Racism and Nonhuman Justice in Samuel Fuller’s White Dog

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about racism to be understood either as a problem on the level of culture or, in the wake of the Anthropocene, as only one effect of a more generally abusive behaviour that instrumentalises, exploits and colonises human and non-human nature alike. Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982) addresses this complex question. Specifically, the film extends the critical discussion of racism as it shows ideology being ‘implanted’ into a white shepherd dog that is trained to kill black people. This turns the shepherd into a symbol and instrument of racism. Yet the dog also has its real existence and real history of abuse. Fleshing out a critique of racism with a nonhuman animal’s relational experience of suffering, the film arrives at a complex understanding of justice, not to relativise racism, but to dramatise the extent of its impact. This essay reconstructs Fuller’s critical approach by reading the film from two perspectives: a human-centred one (foregrounding racism in an ordinary sense) and one primarily concerned with the nonhuman as informed by Donna Haraway’s writings on dog training and interspecies companionship. It will be made clear that, in Fuller’s view, racism also implies a crime against nature.