Rafael Román Martel

Wolff requested of Harris-Perry a “historical” take on the matter, and while she barely mentioned Vick (and said nothing of Tucker Carlson), she gave an extensive history of African-Americans and dogs. “We want to be really careful here,” she warned, “There are some complex issues at stake whenever you are talking simultaneously about African Americans and talking about issues of animal rights.” She explained that “questions about the humanity of black people and the relative importance of the life of animals have in fact been deeply connected,” complicating the issue for Vick. To tie the argument to the story, she noted that domestic animals are often “fetishized” such that, while “we’re not really all that horrified” about fur or food animals, the killing of a dog is a cardinal sin. Compare this to the fact that “one of the ways that black people were enslaved… was that black people were equated to animals,” she continued, and that “dogs were directly used against black people.”

She doesn’t elaborate further than noting that there is a “weird kind of interconnection and anxiety” between animal abuse and civil rights, so it’s left to the viewer to try to figure out how to weave her historical context into the Michael Vick case. In fact, the only comment directly related to the Vick case would be her note that people are often not horrified by the way animals are killed for fur or food.

This leaves many open questions as to what many of her comments– especially the note about dogs being used against African Americans during the Civil Rights movement– have to do with Vick. Carried to its logical conclusion, Harris-Perry could perhaps be suggesting that a reason Vick behaved as he did against dogs was because, as an African-American, he was participating in a long-standing feud with canine-kind. His crime, she may be arguing, was a subconscious expression of racial anxiety, and must be understood as such before condemning Vick the way someone who has not experienced racial strife (ahem, Tucker Carlson) could not understand. Or perhaps she may be suggesting that it was an act of envy and not wrath– “questions about the relative humanity of black people” in the days of slavery led many of vile mind to conclude dogs were a higher lifeform than African-Americans, as dogs and certain domestic animals were “fetishized” into an untouchable innocence.

As the comments are so detached from the subject matter, it’s basically a Rorschach test of political ideology. Liberals will embrace the historical context. Those on the right will cry “race card.” Hopefully Harris-Perry will elaborate further in the future, as, if there was a highly sophisticated historical point directly related to Vick’s dog abuses in her commentary, something was lost in translation.