latest Lying Ads

If you watch much cable-network teevee, it’s a statistical near-certainty you’ve seen this ad sometime in the past week, because SeaWorld has been flooding the cables with it. Here’s the script:

Some say, free the whales. For them, nothing else is acceptable. But nothing could be worse for the whales. Most of the orcas at SeaWorld were born here. Sending them into the wild wouldn’t be noble. It could be fatal.

When they freed Keiko, the killer whale of movie fame, the effort was a failure, and he perished. But we also understand that times have changed.

Today, people are concerned about the world’s largest animals like never before. So [sounding slightly annoyed], we too must change.

That’s why the orcas in our care will be the last generation at SeaWorld. There will be no more breeding. We’re also phasing out orca theatrical shows. They’ll continue to receive the highest standard of care available anywhere. And guests can come to see them simply being their majestic selves – inspiring the next generation of people to love them as you do.

Fortunately, I resisted the impulse to hurl my pizza at the screen when watching this for the eighth time. Not sure what would have happened on the ninth had it still been within reach.

Those of us who, early on in this paradigm shift, were inclined to be generous and give SeaWorld credit for having learned to change with the times can be forgiven if this ad induces shudders of déjà vu all over again, because this is just classic SeaWorld cultism reasserting itself: Making straw boogeymen out of the very animal-rights activists you’ve supposedly just allied yourself with, peddling in half-truths and outright fictions, all delivered with a dash of snotty, privileged superiority.

Indeed, you know that it had to have had the folks at Humane Society of the U.S. – SeaWorld’s allies in their new, more “sensitive” approach to handling their captive orcas, the great upshot of which is that SeaWorld will indeed cease breeding its captive stock – had to have been reaching for their heartburn medications, not to mention their Rolodexes, upon seeing this ad.

Already, HSUS has been under a lot of internal fire within the animal-rights community for having aligned itself with SeaWorld in this effort to help the company reform its image – Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd was unsparing, calling HSUS chief Wayne Pacelle SeaWorld’s “Judas.” Now it looked as if the SeaWorld public-relations team was intentionally lobbing uncooked eggs onto Pacelle’s face. Stinky, lying eggs.

First of all, let’s be clear: Not a single animal-rights organization involved in the orca-captivity issue advocates simply “freeing the whales.” What all of these organizations, and certainly HSUS, advocate is a combined program that works to reintroduce wild-born orcas (there are six of them in SeaWorld’s inventory) back into large seapens in their native waters, and to place captive-born orcas in whale “sanctuaries” that give the whales room to roam and explore a complex natural environment while still providing them with human care.

Reducing this thoughtful and scientifically sound concept to a mere caricature of “free the whales” is, however, typical of SeaWorld’s response in all of its dealings with animal-rights activists – namely, to make them out to be a bunch of “extremists” and “radicals.”

And throwing the Keiko story out there as a “failure” was a particular slap in the face to the HSUS, since they had been in charge of the orca when he died in 2003.

Certainly, there was a rueful quality to Pacelle’s post at the HSUS blog defending his organization’s record in its handling of Keiko, not to mention the concept of seapens as rehabilitation facilities for captive orcas.

I understand the impulse among so many advocates to call upon SeaWorld to remove orcas from their enclosures and allow them to live in sea pens. I’ve long talked about that idea, too. We have quite a history with that issue, given that the HSUS was centrally involved in the Keiko project more than 15 years ago and put a million dollars into his release into sea pens and eventually into the wild. Keiko lived in those environments for five years. In terms of improving his individual welfare, I believe the project was a success. Many others, especially the folks at SeaWorld and others from the zoo and aquarium worlds, consider it a failure because Keiko never achieved full independence. But I think everyone – on both sides of this divide — agrees it’s an issue that comes with tremendous challenges and costs and risks and warrants more careful study. It’s probably further complicated by the biographies of the whales at SeaWorld, since all but four of the nearly 30 whales are captive-born, and the few that were wild-born have been in captivity for decades.

This is being kind, and then some. The reality is that Keiko had been doomed by an intransigent and ultimately uncaring marine-park industry to essentially rot to death in his pool in Mexico City, because they feared the papilloma virus he had contracted there might spread to their collections. It was the intervention of animal-rights activists that rescued him, quite successfully, and gained him seven more years of good life, superior to anything experienced by any other captive orcas.

As I explained awhile back:

If the marine-park industry had had its way, Keiko never would have been moved out of Reino Aventura and almost certainly would have died there by 1996, perhaps 1997 at the latest. Period.

Keiko in Oregon, 1996

If you go back to 1994 and '95, when the "Free Keiko" campaign was just getting underway, it had been made painfully clear by the entire marine-park industry that Keiko was not going to be leaving Reino Aventura, the tiny, cramped Mexico City pool where he had been held since 1985, anytime soon. None of the other parks wanted him because of his papilloma-virus infection and his rapidly declining health. And they actively sabotaged an agreement between activists and Reino Aventura to place him in a seapen in Iceland.

Instead, the campaign successfully built a new pool for him in Oregon, bought him from Reino Aventura, and moved him there in January 1996. He was moved a little more than a year after that to the Iceland seapen.

And he wound up living a good life up until late 2003. So the campaign to free Keiko bought him more than seven more years of life.

And they were pretty damned good years, especially for a large male captive orca whose previous life had mainly been stuck inside tiny concrete pools. His pool in Oregon was the nicest orca pool in the world, and he regained his health there, losing the papiloma virus and gaining large amounts of weight. His Icelandic seapen was even better; he grew healthy and strong there, and relearned how to hunt on his own quite efficiently.

Keiko was functionally free beginning in the summer of 1999, allowed to roam at will out of his seapen, but returning voluntarily until that day in August 2002 when he hooked up with a pod of wild orcas and never came back, showing up in Norway instead and reestablishing contact with humans.

The Keiko experiment was not a failure except in reaching a final goal that the industry had a direct hand in ensuring was never reached -- namely, a positive identification of his familial pod so he could be reunited with them. What we learned from Keiko is that such identification is vital to a complete reintegration.

But in every other regard, this was a successful reintroduction to the wild. He learned to feed himself. He was independent. He clearly appeared to be healthy and happy, right up until just before he died. And the lung infection he died from may well have been contracted in captivity anyway.

Here’s what Paul Spong, the great orca scientist, had to say about the Keiko saga:

“My belief is that Keiko would have needed direct contact with members of his immediate family and community in order to fully integrate back into a life in the wild. That did not happen in Iceland, and it is very unlikely that it would have happened in Norway. However, this does not mean that it could not happen, given the appropriate circumstances. Had more been known about Keiko’s social background, it would have been far easier to put him in contact with members of his family. I do not believe he met his mother or any siblings or close cousins while he was swimming freely in Icelandic waters. He did meet and interact with other orcas, but they were not his kin, so he did not join them permanently. That said, Keiko did get to experience the feel and sounds of the ocean once again, after being surrounded by barren concrete walls for most of his life, and that, I believe, must have come as a profound relief to him. For me, the simple fact that Keiko died as a free whale spells success for the grand project that brought him home. Deniers will deny, spinners will spin, but they cannot erase or alter this truth.”

And one more note: During the seven years (1996-2003) that Keiko was enjoying the good life in Oregon and Iceland and Norway, under the care of animal activists, a total of six orcas died at SeaWorld. If SeaWorld and its minions want to imply that the kind of care that Keiko received “killed him,” that’s an accusation that can be hurled straight back at them sixfold.

