In San Francisco’s Chinatown in the mid-1990s, animal activists took to the streets to protest live animal market vendors’ “cruel” practices and to convince the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare to ban the sale of live animals (including turtles, frogs, birds, and fish) for food. Chinatown’s vendors and political leaders—noting that the activists focused on Chinese markets specifically and not on elite French restaurants in the area or the popular tourist locale Fisherman’s Wharf—mobilized a powerful response, arguing that the animal activists were, knowingly or not, engaged in a form of cultural imperialism that had long targeted Chinese American cultural practices. At issue in the live animal market debate, which raged for more than a decade, are entangled questions about race, species, belonging, and who has the cultural authority to decide what constitutes “cruelty” and who counts as “human”—questions central to Claire Jean Kim’s book, Dangerous Crossings. Kim argues that disputes over how racially marginalized groups keep, use, and consume animals in their cultural traditions provide rich sites for considering how power operates within cultural communities and across species lines. In these disputes, racially marked cultural practices become hypervisible, perpetuating stereotypes linking nonwhite populations with cruelty and animality. As one Chinatown activist, Rose Tsai, put it, “Are we so sure that if cameras were free to roam the slaughterhouses and meat factories that produce and supply the neatly packaged meat we buy at super-markets that the conditions there would not offend the sensitivities of many of us? … If San Francisco, as a city, wants to take on the issue of cruelty to animals, let it do so in a consistent manner” (118).
In Dangerous Crossings, Kim argues that race, species, and nature are “taxonomies of power” that are culturally constructed and mutually constitutive. She examines three case studies that illuminate these taxonomies: the battle over Chinatown’s live animal markets; the controversy over the Makah [End Page 127] tribe’s decision in the mid-1990s to resume whale hunting after an interval of seventy years; and Michael Vick’s arrest and conviction for dogfighting in 2007. In each case, public outcry by animal and environmental activists focused on a discourse of cruelty and harm (what Kim calls “the optic of cruelty”), while cultural activists countered with a discourse of racism and cultural imperialism (what she calls “the optic of racism”). What these disputes demonstrate, Kim argues, is the need for “an ethics of mutual avowal, or open acknowledgement of connection with other struggles … constructing a reimagined ‘we’ in resistance to the neoliberal elites waging war against racialized groups, animals, nature, and others” (20). Ultimately, Kim asks: How can we theorize multiple taxonomies of power and oppression ethically and complexly? What happens when animal rights and cultural rights clash?