“...lot of dogs dont like black people but theyre fine w/everyone else.”
September 18, 2015 8:34 AM   Subscribe

Our Racist Dogs by Kelly Mays McDonald [The Awl] Why do certain dogs attack certain people? Because they’re weaponized.
“Weaponized dogs are ever-present in humanity’s long legacy of colonialism and slavery. They have fought alongside many instances of human atrocity to perpetrate acts of physical and psychological violence that supersede the scope of a simple gunshot. European colonizers of the New World notably trained their dogs to “relish Indian flesh” by explicitly feeding them the bodies of the victims after a battle. Throughout America’s early history, slave masters and bounty hunters adopted bloodhounds as the primary means of tracking down runaway slaves by scent, which is widely depicted in popular media. What is left out of the popular narrative, however, is the fact that when they encountered people on the run, the dogs were often trained to bite and tear the flesh of slaves to hold them there until they could be shot, shackled and dragged back to their masters for public lynchings and beatings.”
posted by Fizz (31 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
there's something kind of uniquely horrible about making dogs be racist
posted by mightygodking at 8:51 AM on September 18, 2015 [9 favorites]


I was correct in assuming that the pet dogs that I was encountering in Illinois were “racist,” projecting their owners’ choice to exist in a whites-only world, and perhaps even reflecting an inherent bias cultivated over decades of segregation.

You know, it's funny. I live in a Mexican neighborhood full of dog owners and I regularly walk my dog in a park that's the dividing line between the Mexican neighborhood and a predominantly black neighborhood and never once since moving here have I come across a racist dog.

But my little subdivision in suburban Georgia was full of them.

Huh.
posted by phunniemee at 8:52 AM on September 18, 2015 [15 favorites]


As a hat-wearing man I've encountered many dogs who are racist against hat-wearing men.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:54 AM on September 18, 2015 [18 favorites]


White Dog previously on MetaFilter.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:56 AM on September 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


Met a lot of dogs that are weaponized (ie, trained or cued to attack) hat-wearing men?
posted by muddgirl at 8:58 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


(Also White God.)
posted by nom de poop at 8:59 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Isn't this sort of like writing an essay about boxing based on a viewing of Penitentiary?
posted by thelonius at 9:00 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


The movie is the framing device, not the basis of the essay's thesis.
posted by idiopath at 9:02 AM on September 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


No. She references throughout a well-researched and thought-out scholarly article about the history of weaponized dogs in the colonial Americas at the end of her piece. Both her piece and the scholarly article are well-worth reading.
posted by blucevalo at 9:02 AM on September 18, 2015 [13 favorites]


thelonius: “Isn't this sort of like writing an essay about boxing based on a viewing of Penitentiary?”

Only the first quarter of the essay talks about the film White Dog. Scroll down to the first linebreak delineated with an arrow; after that linebreak, there's a lot more personal experience and research discussed.

This is an excellent essay.
posted by koeselitz at 9:10 AM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


Met a lot of dogs that are weaponized (ie, trained or cued to attack) hat-wearing men?

Both of my dogs are friendly and very sweet (unless you are a game bird or rabbit), but are freaked the fuck out by men in sunglasses and hats. Even me - if I disappear for a bit and come back in shades and a cap, my dog will bark and carry on like his life is in danger.

This is something we've worked hard to discourage, and not had much success with. It wouldn't be hard to train them to be more aggressive about it.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:10 AM on September 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


Bio from the author's website:
Kelly Mays McDonald is a Los Angeles-based writer and animal behavior professional who has spent the past decade being licked, bitten and scratched by dogs from all walks of life. She has worked in California, New York City and the Midwest as a professional “dog wrangler” and animal behavior expert for private clients, doggy daycares and animal shelters, and served as a guest lecturer in Shelter Animal Behavior for the University of Illinois School of Veterinary Medicine.
Even me - if I disappear for a bit and come back in shades and a cap, my dog will bark and carry on like his life is in danger.

