what's milk got to do, got to do with it
Joaquin Phoenix swept the acting awards this season for JOKER.
Now, I feel about Phoenix’s performance the way I feel about many of the presidential candidates who aren’t my first choice: Taken in a vacuum, it’s easy to admire many qualities of that person and their work. All these people put their hearts and backbones into what they do, which I can respect and appreciate even if the final product doesn’t do it for me.
But their work is overshadowed by foaming stan enthusiasm that this one person’s work is THE GOATest OF ALL GOATs, and a person who likes someone else’s work is an existential threat that must be obliterated (for how can my GOAT be the GOATest of GOATs if someone else thinks that there is another GOAT? DESTROY THE FALSE GOAT. See also: the plot of Snow White and, I think, Willow?)
ANYWAY, I don’t actually want to write about Phoenix’s win. I want to write about his speech.
More accurately, I feel I must write about it.
As a well-meaning progressive vegetarian cishet white person, I am uniquely suited to speak to it: the highs, the lows, the left turns, and the reason I woke up this morning still feeling icky about a speech composed of sentences that I mostly all agreed with.
I’m not trying to pile on Phoenix here, so slow your roll. I just don’t believe that the best way to help well-intentioned people is to ignore their fuckups out of fear they’ll bail if we offer them a chance to grow. I think the best way to help well-intentioned people is to say, “Hey, that wasn’t it,” and have faith that they’ll take the chance to grow. So truly, it is with respect and a challenge to grow that I say:
This speech gave me the icks.
I was excited to see what Phoenix would do with his Oscars speech after I watched the clip of his speech at the BAFTAs. You know, when he opened with “I feel very honored and privileged to be here tonight, and the BAFTAs have always been very supportive of my career, and I’m deeply appreciative,” and without a blink he slid into, “But I have to say that I also feel conflicted because so many of my favorite actors who are deserving don’t have the same privilege.”
Then he dropped the hammer with, “I think that we send a very clear message to people of color that you’re not welcome here. I think that’s the message that we’re sending to people that have contributed so much to our medium and our industry and in ways that we benefit from,” and finished it off with the killer three-part combo: “I have not done everything in my power to ensure that the sets I work on are inclusive. But I think that it’s more than just having sets that are multicultural.” BAM! PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY!
“I think that we really have to do the hard work to truly understand systemic racism.” POW! SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION!
“I think that it is the obligation of the people that have created and perpetuate and benefit from a system of oppression to be the ones that dismantle it. So, that’s on us.” COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP! Aaaaaand I’m dead.
So when Phoenix opened his Oscar speech last night with:
I think the greatest gift that [Hollywood has] given me and many of us in this room is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless.
I cackled with preemptive glee. HERE WE GO, BABY.
YES, JOAQUIN! DO IT LIKE YOU DID AT BAFTAS! Make that room go QUIET!
I've been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively and I think at times we feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality.
Oop, not sure about commonality but—
I think whether we're talking about gender and equality
Yes!
or racism
SAY IT!
or queer rights
LOVE IS LOVE!
or indigenous rights
DOWN WITH COLONIALISM UP WITH FIRST NATIONS!
or animal rights
saywhatnow?
we're talking about the fight against injustice.
I’m sorry, I’m still catching up here—
We're talking about the fight against the belief that one nation
Okay…
one people
Yes.
one race
Back on track.
one gender
Please don’t do it Joaquin
or one species
Okay but you did it though
has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.
I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world. And many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric world view: The belief that we're the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources.
We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that's intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.
I’ll be the first person to tell you that factory farming is a horrific atrocity. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was ten. My kids eat very little, VERY expensive meat. We are a 95% vegetarian household. Animals should not be abused in any capacity, for any reason, ever.
Yet animal rights is a very different conversation from the conversations we must have about violence we apply to entire groups of human beings. I love animals and hate people who hurt them. AND abhorrent animal abuse is DIFFERENT from the deep violations of systemic human suffering. It is.
If Joaquin wanted to make a speech about animal rights, he could have done that.
If he wanted to make a speech about human rights, he could have done that.
But I struggle to hear him weave together a narrative about human rights with a narrative about animal rights without feeling that he’s othering, whatabouting, and diminishing the pain of oppressed groups of human beings.
This is the speech version of the pulled Superbowl PETA ad that had woodland creatures taking a knee in “homage” to Kaepernick’s NFL protest, complete with the hashtag #allspeciesmatter.
But YO, #alllivesmatter is THE PROBLEMATIC RETORT of those seeking to avoid engaging with racist violence, not the MORAL OF THE STORY. And by extension, #AllSpeciesMatter is the PROBLEMATIC VEGAN VERSION OF THE RETORT. It oversimplifies oppression to release oppressors from personal responsibility. Worse, it erases the voices of protestors like Colin Kaepernick who lost his job, and countless Black people who lost their lives in acts of senseless, racist violence.
“Thanks for your protest about saving Black lives, I’m going to take it and save fish lives” is not an “homage.” It’s a hijacking. It’s a gross, gross, supergross, nonsensical hijacking. FISH CAN’T KNEEL.
As much as I believe Phoenix’s heart was reaching for the right words, the ones he chose weren’t them. I respect him enough and see him working hard enough that I’m willing - nay, eager to say, “This isn’t it.”
