Speciesism and racism have been present from the beginning of the nation, but the rupture in white racism at having a population it had intentionally animalized take on the mantle of citizenship forced a change in racist tactics and in how formerly enslaved people resisted. The human consequences of evolving racist expedients at the individual and systemic levels and resulting Black resistance drove-and still drive-much of American policy. Constants in the evolutionary process have been white reifications of the trope of animalization and Black strategies of opposition to those tropes. The fight along these lines has had significant consequences for animals, who remain at the bottom of the social order. In other words, while American racism targets its most vulnerable human groups, it also hurts animals. In a nation whose development has been largely defined by racial thinking and dispossession, the collateral damage of human bigotries for nonhuman animals is significant.