Dog behavior is a difficult subject for laypersons to discuss, and I'm certainly a layperson, but there is a vast difference between a dog with properly-trained bite inhibition getting freaked out when their owner grows a beard or wears a hat, vs. dogs who are trained from a young age to bite and hold on cue. McDonald alludes to the difference between dogs who are socialized to be "racist" (Ie, fearful or avoidant) of black people, and dogs who are weaponized against black people, but apparently not clear enough? I mean, I once met a dog raised in an African-American family who was undersocialized around white people, and it did not like me and even barked at me and ran away, but it didn't bite me while sending calming signals the way that McDonald describes the dog that bit her.
posted by muddgirl at 9:17 AM on September 18, 2015 [12 favorites]


This is something we've worked hard to discourage, and not had much success with. It wouldn't be hard to train them to be more aggressive about it.

You wouldn't even necessarily have to consciously try to train them, if you yourself were kind of uncomfortable and freaked out and disliked men with sunglasses and hats. Just tensing up and acting weird and unfriendly around them would confirm to many dogs that THESE humans are NOT TO BE TRUSTED, even MY OWN HUMANS think so!! And of course dogs can see skin color--they're dichromats, not blind. They can hear differences in cadence and pick up on plenty of other social markers, too.

(Dogs can also be, for lack of a better term, 'racist' to other dogs. After a few bad experiences with Cairn and Scottish terriers, my own dog thinks that dogs with beards, especially terriers with scruffy faces, are all definitely pretty dickish and probably just waiting to be douchey to her. So she tenses up and watches them and overreacts if they do do something slightly rude and clearly holds them to higher social standards than non-scruffy dogs. It's irritating and kind of embarrassing, but it definitely could be worse.)

That's not quite the kind of thing that the article is talking about--her thesis seems to be more based around institutionalized and intentionally trained racial aggression on the part of dogs, which is definitely its own horrible thing. But I'd be surprised if this kind of picking-up-on-human-racial-tensions issue wasn't also factoring in to the way that K9 units are run, especially if the cops running those units aren't specifically looking out for it and carefully trying to account for it. Which I think has an approximately nil chance of being the case in most precincts. I think I mentioned this a while back in the context of drug searches, but I really wish more precincts would take race into account when training their dogs to reduce the risk of false positives influenced by handler expectations.
posted by sciatrix at 9:22 AM on September 18, 2015 [12 favorites]


And yeah--muddgirl is totally right, the dog biting the shit out of her while sending calming "I BET THIS IS A GAME" bright-eyed signals? That sounds very much like the reaction of a dog trained using Schutzhund-style bitework methods, when the dog is basically taught that the arm or leg they're biting is a toy. (Usually they're trained on heavy canvas sleeves rather than human flesh, but... yeah.)
posted by sciatrix at 9:25 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Pogo_Fuzzybutt: very sweet (unless you are a game bird or rabbit), but are freaked the fuck out by men in sunglasses and hats.

But they loved the Blues Brothers. Go figure!
posted by dr_dank at 9:42 AM on September 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


I am a cat person, and have no plans to get a dog ever because I love dogs when they belong to other people who will do the hard work of poop-scooping and training - rather the way I feel about kids, in fact. That said: “Oh,” she said, “a lot of dogs don’t like black people but they’re fine with everyone else.” With that she flipped her blonde ponytail and walked away. appalled me. The shelter worker was way out of line. Leaving aside the microagression to Ms. McDonald, didn't Ponytail stop to think that maybe a black person would come in looking to adopt a pet? That a dog snarling at a prospective adopter wasn't exactly a good advertisement for the shelter? If I were the shelter director, I'd want to have a word or two with the shelter worker (indeed, withall the staff) about this.

I'd be interested in reading about black people's (and other PoC) experiences with animal shelters and rescues. I wonder if PoC are not made welcome at many shelters or rescues, and, if so, what animal rescuers are doing about it. Animal rescue is such a white, female world (in my experience) as it is.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:50 AM on September 18, 2015 [13 favorites]


One of the most notable things about dogs in England is that most act just like their owners. English dogs tend to ignore strangers on the pavements (sidewalks). They make no eye contact and act as if you are not there. Just like most English people do (excluding London of course since all dogs there are either bankers, members of Parliament or work for the BBC).

It's completely disheartening for a person who enjoys meeting other people's dogs.
posted by srboisvert at 10:02 AM on September 18, 2015 [9 favorites]


My childhood dog, a massive cocoa Lab, was a ladies' dog. All women and children too young to discern by sex were his bestest buddies. But he never learned to trust adult men. He warmed up to my Dad OK over time, but never got all puppy-love with him. Male visitors got the whole Cerberus treatment; we had to keep him in whenever we were expecting deliverymen. He never attacked anyone, but he had a bark like the Second Coming.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:46 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Previously on MeFi (though the thread barely touches on the history of the stereotype, weirdly enough)
posted by thetortoise at 10:51 AM on September 18, 2015


I'd be interested in reading about black people's (and other PoC) experiences with animal shelters and rescues. I wonder if PoC are not made welcome at many shelters or rescues, and, if so, what animal rescuers are doing about it. Animal rescue is such a white, female world (in my experience) as it is.