One can understand the HSUS feeling the need to troop along, despite this obvious public-relations slap in the face from SeaWorld, in maintaining the alliance to help make the captive orcas’ lives better. That no doubt is why Pacelle defends SeaWorld in spite of the churlishness:

While The HSUS is committed to looking at the options that exist for captive animals, I want to encourage animal advocates to celebrate the major progress that SeaWorld has made, as we’ve done, and to inspire the company to take additional positive action across a broad swath of animal protection concerns. What the company has committed to is quite extraordinary, and I urge every advocate to take stock of the unprecedented set of pledges SeaWorld has made – many of them unimaginable even among the core group of advocates and organizations who have been demanding reform for so long.

That makes a certain amount of sense, but nonetheless, no one will be blamed if they continue to be skeptical that SeaWorld will ever really “get” why orcas don’t belong in captivity. Because they obviously don’t now. They’re just finally facing up to the realities of their bottom line, and their remaining cultural impulse is to keep sniping at their critics rather than ever acknowledging those critics were right all along.

What’s also obvious is that Joel Manby has a long row to hoe when it comes to changing the culture within SeaWorld to one that actually understands the bigger picture, and genuinely places the welfare of the whales above their own predilections and bottom lines. The ghost of Fred Jacobs clearly still haunts their public-relations department, so that might be a good place to start making some cultural changes too.

In the meantime, we’ll all be forgiven if we continue to watch SeaWorld make these changes with nothing but deep skepticism. This response ad from PETA pretty much says it all.

Confederate Heritage Month: It Was About Slavery

It is one of the oldest, hoariest, and most reliable tropes wielded by defenders of the Confederacy: the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about "states rights." That's what they actually used to teach us in high school as part of our standard education.

It is a lie. All anyone has to do is go back and survey the original declarations of secession by the various Southern states -- as well as the many speeches on behalf of secession by various Confederacy advocates -- to get a clear understanding of what motivated them.

It was slavery. And white supremacy. And very little else.

The only mention, or discussion, of "states rights" in all of this is actually pointed the other direction: The Confederates were in fact agitated extremely by Northern states who were asserting their states rights by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all non-slave-holding states to return any and all former (usually escaped) slaves who were living within their borders. The fact that the federal government did so little to enforce the act was, in the view of the Confederates, proof positive that the entire federal compact was irrevocably broken.

Here. You'll get a better idea of all this if you scroll through the complete collection of the various Declarations of Secession by the Confederate states.

Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.  ....

... It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. ...

Georgia:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. ...

While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation. The main reason was that the North, even if united, could not control both branches of the Legislature during any portion of that time. Therefore such an organization must have resulted either in utter failure or in the total overthrow of the Government. The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. ...

... Why? Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed $3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union; put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and out of the protection of Federal law everywhere; because they give sanctuary to thieves and incendiaries who assail it to the whole extent of their power, in spite of their most solemn obligations and covenants; because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides....

A depiction of South Carolina's secession convention

South Carolina:

... The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

A banner from South Carolina secessionists.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. ...

 Texas:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South.

 Virginia:

The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.

 Alabama:

Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republi­can party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new princi­ples, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.  

You can also get a clear picture by reading the Southern press's editorials of the time, such as this one from the Richmond newspaper:

‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy — a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.

Or you can read the speeches, such as this one by Alexander Stephens of Virginia, at the various secession sessions:

The great truth, I repeat, upon which our system rests, is the inferiority of the African. The enemies of our institutions ignore this truth. They set out with the assumption that the races are equal; that the negro is equal to the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be legitimate. But their premises being false, their conclusions are false also. Most of that fanatical spirit at the North on this subject, which in its zeal without knowledge, would upturn our society and lay waste our fair country, springs from this false reasoning. Hence so much misapplied sympathy for fancied wrongs and sufferings. These wrongs and sufferings exist only in their heated imaginations. There can be no wrong where there is no violation of nature’s laws. We have heard much of the higher law. I believe myself in the higher law. We stand upon that higher law. I would defend and support no constitution that is against the higher law. I mean by that the law of nature and of God. Human con­stitutions and human laws that are made against the law of nature or of God, ought to be overturned; and if Seward was right the Constitution which he was sworn to support, and is now requiring others to swear to support, ought to have been overthrown long ago. It ought never to have been made. But in point of fact it is he and his associates in this crusade against us, who are warring against the higher law—we stand upon the laws of the Creator, upon the highest of all laws. It is the fanatics of the North, who are warring against the decrees of God Almighty, in their attempts to make things equal which he made unequal. My assurance of ultimate success in this controversy is strong from the conviction, that we stand upon the right.

The only "states right" the South was interested in defending was the right to hold slaves. So please: The next time someone whips out that hoary old lie, just remember that it belongs with all the other false history woven into "Lost Cause" nonsense.

It's Confederate Heritage Month! Day 1

'Lynched': This was a popular postcard in the 1920s, as were other photographs of lynched African Americans, and were frequently kept as memorabilia.

 Some of you may recall that today, April 1, is more than just April Fools Day -- it's also the first day of Confederate Heritage Month, as recently declared by Mississippi's governor. 

Now, I know a lot of Southerners like Gov. Bryant would just as soon we mostly devoted our excursions in Confederate history and its lingering heritage to sipping mint juleps and treating ourselves to multiple viewings of Gone With the Wind and other similar renditions of history -- you know, the kind that promote the old "Lost Cause" mythology and which has been widely adopted in the decades since the war by Confederate apologists who successfully revised the history of the Civil War. It's also worth noting that Mississippi rather pointedly does not celebrate Black History Month.

So it seems to me that we should indeed begin celebrating Confederate Heritage Month, broadly, as a national project, so that we can finally begin teaching all of our children, inside the South and out, its REAL heritage: the heritage of slavery and why it was maintained, the heritage of a treasonous Civil War fought not for abstractions such as "states rights" but truly for the maintenance of slavery, the heritage of night-riding Ku Klux Klansmen, of thousands of lynchings of black people, of Jim Crow rule, and public-institution segregration, and of the vicious, desperate and cruel campaign to maintain all of that during the Civil Rights struggle.

For starters, let's review the history of lynching in the old Confederacy, that consummate "pastoral scene from the gallant South," as Billie Holliday sang.

Lynching (the word was even in Southern in its origins, having derived from a Virginia judge who endorsed extralegal violence against Loyalists during the Revolutionary War) was the central linchpin, as it were, in the post-Civil War suppression of African Americans. The extreme terrorization of the black community was essential to preventing them from ever working to overturn Jim Crow voter-disenfranchisement law, or the legal segregation of all public institutions (including washrooms, drinking fountains, and swimming pools, as well as schools).

The lynching of six African Americans
in Lee County, Georgia, in 1916

Sexual paranoia was central to the lynching phenomenon. In the years following black emancipation -- during which time a previously tiny class of black criminals became swelled by the ranks of impoverished former slaves -- a vast mythology arose surrounding black men’s supposed voracious lust for white women, a legend for which in truth there was scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to (and perhaps has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men’s longtime sexual domination of black women, particularly during the slavery era. In any event, the omnipresence of the threat of rape of white women by black men came to be almost universally believed by American whites. Likewise, conventional wisdom held that lynchings were a natural response to this threat: "The mob stands today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race," warned John Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among Northerners as well. The New York Herald, for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad citizens who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch law, is largely in the fact that the good citizens live where their wives and daughters are perfectly safe."

The cries of rape, for many whites in both South and North, raised fears not merely of sexual violence but of racial mixing, known commonly as "miscegenation," which was specifically outlawed in some 30 states. White supremacy was not only commonplace, it was in fact the dominant worldview of Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most Caucasians believed they represented Nature’s premier creation (having been informed this by a broad range of social scientists of the period, whose views eventually coalesced into the pseudo-science known as eugenics), and that any "dilution" of those strains represented a gross violation of the natural order. Thus it was not surprising that a number of lynching incidents actually resulted from the discovery of consensual relations between a black man and a white woman.