I started to get nervous even before we starting talking cow insemination. For me, the red flag went up at at the beginning of his speech, at the word commonality. “Commonality” sounds like “everyone just needs to understand that we’re on each other’s teams,” and I have a pretty short fuse when it comes to being informed that a person is “actually” on my team. (Hot tip: If you have to tell someone you’re on their team, it’s because your actions have been showing them that you are NOT.) Not to mention, if you try to put everyone on one team without first dealing with the deeply-held biases among members of that team, you’re just going to have a team fraught with deeply-held biases, where the same people get the mic and the same people do not. You know the old expression: wherever you go, there you are racist.
Sure, I think it would have been great to point out the common ground between the white feminist and #OscarsSoWhite crews. As long as Phoenix also made sure to point out that white supremacy and patriarchy are inextricably marbled together, and white feminists can never be free from oppression until they’ve smashed white supremacy alongside patriarchy.
But he didn’t do that. He hijacked himself, and this speech gave me the icks.
But why?
Is it because when he lumps together human and non-human oppression into one narrative, it makes me wonder if Joaquin finds both the experiences of a cow and the experiences of a black female human being equally alien to him? Which makes me feel… less than human? Which… is a feeling I don’t want to get from someone who’s ostensibly on my team?
Is it because this speech calls up historical comparisons of marginalized groups to animals as a way to diminish their humanity, make their abuse tolerable to those who witnessed it, and create a clear hierarchy between groups?
Is it because the vegan movement has been chronically exclusionary of people of color? Is it because veganism has been one element of the widespread appropriation of foods that figure prominently into culturally specific cuisines, resulting in hella stupid markups on things like plantains?
Is it because putting “people who drink milk” on the same level as “people who perpetuate white supremacy” and “people who don’t pay women equally” moves the Overton window way out into left field? I worry that Joaquin hopes that the epiphany might be, “Drinking milk is as bad as racism,” when I fear the epiphany will be, “Racism isn’t that bad. It’s just like drinking milk.”
Racism isn’t like animal cruelty. It’s like racism. And it’s so dangerous to draw a line between milk and racism. Milk is so much easier to talk about. Which is why, when Phoenix went on to say:
And I think we fear the idea of personal change, because we think we have to sacrifice something, to give something up. But human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious. And I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.
This very good point about applying creativity and compassion to racism and sexism and homophobia and colonialism has just become a very good point about applying our humanity to milk.
“We CAN be inventive! We milked almonds! We milked HEMP! Good for us! Well done us! You’re welcome, world! Gosh, we’re good. We really are at our best here. Clocking out for the day!”
This is the most insidious problem with conflating moral crimes against the environment, animals, and humans. I think most people are going to settle on the one of which they feel they are innocent, and assume it’s a threefer. It’s not. Racists can love animals and animal abusers can hire women into leadership positions and vegans can march in a pride parade without questioning whether they should be wearing a fierce feather headdress.
Crimes don’t work like that. Less intensely, mistakes don’t work like that, either. People are LOTS OF THINGS. We are responsible for ALL OF THEM. Phoenix isn’t about shirking responsibility. He goes on to say,
Now, I have been a scoundrel in my life. I have been a scoundrel, I've been selfish, I've been cruel at times, hard to work with and ungrateful. But so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. And I think that's when we're at our best: When we support each other, not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes, but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other, when we guide each other toward redemption. That is the best of humanity.
I respect that he’s acknowledging his own bullshit. I like that he’s being real and transparent. “I’ve been hard to work with” is not something you hear every day and that shit’s refreshing as hell. I wish he’d just stopped after expressing gratitude for a second chance. Or even offered to give his own personal second chances to people who are seeking to grow and learn and pursue redemption.
Sadly, his blanket statement that, paraphrased, “second chances are the best of humanity”? Twas uttered from the golden, jewel-encrusted throne of safety, ‘neath the platinum beer helmet of privilege.
If he wants to educate people and offer redemption for trespasses against his actual self, like, cool. He can do that. He can literally do that, because he’s probably got the time and hasn’t been doing it his whole life. These conversations are still dewy and fresh for him. He’s probably still hopeful that he can change some minds by talking it out.
Yeah, call for other privileged, safe people to have those conversations with willing but discombobulated doofuses on the rebound from a monumental fuckup! COOL! Start a woke poker night. Or a poke wokers night. Either one could be fun.
But me, I can cancel the shit out of Ryan Seacrest, and that’s the best of MY humanity. If the slavering hordes of shitty bros want to find their way to a second chance, they can appoint a fucking navigator, pay a fucking therapist, and get the hell to work. The internet exists and it’s full of smart people who have already written billions of words about how to not be a fucking asshole. I’m getting prickly here (in case you didn’t notice) because I am sick of hearing moral imperatives to be kind to those who DGAF about other people. I don’t think he meant it that way? But I also don’t think he took the time to consider the impact of his words.
I just – I want to – um – When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric: He said 'Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.' Thank you."
Dear Joaquin (not that he’s reading this, but),
“Run to the rescue with love” is beautiful. It’s a beautiful way to live and a beautiful way to hold your brother in your heart and all our lives. Thank you for sharing it with us. I was moved.
I sincerely thank you for putting yourself out there. It takes strength to be vulnerable.
I hope you know that I don’t take the time to criticize those who are beyond learning. I’m thankful you’re here. And I’m telling you this wasn’t it. There are connections between human rights, animal rights, and environmental advocacy, but 45 seconds isn’t enough time to do that connection justice without allowing one complex issue to swallow other, more uncomfortable and crucially important complex issues.
Find more navigators and read more stories. Put your work where your words are and show us a shitload of inclusive hires. Meet more people and listen to them openly. I hope you will because we need you.
xoxo