I am a white lady, but I can confirm that yes, there is a pretty consistent undercurrent of racism in a lot of shelter and rescue organizations. There are a lot of intersections between certain schools of thought regarding dog breeds and racism in particular, many adoption policies and decisions involve implicit cultural biases, and working in any kind of animal rescue can tend to create resentment toward humans in general, because you're dealing with the effects of people's worst behaviors. That all creates a pretty fertile breeding ground for racism, classism, and even just misanthropy in general.

Add to that that animal welfare is so heavily dependent on donations and volunteers, so there is a very strong tendency not to criticize intolerance and even sometimes overtly racist talk and actions. And, of course, it feeds on itself by alienating people of color, which makes those organizations even whiter, to the point that shelter workers like the one in her anecdote can be entirely dismissive of things like dogs behaving aggressively with black people.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:52 AM on September 18, 2015 [8 favorites]


Seth is just a racist dog
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 11:03 AM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]




From rosswald's link: Mr Zuma, a proud Zulu who adheres to traditional practices such as polygamy, said in an August interview that it was "not right" for women to be single, and that having children is "extra training for a woman".

Sounds like Mr. Zuma is actually a bit of a dog, himself.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:48 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


"Only the first quarter of the essay talks about the film White Dog. Scroll down to the first linebreak delineated with an arrow; after that linebreak, there's a lot more personal experience and research discussed.

This is an excellent essay.
"

It's a deeply frustrating essay because it uses two framing devices that are poorly supported in the text while connecting a larger, underexamined theme in American racism.

The dog I most connect with my childhood was racist, incurably so. She was a Cocker-dachshund mix, never over ten pounds, and a rescue. For a while in first grade, I went to a Montessori school that was about an hour away, and every day we'd drive past a stretch of median with a dog on it. My mom tried calling animal control, and got told by the county that the dog had been out there for over a month but that none of their staff could catch it. So my mom, who had worked with animals before, took an hour or so to coax the dog, getting closer and closer to our car. It took her seeing me and my brother in the back seat before she'd get in.

We took her to a vet, got her wormed and found out that she'd had at least three broken ribs. Our guess is that she was thrown from a moving car.

She was always great with my brother and I, but dachshunds and Cockers are both known for biting and it didn't take long before seeing her seemingly inexplicably freak out and attack. She hated three things: boots, men and black people. She hated boots to the extent that she'd lunge at them even if no one was wearing them; if an unfamiliar man of any race stepped near her, she'd bite him; since most of our friends were black, we quickly learned that she just couldn't be around them — she'd lay low until shooting out of whatever hallway and snapping. With kids she never broke the skin, but anyone else around meant she had to be sequestered.

Our best guess was that she'd been kicked viciously by a black man in boots.

After she died, it took us a long time to get another dog, but my mom started going back to shelters and eventually came home with a Springer spaniel. He was bigger than any other dog we've had, about 100 pounds, and smarter than any dog we've had too. The shelter didn't have any background information, but from the carriage, ears and docked tail, it's likely he was from a show line. He also had Springer rage and bit my mom's hand badly enough that she needed four stitches and narrowly avoided ligament damage.

The problem with the essay's framing is that the legacy of state-sponsored racism reified through dogs is that it over-generalizes. There's no way that a dachshund or Cocker spaniel would be used to hunt slaves or prisoners, nor to serve as police dogs. I've known other racist dogs, and it's both a thing that happens and something that is only tenuously connected to the overall legacy of using dogs to enforce white supremacy. Similarly, I've known dogs that snapped into violence without it being their or the trainer's fault, again without a connection to enforcing white supremacy.

As for the dog that attacked the author, I don't doubt that she's accurately reporting what happened, but without mentioning things like the dog's breed, that connection to the larger point of dogs used to enforce white supremacy is tenuous — a 100-pound dog attacking does not mean it was an attack dog. A racist dog attacking does not mean it was an attack dog. The connection within canine violence to white supremacy is almost entirely grounded in attack and tracking dogs.

