Racist, or Just Animal Crackers?

Abstract

University lecturer Charles reports how the media is full of stories about invading squirrels. One such report told how a local councillor proposed increased security measures at the usual ports of entry - overhanging trees should be pruned, commenting: "When I was a lad you didn't see squirrels coming into town - now we're inundated with them.... One woman told me she got surrounded by six squirrels.... One's OK, but five or six is a bit of a problem." Was the man is merely parroting racist phrases? asks Charles, contrasting his comments with those of the BNP's David Guynan: "This town is turning completely into a foreign land.... It's like the grey squirrels taking over. I'm a red squirrel, that's what I am." Writes Charles: Is this analogy of immigrants and asylum-seekers as grey squirrels merely a modern retelling of the Nazi metaphor of Jews as rats? There's an old joke: "What are the two differences between a squirrel and a rat? A bushy tail and a good PR guy." And these days the greys aren't getting great PR.

What would ‘inclusive journalism’ have felt like for the pig?

“…When nonhuman others are central to the stories critiqued, the analysis remains staunchly anthropocentric and blind to the naturalized ideologies of the ways in which the media helps subjugate the nonhuman (e.g. Charles 2004Charles , 2012Olesen 2008;Grunwald and Rupar 2015).…”