Animal Humanism

In the antebellum United States, attempts to exclude non-white people from the category of the human illustrated why humanist arguments, such as the iconic antislavery question “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” became necessary to combat racism and slavery. However, the iconic emphasis of enslaved people’s humanity and their distinction from nonhuman animals was not abolitionism’s only way of referring to animals, and not all abolitionist arguments depended upon a model of sympathy that necessitated the sympathizer’s similarity to the enslaved. Abolitionist children’s literature published between the 1830s and the 1860s often employed animals in comparison with – rather than in distinction from – enslaved black people, with an effect distinctly different from the comparisons of scientific racism. Some of these texts used domesticated animals to mediate their readers’ sympathy for enslaved people. As I will argue, this model of sympathy which is not dependent upon articulations of sameness is a more progressive model for affective sympathy and kinship in that (unlike other, more prominent models of abolitionist sympathy, such as the employment of mixed-race characters to garner white sympathy) it has the potential for promoting such affective relationships across acknowledged positions of difference.

In my longer essay, I read abolitionist children’s literature in which such affective relationships are possible despite differences in race and species in order to show how this more progressive difference-based model of sympathy worked against the more prominent sameness-based model of abolitionist sympathy. Unlike the prioritization of sympathy for mixed-race people that is so prominent in abolitionist literature, the model of sympathy present in these animal-focused abolitionist stories and poems for children is more in line with progressive notions of antiracism which appreciate difference, rather than calling for its erasure.

A model of sympathy that has the potential to be conveyed across positions of difference opens up possibilities for both antiracist discourse and human-animal studies. When we ask for whom one can have sympathy, we must look beyond comparisons between beings, and the hierarchies that accompany them. My allusion to humanism connotes “humaneness,” or the particular valuation of human life, as the term sometimes signified in the nineteenth century. The abolitionist arguments I discuss depend upon the category of humanity – a category linked to notions of freedom, property, self-valuation, and Christianity. I present abolitionism as one version of humanism, in its dependence upon the category of the human for an ethics of interracial relations, but I argue that these literary comparisons of humans and other animals – primarily pets – have the potential for a more productive discussion of sympathy. Despite their failings, the texts I discuss present a model of sympathy that, by refusing to view difference as foil to sympathy, has the potential to resist the hierarchies of both race and species that were common to nineteenth-century discourses of scientific racism.