Humanism’s progress demoted animals to the inhuman, like racism after slavery.

Evidence

Besides, animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed. A logic parallel to that of racism. An objective animal “reign” has only existed since Man has existed. It would take too long to redo the genealogy of their respective statuses, but the abyss that separates them today, the one that permits us to send beasts, in our place, to respond to the terrifying universes of space and laboratories, the one that permits the liquidation of species even as they are archived as specimens in the African reserves or in the hell of zoos - since there is no more room for them in our culture than there is for the dead - the whole covered by a racist sentimentality (baby seals, Brigitte Bardot), this abyss that separates them follows domestication, just as true racism follows slavery. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 434

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s earlier material on Orientalism: how the category of ‘Other’ is constructed by the colonizer’s gaze — animals here stand in for the colonized. — connects to: Between the 18th and 19th centuries the enemy became classified as inhuman; Believing blacks were animal-like masked the contradiction of slavery with equality. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1167
• SEED: The animal-holocaust-to-human-racism analogy, including the sting of ‘baby seals, Brigitte Bardot,’ is a provocation worth an essay on the politics of species-based sentimentality.

Broader Connections

• Between the 18th and 19th centuries the enemy became classified as inhuman #exemplifies (0.82)