Page 10 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

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counted” has determined the level of change considered to be “dangerous.”)

Karen Mutter’s “Kinship and Murder” begins as a response to the anti-gay

massacre in Orlando but moves almost immediately to the other recent violence

in her back yard: the gunning down of Trayvon Martin of 2012 and the Florida

bear hunt of 2015. Mutter is both unable and unwilling to consider any of these

events separately. “In a world that does not see each living being as kin, we are

all fair game.” More, she links them to the violence of her own profession,

medicine, which “did not ask me to consider the lives of my kin beyond the

human realm... [which] does not consider the consequences of pharmaceutical

and radiologic pollution for the Earth and all beings...[which] places human need

as supreme to everything else.”

It is the separating that is killing us—the not-seeing-as-kin/kinned. If it is true that

we cannot consider our ecological crisis apart from systemic racism, it’s also true

that we can’t keep addressing human-on-human violence without reference to

the larger physical world we’re all part of. In her notes to “She and I,” Kathryn

Kirkpatrick writes of the growing rift she has felt between herself and other

feminists whose “thinking.. assumes human beings are in the struggle alone.” As

someone for whom “feminist,” intrinsic and essential as it is and has been to my

sanity and my self-definition, is for this very reason no longer an adequate

identifier, I felt a shock of recognition at these words. What if, as Megan

Hollingsworth suggests in the epigraph above, when we said “community,” we

meant not only the humans existing inside those borders but all the other

organisms living there as well?iv What if social injustice were never considered

apart from the injustices we humans inflict on the earth and other nonhuman

beings? “Some of us have become used to thinking that woman is the nigger of

the world, that a person of color is the nigger of the world, that a poor person is

the nigger of the world. But, in truth, Earth itself has become the nigger of the

world.”v Alice Walker wrote these words, way back in 1986.

But justice isn’t the only or even the main issue. It’s our human cluelessness.

“Our spiritual ecosystem is out of whack because there’s too much human nature