Underlying the stated fear of black rape, moreover, was a broad fear of economic and cultural domination of white Americans by blacks and various other "outsiders," including Jews. These fears were acute in the South, where blacks became a convenient scapegoat for the mesh of poverty that lingered in the decades following the Civil War. Lynching in fact was frequently inspired not by criminality, but by any signs of economic and social advancement by blacks who, in the view of whites, had become too "uppity."

A classic instance of this occurred in the little East Texas town of Center, about sixty miles due north of Jasper, in 1920. The victim was a black teenager named Lige Daniels, who was accused of killing an elderly white woman who lived in Center. When word reached the governor that mob violence was imminent, he wired the captain of the Seventh Cavalry stationed nearby to protect the prisoner. The cavalry, however, never showed. The captain later explained that he had been unable to "find any members of his company in time for mobilization."

So at about noon on August 3, 1920, a mob of about one thousand men stormed the Center jail, knocked down the steel doors, and dragged Daniels outside, where they proceeded to beat him severely. A rope was thrown over a nearby oak tree, and Daniels was then hanged.

The lynching of Lige Daniels,
Center, Texas, 1920

A photo postcard that was available for many years afterward, mostly in the backwaters of trinket shops, recorded the event. It is a remarkable photo, and not only for the warm glow of the sun peering through the oak tree and bathing Lige Daniels' corpse, hanging from the bough, in an almost angelic light. What makes the portrait unforgettable instead is the crowd gathered below—stern-faced fathers and laborers, all looking quite proud of themselves; and a handful of children. One young boy (he appears to be about ten), dressed in his Sunday shirt and tie, is beaming beatifically. He probably remembered that day till he died.

The lynching of Jessie Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916

There were many such postcards. Perhaps the most notorious were those from the lynching of another black teenager, Jessie Washington, by a mob of several thousand residents of Waco, Texas, on May 16, 1916. Washington, who was retarded, had confessed to the murder of an elderly Waco resident. At the moment his conviction (with four minutes' deliberation by a white jury) was announced, the mob surged forward into the courtroom and dragged Washington outside, where he was stripped, beaten, stabbed, and wrapped with a chain, which was draped over a tree limb, just above a pyre of wooden crates. Washington was then jerked twice into the air, and his body lowered onto the pyre, where he was sprinkled with coal oil and set alight.

Afterward, mob members proudly strung the charred corpse back up for a brief public display, after which Washington's body was lassoed by a horseman and dragged around the town until the skull bounced loose. Some motorists then tossed his remains into a black bag, tied it to the back bumper of their car, and tooled around the countryside with it in tow. A constable finally retrieved the bag from a nearby town, where it was left hanging.

The lynchings of Daniels and Washington were mere drops in an ocean of bloodshed. Between 1882 and 1942, according to statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, there were 4,713 lynchings in the United States, of which 3,420 involved black victims. Mississippi topped the list, with 520 blacks lynched during that time period, while Georgia was a close second with 480; Texas' 339 ranked third. And most scholars acknowledge that these numbers probably are well short of the actual total, since many lynchings (particularly in the early years of the phenomenon) were often backwoods affairs that went utterly unrecorded. In that era, it was not at all uncommon for a black man to simply disappear; sometimes his body might wash up in one of the local rivers, and sometimes not.

The violence reached a fever pitch in the years 1890-1902, when 1,322 lynchings of blacks (out of 1,785 total lynchings) were recorded at Tuskegee, which translates into an average of over 110 lynchings a year. The trend began to decline afterward, but continued well into the 1930s, leading some historians to refer to the years 1880-1930 as the "lynching period" of American culture.

The lynching of Rubin Stacy, Florida, 1935

There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from the postcards themselves -- many of which can be seen at the Without Sanctuary site -- as they frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning. Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.

Indeed, lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community. Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards, memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with which the victim was hanged. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as a warning to would-be black criminals.

That was the purported moral purpose of these demonstrations, at least in the South: Not only to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes against whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces) not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners’ reports from lynchings merely described the victims’ deaths occurring "at the hands of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude, but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will. This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as symbolic of the region's continuing economic and cultural oppression by the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia, Herald and Advertiser explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the ocean's tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under foot."

Thus the numbers of deaths produced by the lynching phenomenon only hint at their impact, which broadly affected literally millions of more Americans, effectively keeping them in the thrall of terror that their white neighbors might, with the least provocation, murder them horribly.

Of course, the threat of the rape of white women and other pretenses for lynching presented handy pretexts for these horrors. As always, the violence was predicated on a fear of future violence; lynching was excused as a preemptive act.

Yet in reality a black person could be lynched for literally no reason at all -- in some cases, simply for defending himself from physical assault, or for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lynching laughed at the notion of blacks advancing through hard work; moderately prosperous blacks who managed to do so were often the first targets of angry lynch mobs intent on dealing with "uppity" blacks.

Lynchings unquestionably had the short-term desired effect of suppressing blacks' civil rights; the majority of African Americans in the South during that era led lives of quiet submission in the hope of escaping that horrific fate, and relatively few aspired beyond their established station in life. Those who did often migrated northward, where lynchings were hardly unknown (some of the most notorious occurred in places like Indiana and Minnesota, and they in fact were recorded in nearly every state in the Union), but were not as endemic. However, the awfulness of the mobs' brutality, often reported and photographed in gruesome detail, ultimately also inspired a reaction that gave birth to the Civil Rights movement and eventually the demise of the racial caste system lynching was intended to enforce.  

Next: The origins of the Confederacy.

Dominance and Control and SeaWorld: The Paradigm Shifts

The eye of a SeaWorld orca.

There is a scene in the documentary Blackfish in which, via archival footage, we see a young Jeffrey Ventre during his SeaWorld trainer days giving a spiel to his audience during a show when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a large killer whale comes flying across the haulout on which he’s standing and goes skidding past him within inches, then plunges back into its pool.

Ventre seems genuinely surprised, and the footage shows him talking to one of his fellow trainers (Mark Simmons, it turns out), saying: “You dork!”

By all appearances, the moment captured in the footage seemed to underscore the extent to which those trainers are actually at the mercy of the whales they’re supposed to be controlling and their whims. After all, even a minor deviation in their routines could result in disaster for the humans in their pools: If the orca had been a few inches closer and come out a few seconds earlier, Ventre would have been pancaked.

But in reality, as Ventre, explained to me recently, the whole stunt was planned. “The orca was Taima, and yes it was a staged behavior,” he said. “It came off well because Taima (later banned from waterwork with humans) came up early.”

So in many regards the moment seemingly demonstrates the extent to which the trainers actually could control the killer whales. But even that, Ventre says, is a deeply deceptive illusion: “The spectacle of the production,” he said, “does center around SeaWorld's ability to manipulate and control the world's top predator.”

That all seemingly came to an end this week, with SeaWorld’s announcement that it would immediately cease its orca breeding program, as well as its circus-style orca performances. Future orca shows, the company says, will emphasize “natural behaviors”, though the company insists it will not consider seapens or other options for the remaining orcas in its collection, saying “the orcas at SeaWorld will stay in our parks.”

Outside of the relatively cloistered world of animal-rights activism (as well as the business-investment world), the announcement seemed interesting and even momentous, but not necessarily world-shaking. But make no mistake: the paradigm shifted in an important way this week, announcing, potentially, a deeper social change. Something profound and, if sustained, deeply good: a deep shift in humankind’s relationship to the natural world, and ultimately to each other.

