With an English degree from the University of the Massachusetts, Amherst, you can be qualified to write a letter to the editor decrying “speciesist microaggressions.”
In a Nov. 25 letter to the editor in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Marion W. Copeland expressed her offense over the use of the word “animals” in the title of a guest article by Marilyn Marks.
The article was titled: “Naming All the Animals of Racism Right Here, Right Now.”
While Copeland wrote she has no qualms with Marks’ original article against “racial microaggressions,” the title of the article itself was a “speciesist microaggression” against "non-human animals."
“The headline itself strikes me as a speciesist microaggression, all the more egregious because it was likely unintentional,” Copeland wrote.
So because Marks and the editors at the Daily Hampshire Gazette used a common phrase—“the animals of [X]”—Copeland stated they are committing a heinous “microaggression" — even “more egregious” because they used it in the layman’s fashion and did not mean offense.
Copeland explained speciesism is allegedly bad because it is “rooted in our assumption that humans are somehow superior to other animals”:
Speciesism is rooted in our assumption that humans are somehow superior to other animals and in our tendency to equate negative behavior like racist stereotyping and agression [sic] with other-than-human animals, and our consequent failure to include anyone nonhuman in our community of concern and compassion.
Copeland stated she would “totally support Marks’ conclusion that it is high time we humans ‘cross the racial divide, reach out and take steps to heal our human family’ — and join the other animals.”
According to Copeland, however, “The only animal I know that has anything to do with racism and certainly with ‘racial microaggressions’ is the human animal.”
By an extension of Copeland’s logic, this means humans need to “join the other animals” who are apparently superior to humans because of their inability to commit racial microaggressions.