This Animated Video Explains What Social Movements Can Learn From Penguins

By Sameer Rao May 18, 2016

A new animated video points to an unlikely source for solutions to the world’s social justice problems: penguins.

Activist and Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Janaya Khan’s new video describes the behavior of penguins, who huddle together for warmth via an ongoing cyclical process, as a useful way of understanding what a racially equitable society might look like:

So I’m watching National Geographic—cause that’s what I do in my spare time—I am seeing these empire penguins. The penguins are ordered in a particular way. They are in the shape of a spiral and the penguins on the inside are really really warm and the penguins on the outside are cold and gradually over time the penguins on the inside would move out and penguins on the outside would move in. That’s how they survive. So imagine if our organizing structures and the ways we understood decolonization and even where we placed ourselves in movements took on that framework.

Check out Khan’s full analogy in the video above.