***

Seeing any killer whale in the flesh inspires awe, captive or wild. Even behind the glass and concrete of a captivity pool, it’s hard not be struck by the majesty of the animal: It is so big, so powerful, so beautiful, its intense intelligence unmistakable.

In the wild, seeing orcas is a joyous, inspirational thing, because it feels so innately right. The animals themselves are spontaneous and joyful in their behavior, even when they are at their most businesslike and distant. You are seeing this astonishing creature doing what it has done for six million years, the rulers of the ocean at home in their realm. It’s genuinely an unforgettable experience.

However, seeing orcas in captivity brings an added twist. The guides at the marine parks such as Sea World and Miami Seaquarium will often tout supposed side benefits they claim that captivity of the animals bring, such as educating young people about the oceans, “inspiring” them to care for the animals they see, and providing important scientific research information that helps the animals survive in the wild. The reality, however, is that SeaWorld’s “education” programs are really low-information affairs geared primarily to propagandize children into visiting the park, while its “science” record is so laughably thin that very few real scientists engaged in conservation work with wild whales take them seriously.

No, what SeaWorld has been selling (at about $100 a head, plus parking, food, and plush dolls) is not an understanding of the animals, but a spectacle -- the jaw-dropping sight of seeing a relatively tiny human mastering these gigantic creatures and seemingly controlling them, as trainers like Ventre and others performed a series of precision stunts before your eyes. The “education” that children receive at these parks is an overpowering message that it is not only right, but admirable, that we humans keep wild animals under our power through a system of dominance and control.

“The story of man's dominion has been told numerous times, most notably in the movie King Kong,” Ventre wrote to me in a thoughtful missive last May, noting that this narrative works well with an astonishingly large and powerful creature like a killer whale: “There are larger carnivores, including sperm whales, but no equal to Orcinus orca in terms of the sophisticated brain, cooperative hunting methods, and killing equipment.

Trainers’ relationships with the orcas, in terms of dominance and control, is complicated, he explained:

I agree that in any given waterwork show or session, the orca is in charge, however, SeaWorld does have the ultimate leverage. Food. 

This is why the topic of food deprivation is crucial to the debate and also why it is shameful that SeaWorld is trying to deny its use, lately. It is part of the daily existence of some whales at all parks during different time periods. How else do you get animals to separate from their mothers or stay motionless for teeth drilling procedures?

Predictable whales such as Katina (and formerly her daughter Kalina) have been referred to as "Cadillacs." She has been the matriarch or co-matriarch of the Florida facility for 30+ years. She is known to the trainers as a "business woman," compliant, reliable, and expecting payment. She is well paid in fish.  She expects to be paid and SeaWorld keeps her happy. Katina is probably the corporation's single most valuable asset as she has produced many offspring, and runs a tight ship, preferring order over disorder in her artificial pod.  She controls things to her liking, and the training management loves that. Kasatka, whom I have never worked with, is also a dominant female, but unlike Katina, and as seen in Blackfish, has a long track record of attacks on trainers.

A predictable matriarch allows for consistent live public shows with killer whales. Without that the show production suffers. Katina has trained dozens of killer whale trainers including myself.

Katina is aware of her situation and as matriarch carves out a life for herself and her offspring to the best of her ability. Analogous to a prison guard being cooperative with the warden to make life better.

Then there are the other animals that are less predictable. Animals that I worked directly with in this category include Taima, her mother Gudurn, Tilikum, and Kanduke. These animals were also aware of their surroundings and were not as interested in working with the training staff. This caused them to have their food amounts cut, regularly, so they would comply with commands or not disrupt shows.

No one knows what he was thinking, but Tilikum has killed three humans, including two of his trainers. For reference, Kanduke was actually more feared than Tilikum, although he lived a shorter life, pre-Internet, so his antics are less known. These orcas (plus Kasatka, Orkid, Ky, Keto) all developed track records that made them unsafe to get into the water with. So, in that sense, they are definitely in charge.

Sociologist Susan Gray Davis discussed the illusory aspect of SeaWorld’s shows last spring during Voice of San Diego’s sponsored debate, between SeaWorld’s defenders and its critics, over orca captivity. While studying the question of what people actually learn at marine parks like SeaWorld, she came to the conclusion that it all came down to entertainment, particularly the big orca circus shows put on at the its various Shamu Stadiums:

I think they are the key to the brand. It’s the model for the human-animal interaction that occurs at SeaWorld. It really expresses a lot of tension, because it combines the fascination with these animals with an enthusiasm for subtly, but maybe not subtly, humans being in charge of the animals. So there’s this big, beautiful powerful wild animal that is also being controlled by a human being. It’s done in a very skillful, very artful way, but that’s essentially what people are seeing in the shows.

So the kind of “environmental” education that occurs at these parks is not in any sense a forward-looking effort that helps young people take a more enlightened approach to their own futures. It is instead a reflection of what the cetacean-captivity industry is really about – namely, just another iteration of the systems of dominance and control that embody traditional Western Civilization, values that we know are killing the planet.

This is something deeply embedded in our culture – so deeply that it may take generations to root out. It comes out of the same components of our wiring that have brought us such depredations as slavery, war, genocide, psychopathy, and environmental degradation.

The enlightened parts of our society have worked hard over the centuries to root out these phenomena, because they understand that they are ultimately self-destructive and ultimately evil – with varying degrees of success. Slavery has diminished dramatically, though it remains a fact in many corners of the underdeveloped Third World and even in the slimier corners of developed society. Genocide is not as common a phenomena as it was a century ago, but the threat of it hangs over us like a dark cloud. War and psychopathy and environmental degradation are very much still with us.

Orca captivity, as it happens, gives us a unique window on the reality that these systems of dominance and control are, in the end, utterly illusory. And perhaps even more interestingly, it is the orcas themselves – and particularly their wild societies, whose foundations emerge from a profound empathy – who may be able to show us a way out.

***

Animal-rights activist Michael Mountain has written eloquently about how the fear of death has drastically distorted human behavior, particularly in Western Civilization, leading humans to create a domain for themselves separate from the natural world, a system of dominance and control that extends to every facet of human endeavor.

Our central problem, as humans, is that as much as we reach for the stars and create profoundly beautiful works of art, we cannot escape the knowledge that, just like all the other animals, we are destined to die, go into the ground, and become food for worms.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, social anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote that the awareness we humans have of our personal mortality creates a level of anxiety that drives much of our behavior. Certainly other animals experience bursts of terror in the face of death, but for us humans it’s a lifelong awareness, and one that brings about a chronic level of anxiety that we spend our whole lives – and build whole civilizations and cultures – trying to cope with.

And so it is that, to alleviate the anxiety we feel over our animal nature, we try to separate ourselves from our fellow animals and to exert control over the natural world. We tell ourselves we’re superior to them and that they exist for our benefit.

We treat them as commodities and resources, use them as biomedical “models” or “systems” in research, and force them to perform for our entertainment in circuses and theme parks.

To the extent that companion animals fare better, this is largely because we’ve come to treat them less as animals and more as family – part of our human “in-group” to whom we can relate a bit like children.

We even enshrine the abuse of animals in our most sacred belief systems. The Catholic Catechism, for example, states that “Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity.”

These belief systems also offer us hope in some form of immortality that’s not accorded the other animals. They’re just one of the ways we have of distancing ourselves from the rest of nature, and they’ve become so embedded in our cultures that they’re typically not even questioned, much less stopped.