Without that connection, the framing devices of the essay obscure more than they reveal. One of the things that's obscured is the effects of that racist canine violence on black people in general — in my experience, that legacy is self-reinforcing, where black people are more likely to connect dogs to violence and be scared of them. A reasonable analogy might be how black people are more likely to be nervous around the police, and that nervousness reinforces a police view of black people as suspicious. But in either case, it's the responsibility of the human with the weapon to not let that nervousness prejudice them and to not reinforce it.
posted by klangklangston at 12:49 PM on September 18, 2015 [8 favorites]


In 1973 mom bought a 10 week old toy poodle at a garage sale. Even though the dog was black, she hated black people from day one. It was profoundly embarrassing for my parents. I can't believe the breeder instilled that so early. AFAIK, the dog had never been out of the breeder's house.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 1:26 PM on September 18, 2015


If the dog reacted badly to black people at 10 weeks old, and hadn't left the house before, it was likely taking cues from its owners, not the breeder.

Also I couldn't help but laugh at "Even though the dog was black". You mean its fur was black... most dogs' skin is white. And the comment makes it sound like the dog was a race traitor. Ha!
posted by mrbigmuscles at 4:55 PM on September 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


There was a scene in a recent Loius Theroux series (Louis in LA?) where, I am sure, they showed classes to teach dogs just this sort of thing, so even if there are natural reasons for dogs to freak (odd scents, large dark objects), this is a thing people seem to do.


(But then, when Louis went to Jo-Berg he found some gang-bangers who claimed, on camera, to have started microwaving a baby in a microwave as part of a home invasion, so Loius is really good at bring horrific ideas into my home).
posted by Mezentian at 6:20 PM on September 18, 2015


When I was working overseas, whites would talk openly about training their dogs to be racist, to improve their value as guard dogs. I'm not surprised that there is a more implicit version here.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:07 PM on September 18, 2015




There is a bizarre funhouse-mirror reflection of the archetype of the racist dog in all the recent speculation that humans used their nascent relationship with the half-domesticated wolves who became dogs to help them drive Neanderthals to extinction.

Made all the more peculiar by the fact that white Americans (and supposedly Native Americans, but I haven't found anything definitive) have considerable Neanderthal ancestry, but black Africans don't.

Are racist dogs making the distinction between black and white by smell?

If so, are they using HLA types? "It has been stated that police dogs are unable to differentiate the scents of identical twins ..." and identical twins have identical HLA genes, though recent studies seem to show that twins don't have identical or even very similar microbiomes, which would be another candidate for a source of a distinctive smell.

HLA genes strongly influence the behavior of the immune system, and there is another speculative theory out there that the primary selective advantage humans got from mating with Neanderthals in Europe was HLA types which were already well-adapted to the potential pathogens of the new environment they were attempting to establish themselves in, so perhaps we could expect Neanderthal HLA type genes to be strongly represented among the surviving Neanderthal genes borne by Europeans, and therefore a good candidate for the source of a generalizable odor by which dogs could distinguish blacks from whites.

Some blacks, anyway. According to Tavis Smiley, when a small mania to trace one's ancestry back to its African origins using DNA developed among American blacks in the wake of Roots, people were a little shocked to discover that roughly a third of their Y chromosomes were contributed by white men.

Many experiments suggest that even human beings can sniff out some information about HLA types, albeit subconsciously.
posted by jamjam at 8:25 PM on September 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


Director Sam Fuller clearly revised Romain Gary’s memoir to gloss over the fact that the titular dog’s violence is specifically related to state-sponsored police violence.

That sentence is the only one I have to take issue with. From what I know of him, Fuller was not a man to just 'gloss over' something like that. It seems to me more like it's such an obvious, self-evident fact of the time for him that he doesn't need to lead the viewer by the nose to this fact.

Here is a very good post on reddit's r/truefilm subreddit from just 10 days ago.
(Seriously, I strongly urge you to check that out.)

I have just one very important addition to that linked post. In his film Shock Corridor (1963), all the racist rants that Trent goes on were NOT made up - those were actual statements made by various congressmen or that time, spoken on record in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

So I would say that no, Sam Fuller is NOT glossing over that fact, not at all.
posted by chambers at 10:52 PM on September 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


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