I'm So Sick of These People

The animal rights group who will not be named, last seen treating women like meat to try to convince you not to eat any, showed up outside the Westminster Kennel Club Show yesterday to protest the American Kennel Club's breeding guidelines. Naturally, their message had to come wrapped inside a grossly offensive stunt, so they were dressed like the KKK.

"Welcome AKC Members," read a banner hanging from the table — with AKC crossed out and KKK written above it. Two [of the group's] protesters dressed as Ku Klux Klan members, while other volunteers handed out brochures that read: "The KKK and the AKC: BFF?"

"Obviously it's an uncomfortable comparison," [the group's] spokesman Michael McGraw said. But the AKC is trying to create a "master race," he added. "It's a very apt comparison."

Except for how it's totally not. I can, however, think of a group who routinely dehumanizes marginalized people to advance a political cause, for whom the comparison might be more viable, but their name escapes me at the moment…

Renee has more, including an excellent point about the group's utter lack of concern for how playing KKK in a public square might be triggering for people of color. Maybe the group is under the mistaken impression that the KKK is ancient history, that no one who's ever been targeted or harassed or hurt by its contemptible members would walk by their table, but just in the last couple of years, Mama Shakes was out for a walk and saw KKK recruitment posters attached to telephone polls. (Which, naturally, she tore down.)

Not that it wouldn't matter even if it were ancient history. But the fact that it isn't makes the group's callous disregard for triggering victims of hate crime even more reprehensible.