But, as in all forms of denial, we cannot escape what we are. And the more we try to bend nature to our will, the more we end up harming the planet and all its living creatures, quite possibly now beyond repair.

This fear, as Mountain demonstrates, has twisted Western culture in profound ways, particularly as people have engaged in the machinery of death itself – namely, war. Throughout history, war and conquest have not only shaped our societies but have in turn become products of them, like a dog chasing its tail: Violence begetting violence. Even as we attempt to assert our systems of dominance and control over our world, we sow the seeds of our own destruction.

Moreover, warmaking has shaped us as individuals, since it has always been inextricably bound up with cultural conceptions of heroism and virtue, and these conceptions have in turn driven the shape of how we wage war and otherwise build our dominance systems – fueled, most often, by the urge to eliminate.

The adulation of heroes arises out of a basic human need, as Becker put it in other work, to feel good about ourselves, to know ourselves as heroes. In the West, the heroic task historically has entailed energetically taking up arms to redeem the world. It also entails creating an enemy and naming him; the heroic warrior, after all, needs an enemy against which to fight, something to give his life meaning. The drama that results is a holy war to drive out an alien darkness or disease, and it is a drama that has played out innumerable times throughout the long history of the West.

Yet, as James Aho observes in This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy, the heroic dynamic has played out differently in different cultures. In the East, he notes, the martial-arts hero is perfected by becoming "absorbed in a cycle that is larger than himself," subsumed by eternal spiritual principles with which he has become aligned. But this is not the case in the Occident:

In civilizations that have come under Judeo-Christian and Muslim influence -- which is to say, among others, modern Europe and America -- chaos is experienced as the product of disobedience regarding ethical duties, not mere ritual infractions, as these have been revealed through prophecy. Here, then, the heroic task becomes one not of passively yielding to the Way but of energetically taking up weapons to reform the world after the personal commandments of the Holy One. The Occidental holy war functions to sterilize the world of an alien darkness or disease, not to reconcile man to its inevitability, particularly its inevitability in himself.

This expiative impulse, in the West at least, became closely associated with Christianity during the early Middle Ages, especially in the later phases of the Holy Roman empire, when Church doctrine regarding the nature of sin developed into a deep psychological fixation regarding the impurity of the flesh. It gave birth to a deep streak of eliminationism: the extreme objectification of other people grouped into a target, manifested as the dehumanization, demonization, and otherwise degradation of that target group into an object fit only for elimination.

This streak manifested itself on the European continent in the form of pogroms and inquisitions, of which the Spanish Inquisition is only the most infamous, with its autos-da-fe and multiple pogroms, in which some 3,000 to 5,000 people were executed and thousands more tortured.

Historian David E. Stannard's text American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World explores these historical roots of genocide in European culture in some depth. As he observes (pp.154-155), the Augustinian doctrine of worldly sin equated all the natural world with evil and brutality, including such natural impulses as sex. Indeed, any wild place was conceived of as innately evil; only the purifying power of civilization could safeguard us from death and darkness. Africa was named “the dark continent” for a reason.

Death and sex thus became inextricably bound up in the Western mind: the former was inevitably a product of the latter, and any dabbling in it led inevitably to darkness and destruction. Women, in particular, became conceived of as the font of such impulses.

As Stannard explains, such "learned and saintly medieval urgings" were part of a medieval worldview that created a culture that "became something truly to behold," one in which the effort to purge oneself of base sinfulness gave birth to a panoply of bizarre and painful self-inflictions. He cites a passage from a "not untypical" devout friar, described by Norman Cohn, who

shut himself up in his cell and stripped himself naked ... and took up his scourge with the sharp spikes, and beat himself on the body and on the arms and legs, till blood poured off him as from a man who has been cupped. One of the spikes on the scourge was bent crooked, like a hook, and whatever flesh it caught it tore off. He beat himself so hard that the scourge broke into three bits and the points flew against the wall. ...

Eventually, this hatred of sex was expressed in an abiding misogyny that identified women with the putrefication of the natural world and the source of worldly evil. It also identified the outside world with untamed nature and thus with wanton sinfulness. As Stannard writes, "there also lurked in distant realms demi-brutes who lived carnal and savage lives in wilderness controlled by Satan."

This view of the "uncivilized" world as populated by creatures who were perhaps only passably human also preceded Christianity by several centuries. Greek poets like Homer and Hesiod often described an outside world populated by demigods and other half-human races. Pliny the Elder, in the first century A.D., described in his Natural History peoples of far-off lands with fantastic traits, including people whose faces are embedded in their chests, or have the heads of dogs, or hooves instead of feet, or ears so long or lips so large they use them as coverings. Notably, he also famously provided the first recorded description of Orcinus orca, which Pliny insisted “could be described as nothing other than a gigantic mass of flesh armed with rows of teeth.” Later on, the “orc” was described by various Renaissance poets as a voracious monster who prowled the seas and dined on sailors and maidens.

As this myth-making was incorporated into Christian culture, it was assumed that the strangeness of these "monstrous" races of men described by Pliny, linked to the outcast lineage of Cain, was product of their innate sinfulness and downcast nature. "So great was their alienation from the world of God's -- or the gods' -- most favored people, in fact," writes Stannard, "that well into late antiquity they commonly were denied the label of 'men.'"

Eventually, by the later Middle Ages, this fascination with "monstrous" races evolved into an interest in the "wild man" who it was believed inhabited the unexplored wildernesses of the world. This was the standard view of the peoples who explorers eventually encountered populations of humans living on the American continents when the age of exploration began after 1492 -- if these were men at all, they were at best only half so.

Thus the eliminationist impulse was transmitted almost seamlessly from Europe to the Americas, where it actually grew in a more virulent form that went hand in hand with an expansionist impulse. Indeed, Americans generally displayed a wanton disregard for the humanity of the native peoples that only intensified as they marched farther westward.

All of this social conditioning came home with a vengeance in the centuries that followed, for the native peoples of the Americas, who had no natural immunity to diseases that had run their course through the European society that brought them to their shores. Whereas smallpox for Europeans produced unpleasant pockmarks and scars, among Native Americans the disease caused huge, gaping wounds and flesh that fell off their bodies, and of course an eventual and horrible death. Other European diseases -- cholera, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough), tuberculosis, diphtheria, and sexually transmitted diseases -- had similarly disproportionate and devastating effects. And perhaps just as ruthless were the Europeans who encountered these societies in retreat.

This pattern -- weakening the populace with disease, then overpowering them with superior arms and an inhuman ruthlessness and brutality -- was repeated endlessly throughout Americas in the ensuing decades, first throughout Hispaniola and the Caribbean, then in Mexico itself, then in Central and South America. The Spanish conquest of the Yucatan and of Mexico were only the first steps in Spain's larger colonization program in the Americas. The result was the near-utter obliteration of the existing civilizations.

The combination of disease and undiluted eliminationism had a predictable effect throughout the New World. By the midpoint of the 17th century, it's estimated that more than 50 million of the indigenous people in the Americas had perished, some 80 percent of the population. In some instances the devastation was nearly complete; between 1770 and 1850, nearly 95 percent of the Pueblo population in the Southwest was eradicated. By the time Old World diseases had spread to the farthest reaches of the continent, striking the Haida and Inuit peoples of northwest Canada in the early 1850s, the population of indigenous peoples in North America had had shrunk by some two-thirds or more. (There is an ongoing debate over the actual numbers, more of which you can read here.)

The only recorded example of a government effort to reduce the effects of disease on the native population came early in the 19th century, when the United States, according to Abraham Bergman's "A Political History of the Indian Health Service," began providing federal health services for Indians in the early 1800's -- but their primary purpose was to protect U.S. soldiers from contamination from nearby tribes. All the first vaccination programs were in the vicinity of military posts.

