The Authors:
Erin Tarver, The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog: Race Criminality and the Pit Bull Culture, 55 Culture Theory and Critique 273, 281 (2013)
Ann L. Schiavone, Real Bite: Legal Realism and Meaningful Rational Basis in Dog Law and Beyond, 25 WM. & MARY BILL OF RIGHTS J. 65, 111 – 12 (2016)
Ann Linder, The Black Man's Dog: The Social Context of Breed Specific Legislation, 25 Animal Law 51 (201
Colin Dayan, "Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, and preemptive justice", Boston Review, 26-28 (2010)
Karen Delise, The Pit Bull Placebo: The Media, Myths, and Politics of Canine Aggression, Anubis Publishing, (2007)
Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon, Vintage Books (2016)
Together, these authors have created a false history of the pit bull in America to support the proposition that pit bulls were once beloved, "All American" dogs at the turn of the 20th century when white people owned them. These authors assert that pit bulls only became vilified when Black people began owning them in the 1970s. The false history in turn allows these authors to contend that Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) banning or regulating pit bulls only was implemented when pit bulls were associated with Black owners. Both of these assertions are false. Pit bulls have always been regarded as dangerous. Breed Specific Legislation was in fact called for and enacted at the turn of the 20th century.
The PBA's version of history is demonstrably false. News archive searches turn up opinion pieces calling for bulldogs to be banned in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the dogs were associated with white owners and white dogfighters. The first BSL was implemented in the late 19th century, with several cities adopting some form of BSL in the early 20th century, the period that was supposedly the heyday of the pit bull as "America's Dog."
Karen Delise created the first version of the pit bull's fake history as an "All American" pet in her 2007 self-published book, The Pit Bull Placebo. She maintains that pit bulls of the 19th and early 20th centuries were loyal farm dogs and universally beloved pets. She claims that by the late 19th century pit bulls were no longer used for dogfighting, which is ridiculously false. News archives of the era are full of features praising the ferocity of the bulldog as a fighting machine and condemning bulldog attacks on innocent people. Check out what turns up in news archives from Baltimore, just one city from that time period.
Delise blames the pit bull's negative image on modern media bias, politicians, and ignorance, but she does not blame racism in The Pit Bull Placebo. She likens the change in the 70s through the 90s to the Salem Witch Hunts and McCarthyism. She references race by saying that when people say pit bulls were different than other kinds of dogs, they were "removing their canineness". Without mentioning race directly, she compares recognition of the pit bulls' inbred dangerousness to race, but she does not assert that racism was a motivation for the supposed change in public regard for the pit bull.
Erin Tarver accepts Delise's false history of the pit bull's glory days and subsequent fall from grace without question in her 2013 paper, "The Dangerous Individual('s) Dog." And, she adds a new motivation for the changed attitude towards pit bulls: racism. According to Tarver, pit bulls were beloved pets in the early 20th century because white people owned them, but became reviled when pit bulls became associated with Black owners. Tarver suggests that the pit bull only became "pathologised and criminalized" once they became associated with Black people in the late 20th century, as if the original function of pit bulls -- dogfighting -- was not always considered criminal and pathological by the vast majority of people in the 19th an early 20th century.
Bronwen Dickey's 2016 book, Pit Bull: Battle over an American Icon, shares all kinds of evidence that pit bulls were beloved in the early 20th century to expand on Delise's false history of the pit bull. The problem is that when pit bulls became popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were just as controversial then as they are today. Dickey's "research" into the history of the pit bull consists of cherry picking tidbits that reveal that there was indeed a fad for pit bulls in the late 19th and the very early years of the 20th century. She presents the evidence of the pit bull fad without showing the inevitable and immediate consequences -- the news reports describing attacks on people and pets, the surge in casual dogfighting for entertainment, the opinion pieces about the bulldogs' dangerousness, and calls for breed bans.
Just one example of her one-sided "history" is her treatment of college fraternity mascots from the chapter "America's Dog." She shows that fighting pit bulls became very popular as college athletics team and fraternity mascots for a short period of time in the early 20th century. She doesn't mention that those mascots began to be banned from colleges because they attacked people and the fraternity boys used them for dogfighting.
Most importantly, she neglects to mention that the first BSL regarding pit bulldogs was enacted during the period that Dickey hails as the heyday of the universally beloved pit bull. If she bothered to include these facts, she would have to conclude that then as now, when pit bulls become more popular as pets, pit bull attacks skyrocket, draw a tremendous amount of controversy, and cities move to regulate them. It was then, as it is now about the dangerousness of the pit bull breed.
As background for her study, Ann Linder retells the same false history of the pit bull in, "The Black Man's Dog: The Social context of Breed Specific Legislation" to assert that pit bulls are viewed as great pets or dangerous depending on who owns them. In a study about "the social context of BSL", it is odd that Linder seems to be completely unaware that BSL regulating "bulldogs" (pit bulls) can be found as early as 1893 and throughout the early 1900s when they were "the white man's dog." She seems to mistakenly believe that BSL only began being enacted in the late 20th century. In addition, Linder fails to mention that many opinion pieces and editorials can be found advocating for bans and regulation of bulldogs in the late 19th century and early 20th century when pit bulls were associated with white people. That is a tremendous amount of "context" that was left out of her study of "context."
Linder's study looks at scant evidence from a single, small-scale examination that she administered to reach very weak conclusions. Linder claims that people believe pit bulls are more likely to be owned by Black people. She then claims this "might" mean that pit bull bans and home insurance policies excluding pit bulls could possibly also disproportionately restrict Black people from housing. She says this "possible" racial discrimination "might" be intentional, but she has no evidence of any of these suppositions.
Linder's study concludes merely by saying, "At this time, more research is needed…" and "…such findings would not be sufficient to challenge legislation legally…" Linder admits that "at the present time, actual ownership (of pit bulls by race) data is not available, (but) if true ownership resembles the perceived distribution measured here" they might be able to prove her claim. So, Linder cannot establish if pit bulls are more often owned by Black people. And, she established that the insurance companies and city councils have no way of knowing that either.
This false narrative about the once universally loved pet bulldog is the foundation for the claim that pit bulls have a bad reputation only because white people are racist. All that follows depends on this false narrative and premise. Once the full history of the pit bull is revealed, the actual reasons for breed restrictions in housing also emerge. Pit bulls are dangerous no matter who owns them and need to be regulated. There is nothing racist about wanting to remove the danger we see in these videos from our neighborhoods.
Activist groups such as the NAACP are currently seeking reform in the insurance industry to assure racial equity. However, it seems pretty strange that only white people are leading this particular charge of discrimination and racism against the housing insurance industry. That is, until you remember that these people are not anti-racism advocates. They are pit bull ownership advocates using the contrived claim of "possible" racism as a hammer to ban insurance companies from implementing breed restrictions. PBAs know that the insurance industry is vulnerable to this particular attack because the insurance industry participated in devastating racist policies like redlining in the past.
"Sea of White" Not Unnoticed
Essentially, "the sea of White," are PBAs and humane groups disproportionately represented by white women who are co-opting diversity, equity and inclusion messaging in order to advocate for dogs generally and pit bulls specifically. This phenomenon is not exclusive to PBAs and humane groups, though.
In 2018, Travis Wood was looking for a job in the field of video production, advertising, and design. While checking out the "Who We Are" pages of companies he was considering, he noticed the sea of white faces. And more than that. Those white people seem to be more willing to include dogs in their work space than to hire Black people. Since he works in video production, he used his skills to create a rather compelling illustration of what he found. Don't miss the pit bulls, bully breeds and pit bull-mixes in the video. Owned, of course, by white people.