Complicating their reluctance to aid people whose humanity was evidently uncertain was the context of their worldview: for much of their early history on the American continent, white Europeans saw the Enemy as being Wilderness, the implacable, alien, deadly swamp whose subjugation it was their mission to impose.

The European conception of wilderness which white immigrants brought to the Americas was complex and shaded, but it was ultimately rooted in a worldview that placed Europe and Christian civilization at the center of the world, the source of civilization and light. The wilderness was the embodiment of sinfulness and evil -- and so were its inhabitants. And their elimination was an essential component of the conquest.

This was true not merely of the human inhabitants, but its animals as well. Threatening creatures -- cougars, bears and wolves especially -- were hunted to near-extinction. Even wild food sources such as salmon were wantonly harvested and their habitat destroyed, especially as dams were erected on every river on the Eastern Seaboard they inhabited. Stocks were not only depleted but intentionally wasted.

Lt. Campbell Hardy, an officer of the Royal Artillery in New Brunswick, observed the mentality in action in Nova Scotia in 1837, where once-plentiful salmon stocks were already plummeting:

"The spirit of wanton extermination is rife; and it has been well remarked, it really seems as though the man would be loudly applauded who was discovered to have killed the last salmon."

Perhaps even more symbolic was the fate of the grizzly bear, which at one time ruled both the Plains and the mountain ranges of the open West. But between 1850 and 1920, grizzlies were systematically and ruthlessly exterminated everywhere humans came into contact with them, effectively eliminated from 95 percent of their traditional range.

The same was true of the native peoples who dwelt in this wilderness. It was common for colonists to view the wilderness as capable of overwhelming civilized men, even from within, turning them into "savages" and "wild men," while the people who had lived there for centuries were commonly viewed as no less than vile beasts themselves.

Yet, even as Western man made contact with these “human beasts” and proceeded to eliminate their presence, the seeds were sown for the destruction of the very systems of dominance and control they tried to impose on their world.

***

Native Americans were only the first such ostensible quasi-humans who were victimized by the streak of eliminationism that coursed through European culture, but the genocide of the American Indians established a pattern that was repeated in succeeding episodes.

First there was an abiding and cold-blooded ruthlessness: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” infamously muttered U.S. Cavalry Gen. Philip Sheridan, and soon “The only good is a dead Indian” was the byword of Western settlers. More pointedly, Col. Chivington’s infamous exhortation to his troops before they murdered women and children at Sand Creek -- “Nits make lice!” -- made irrevocably clear that the elimination intended was utter and total and devoid of any vestige of humanity. That trait was manifested with vicious finality in the last of the great Indian massacres at Wounded Knee, when the bodies of the unarmed women and children were thrown into a pit like cordwood -- a scene that would be repeated across the sea more than fifty years later.

Even as the ostensible threat posed by the “wild men” of the Americas was being obliterated, though, white Americans found another target for their eliminationist impulse: African Americans, former slaves now liberated (formally, at least) by the outcome of the Civil War. Initially, blacks in the South were targeted for terrorist violence by night-riding Klansmen and Redshirts during the Reconstruction Era, to such devastating effect that the verdict of the war was functionally overturned, Reconstruction itself nullified, and Jim Crow segregation imposed.

In the years that followed, a mythology (often invoked to defend the memory of the Confederacy) developed about black people, and black men in particular, steeped in the twisted sexual fantasies (and guilt) of European white culture: namely, that black men were sexually ravenous, inclined to rape and assorted sex crimes, and in need of social control. This mythology became the fodder for a thousand lynching bonfires across America.

"The Negro race," after all, was still closely associated with the jungles of Africa, the "heart of darkness" in the European mind; and sexual voraciousness was assumed in such folk, for though tame they might be, they still were scarcely a step removed from wild men of the jungle themselves; still scarcely human. Yet this was a legend for which in truth there was scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to (and perhaps has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men's longtime sexual domination of black women, particularly during the slavery era.

In any event, the omnipresence of the threat of rape of white women by black men came to be almost universally believed by American whites. Likewise, conventional wisdom held that lynchings were a natural response to this threat: "The mob stands today as the most potent bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race," warned John Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among Northerners as well. The New York Herald, for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad citizens who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch law, is largely in the fact that the good citizens live where their wives and daughters are perfectly safe."

Lynching violence (which claimed the lives of several thousand black people over the years) soon gave way to race riots -- in which entire black populations were driven out of communities in which they had often spent generations -- and their logical end products, “sundown towns” from which black people were forbidden from setting foot after dark, upon pain of a horrific and brutal death. There were literally thousands of such towns spread all over the United States, in every state and region.

All of these phenomena were essential tools with which whites imposed their system of dominance and control on the rest of the American populace, as well as on one another. Miscegenation -- also known as “racial mixing” -- was outlawed in 30 of the then-48 states.

All this came at the height of the eugenics phenomena, from 1910-1935 -- eugenics being the pseudo-scientific theory that argued for genetics and racial “purity” as the ultimate distillation of man’s evolutionary climb, producing eventually “superior” races capable of lifting humanity out of the mire of the dark world and into the light of civilization. It ultimately produced some of the darkest atrocities in the annals of American science, including euthanasia and sterilization programs, the legacy of which still haunts the scientific community.

Among the chief objects of eliminationist paranoia promoted by the eugenicists were Asians -- particularly the Japanese immigrants who began coming to American shores in larger numbers at the turn of the 20th century. The eugenicists warned of the dire threat of the “Yellow Peril” -- a conspiracy theory claiming that Japan intended to colonize the United States by sending farmers who would “outbreed” the white populace eventually, and pave the way for the ultimate goal of a Japanese imperial invasion of the West Coast.

The ferment created by this hysteria led to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act -- also known as the “Asian Exclusion Act” -- which first codified the American concept of an “illegal alien” and outlawed all further immigration from Japan and other Asian nations. Yet because a large number of immigrants remained on American shores, the paranoia never fully subsided, and in fact flared back into full roar after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and in turn produced one of the great atrocities of American history, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

That war, however, proved a critical turning point. The white supremacist worldview had reached its apotheosis in Europe, in the German Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, once again fueled by conspiracy theories, focused this time on Jews and other “inferior races,” and eventually produced perhaps the most devastating genocidal enterprise in history, the Holocaust, in which some eight million people -- six million of them Jews -- perished. And at the end of the war, when the lid was peeled back and the corpses of the death camps were revealed for all to see, the world turned away, permanently repelled by what white supremacism and its eliminationism had produced.

Fittingly, much of the academic world had already begun to turn away from the Darwinistic evolutionary worldview that undergirded the belief in white supremacy, and after the war embraced with both arms the views that had been gradually emerging from the field of anthropology regarding the folly of branding races and cultures “superior” and “inferior,” a worldview that came be known as “multiculturalism” or “cultural relativism.”

And for that, ironically, they largely had a little Jewish man to thank: Franz Boas.

***

Franz Boas is today considered the father of modern anthropology, but when he arrived in Alert Bay, British Columbia, in 1886, he was just another student of what was then considered a promising new field, though he had already made something of a name for himself by challenging the current orthodoxy regarding the reigning evolutionary approach to cultural studies, which proposed a model in which societies progressed through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, culminating in a white patriarchy as the summit of evolution. Certainly he had some natural skepticism, as these theories had already been applied in the service of anti-Semites who claimed through the findings of phrenology (the pseudo-science of skull size) that Jews were an “inferior” race.

A Kwakwaka'wakw man demonstrates a ceremonial
killer-whale mask in a photo from Boas' collection.

Boas traveled among the Northwest coastal tribes a great deal and collected information and tribal legends from around the region, but he wound up spending much of his time in Alert Bay, home of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw people, better known as the Kwakiutl. The Kwakwaka'wakw are a fascinating tribe, with a rich and deeply artistic culture. Their totem poles are among the most renowned of all the coastal tribes for their size and beauty, and the tribe’s fierce insistence on retaining its culture even today is embodied by the jaw-dropping collection of ceremonial transformation masks that can be viewed at its cultural center.

The Kwakwaka'wakw also coexisted with killer whales, whom they revered as beings of great spiritual power. Their origin myth, indeed, tells of orcas who came to shore and took on the shape of humans, and when they encountered the whales in their canoes, they believed they were communing with their ancestors, who were being good to them by driving the salmon into their waters. Their legends describe the blackfish as the people under the sea, people who live in villages like their own in a watery kingdom, and sometimes a tribal princess would marry a blackfish prince, and good fortune would befall that family for generations; however, even throwing a stone or launching an arrow in the direction of an orca would bring about generations of misfortune.

It is now recognized that the killer whale societies of the Northwest are functionally matriarchal -- not only are their pods arranged matrilineally, their cultures appear to be arranged as matriarchies, with postmenopausal females actually leading most of the pods in their daily decision-making. Now, there is no indication in Kwakwaka'wakw mythology that the people of the tribe recognized this -- most of their legends describe the people under the sea as being led by male chiefs (perhaps understandable, given the imposing physical presence of most male resident orcas, who can reach 32 feet in length and 14,000 pounds, with six-foot dorsal fins). But it is likely not merely a coincidence that a number of Kwakwaka'wakw villages were led by female chiefs and were decidedly matriarchal societies.

Boas observed this, and noted particularly that these matriarchal tribes had in fact evolved from patriarchal societies that had failed or foundered for one reason or another. It gave him real traction for attacking the notion that all societies naturally evolved into patriarchies. Some of these matriarchal traditions had been transmitted from some of their northern neighbors.

A phrenologist at work

Having made this paradigm shift, Boas turned his attention to a component of white-supremacist orthodoxy, namely scientific racism, or the eugenics-derived notion that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics, and he similarly deconstructed it as demonstrably unscientific. Boas demonstrated that skull size and cranial shape, based on skeletal studies he pioneered, was in fact highly malleable, depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, and not a stable trait dependent on race, as the phrenologists claimed.

These findings and many others laid the groundwork for a worldview that ultimately destroyed and replaced white supremacism as the dominant model for modern global society -- replaced it with a model in which all cultures have innate value and, as an ethical matter, deserve our respect; in which entire peoples are not branded “inferior” or “superior” but are afforded the rights and opportunities all people deserve; in which warmaking is condemned as destructive and communitarianism is celebrated as a source of well-being for all people; in which power comes not from what we can personally accrue, but from what we can do to empower the people who share the world with us; in which dominance and control are replaced, as stabilizing mechanisms, with cooperation and sustained mutual well-being.

Fundamentally, that is an empathetic society. Scientists are now discovering that we most advance, evolutionarily speaking, when we are a cooperative society. And ironically, that is the one important lesson that killer whales have to teach us -- namely, that empathy is an evolutionary advantage. It is only a vulnerability in a pathological society, like the Old World from which we are trying to emerge.

As I go on to explain in Of Orcas and Men:

So, perhaps it is fitting that today we can turn to the same wellspring of transformative thought as a touchstone for examining not just our relationship with each other as humans, but our species’ relationship to the world in which we live and to the animals who inhabit it. We would do well to learn from the people who themselves have gleaned real wisdom from being in the world of whales.

The cornerstone of Kwakwaka’waka religious thought is the codependency of all of nature; no part of the natural order can exist without the rest. There is no such thing as self-sufficiency, whether for humans or their tribes, for animals or the supernatural beings whose powers they represent. Humans are somewhat naturally at the center of their universe, but they accept that all other members of their common world possess not just an indestructible and unique quality, but a spiritual and material parity in that world. “Kwakiutl religion represents the concern of the people to occupy their own proper place within the total system of life, and to act responsibly within it, so as to acquire and control the powers that sustain life,” explained Boas’ student, Irving Goldman, in his study of the tribe's theology, The Mouth of Heaven.

These concerns find their clearest expression in the mythology of animals and the supernatural beings who take their forms. In the Kwakwaka’waka world, humans and animals have real kinship, reflected in the view of killer whales as their ancestors; they have social and spiritual ties that can never be severed. Indeed, they believe that when the tribesmen who hunt marine mammals die, they return to the undersea village of their orca ancestors. In this universe, humans are the recipients of powers, and the givers of those powers are the animals and the supernatural forces they represent. Of all the animals in their universe, the orca is the most powerful, one of the few (along with the raven, the otter, and the wolf) capable of giving a man enough power to become a shaman.

Acquiring a worldview like this does not require us to submit to a belief in supernatural beings, but it does require us to abjure our arrogance, which, as we have seen, is already at the core of our relationship not just with killer whales, but our world generally. Killer whales inherently challenge our assumptions of species superiority, as well as supremacy. Beyond being merely physically more powerful (at least, without tools or technology), orcas can challenge us in the realm of intellectual prowess as well, particularly given the added dimension with which they can gather information about our world and their proven ability to manipulate acoustics to do that. It is also hard to argue with six million years of actual supremacy as the undisputed lords of the oceans when it comes to evolutionary success, species-wise.

Before about 1990, we could reasonably plead ignorance about the unflattering realities that orcas present in relation to humans, especially the way in which what we have learned about them shines a spotlight on our own cognitive limitations. The dirty truth of dolphin and orca studies is that they have established fairly clearly that human beings may well lack the cognitive capacity to understand how all cetaceans communicate; we’re just not that acoustically sophisticated.

When we are forced to concede, as with orcas, that we are not unique in our intelligence, that we may not be the only creatures worthy of being considered persons, then we likewise have to reconsider our previous, Western-grown position as special beings somehow separated from nature, with such separation being something desirable instead of the abomination that it would be to someone from the Kwakwaka’waka tribe. It is this latter worldview, one that places humans on an equal, and utterly codependent, footing with nature, as well as the spiritual components that accompany that worldview, that in the cold light of day makes logical sense, especially when we are confronted by the majestic truth that is an orca in full breach or a tall black fin approaching our kayak in the fog.

This realization affects our relationship not just with killer whales, but with all the natural world and with all the animals with whom we share it. It demands that we discard the invented notion of animals as property and recognize that granting them rights does not force us to lose control of the animals we already control; it just requires us to treat them decently.

It also forces us to recognize that we cannot continue degrading and gradually destroying the natural environment that created this bounty of wondrous life, because we are connected to it as deeply as are the wildlife who inhabit it. Our survival as a species, as human beings, of everything that defines us as human, depends on its survival, and so far, it is not looking good for any of us.

This week, however, brought us a ray of hope. The paradigm shifted, perhaps subtly, but irrevocably.

***

The animal-rights movement, at its core (and despite the occasional fulminations of some of its more thoughtless and self-destructive adherents) is about empathy: Not only does it recognize the existence and rights of the animals who come under the grasp of our systems of dominance and control (whether wild or domesticated animals, or, in the case of SeaWorld’s orcas, an unholy hybridization of both), but it also inherently recognizes that abuse of any animal in our control lessens us: it shrinks our souls. There is a reason that animal abuse is considered an early warning sign of violent psychopathy.

Yet in the end, it is also about confronting the very forces that threaten our extinction: a modern society whose activities threaten to permanently alter the planet’s climate and the biological systems that depend upon it, and whose greed and arrogance and cruelty is threatening to drive not only a mass extinction of other species (including killer whales) on the planet, but ultimately in the end our own demise as well.

As Michael Mountain explains:

But while nature may be “a nightmare spectacular,” violence among our fellow animals is limited to very specific survival needs. It is we humans who are really “soaking the planet in blood.” We like to tell ourselves that people who commit murder and mayhem are “behaving like animals,” but that’s not how the other animals behave. (While, for example, we humans kill approximately 100 million sharks a year, sharks kill maybe five humans, and mostly by accident.)

The truth is that the more we try to distance ourselves from the other animals and place ourselves above the natural world, the more unnatural, irrational and destructive our behavior becomes. We are not outside of nature, and never can be.

Zoos and animal displays and amusements have a long and fairly sordid history in Western Civilization as exemplars of the systems of dominance and control, putting wild things in cages and making them amuse us with tricks, evidence of our ability to dominate. The tradition dates back at least to the infamous animal cages maintained by Henry III and later royalty at the Tower of London, which were opened for public viewing, and continuing through the various menageries and animal collections maintained by the aristocracy throughout much of Europe up through the 20th century.

But the tide has been turning against them for some time, and not merely on the captive-orca front. Elephants -- another large and highly intelligent mammal that in its normal habitat requires extensive room to roam -- have in recent years become a major point of contention among animal-rights activists and the zoo and animal-entertainment industries, enough that recently Ringling Brothers Circus announced it would be ending the use of elephants in their shows. It was one of the first quakes signaling the current paradigm shift.

SeaWorld’s announcement this week, however, meant the giant in the room had moved. SeaWorld is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, and though it has lost much of its value in recent years, it is the force majeure of the marine-park industry. Indeed, Manby’s announcement has already provoked a shocked counter-response from the Association of Marine Mammal Parks, the industry organization, which mostly decried the “assault” that SeaWorld has endured in recent years from the animal-rights sector.

Leading the way, of course, has been virtually everyone associated with Blackfish -- beginning with the director, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, whose skill and marvelous aesthetic eye made the documentary so deeply compelling; as well as the film’s cast of former SeaWorld trainers, including Jeff Ventre, Samantha Berg, John Hargrove, Carol Ray, John Jett, and Dean Gomersall, who have been tireless in their efforts to promote the film’s message in the three years since its release. The “Blackfish Effect” has gone beyond simply damaging SeaWorld’s stock value -- it has now brought to an eventual end the period of orca captivity, and even more, has fueled a change in the national conversation about all kinds of animal captivity. There’s no doubt that this is a documentary that changed the world.

Many others deserve real credit too, especially Naomi Rose of the Animal Welfare Institute, who has been working for a generation or longer for this outcome; Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research; Ingrid Visser of the Orca Research Trust; and Howard Garrett of the Orca Network. All of them are scientists (and, secondarily, animal activists) who work with wild orcas and who have advocated tirelessly from the perspective of a deep understanding of the wrongness of orca captivity.

Manby’s announcement makes mention of the inescapable fact that marine parks like SeaWorld irrevocably changed the public’s understanding, and perception, of the nature of killer whales, and no doubt for the better: We no longer believe, like Pliny, that they are vicious, mindless killing machines who pose a threat to any human in the water. Indeed, we have learned an incredible amount about killer whales in the more than 50 years that they have been held in captivity (though it must be noted that the vast majority of that knowledge has come from studying the animals in the wild, not in captivity). And perhaps the most important thing that we have learned is this: Orcas do not belong in captivity.

It’s not entirely clear that Joel Manby understands that on a deep level. What is self-evident is that, unlike previous SeaWorld CEOs, he is a clear-eyed businessman who can read account sheets and the numbers therein without allowing that to be affected by the pleadings of a corporate culture that had descended into cult-like behavior, sending out spies and fake demonstrators to infiltrate orca-rights activists’ events. In the end, he understood the bottom line: SeaWorld has to transform its business model if it hopes to survive. It can no longer depend on the awesome and illusory spectacle of humans seemingly controlling orcas to make the turnstiles go around and keep their stock prices afloat. It has to change with society -- and society, it is clear, has indeed changed. So Manby pulled the plug on the longtime stonewalling and decided to Do the Right Thing.

However, this whole momentous paradigm shift hinges on what is, in reality, a tiny, almost imperceptible step on the part of the SeaWorld. In terms of visitors to SeaWorld, relatively little will actually change -- they won’t be visibly affected by the end of the breeding program until there are no more orca babies to be seen, and eventually when the captive-born population begins to die out. The new shows will be less circus-like and, one hopes, filled with more factual information about wild orcas than is currently the case. But they will still be taking place in the same concrete tanks.

Manby underscored his lack of understanding of this point in his insistence that seapens or some other retirement/sanctuary scheme is out of the picture -- by dishonestly portraying what orca advocates hope to achieve:

Some critics want us to go even further; they want us to “set free” the orcas currently in our care. But that's not a wise option.

Most of our orcas were born at SeaWorld, and those that were born in the wild have been in our parks for the majority of their lives. If we release them into the ocean, they will likely die. In fact, no orca or dolphin born under human care has ever survived release into the wild. Even the attempt to return the whale from “Free Willy,” Keiko, who was born in the wild, was a failure.

Manby, of course, neglects to mention that had it been up to SeaWorld and the rest of the marine-park industry, Keiko would have rotted in the tiny Reino Aventura pool where he had been filmed and was slowly dying; instead, thanks to the campaign to rescue him from that deathtrap and eventually return him to the wild, he wound up having seven good years of a truly quality life, far superior to what any other captive orca experiences. It only “failed” insofar as he was never successfully reunited with his natal pod, and so eventually resumed the human contact to which he was accustomed, before eventually dying of a respiratory ailment that almost certainly was a legacy of his many years in captivity.

Jean-Michel Cousteau responded eloquently to this passage from Manby:

I urge Mr. Manby to reconsider his statement about Keiko and I ask him to understand that the quality of Keiko’s remaining years were significantly enhanced by having an opportunity to live in an ocean sea pen with many weeks of forays in the open ocean. The orcas in SeaWorld are living in bare and boring enclosures. These highly intelligent animals deserve to live their remaining years in natural environment under human care. The overwhelming evidence of orca distress in captivity is far too great to ignore. It is a fair request for Mr. Manby to continue to listen to the public. Not only has the public been asking for years to end the capture and breeding of captive orcas but the public is now asking to finally close the chapter of captive orca history by retiring the remaining captive orcas and, at a minimum, allowing them the opportunity to swim wild under close supervision of human care in ocean enclosures.

The time has come for us to see orcas in captivity as a part of our past – not a tragic part of our future. Let’s end the show now and retire these intelligent, social, complex animals to seaside sanctuaries.

The thing is, it’s too late for SeaWorld to turn back now, despite the pleadings of their former friends at the AMMP. The ball is rolling now, and the momentum is unlikely to stop until orca captivity has joined slavery and racism as relics of an ugly past.

In the bigger picture, that may seem like ultimately a small thing. But it is the kind of small, good thing that has deeper resonances that ripple through the foundations of our society and the shared reality that makes it possible to cohere, to empathize, and to cooperate. To beat back the darkness.

It is an incremental and yet momentous victory, a ray of light that cuts deep in dark times. In a time when the forces of white supremacism and warlike nationalism, aimed at dominance and control of “those” people, are straining and threatening to roar back to life both in America and elsewhere, we can use all the small good things we can get.