The Summer of the Whale

The seas and the land are teeming with schadenfreude

It was May when humans realized we were in a war with the orcas — although the orcas had declared war long before that.

A May 18 story on the website Live Science reported that attacks by orcas had been growing in frequency since 2020; last month, they sank three boats off the Iberian coast in Europe. Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, speculated that the attacks were inspired by White Gladis, an orca who had been traumatized by a boat. Gladis, after this “critical moment of agony,” had begun ramming into boats, inspiring other whales to do the same.

It didn’t take long for the story to go viral — and for many people to take the side of the whales. As one meme puts it, “I’m joining the war on the orcas on the side of the orcas.” People made t-shirts and stickers with the pun “orcanize”; others images of orcas with the phrases “Join the orca uprising” and “Fuck them yachts” written in glittery lettering. The roiling force of the internet content machine — along with TV news and social media — keep churning out whale stories, and we keep consuming them.

Stories of whales attacking boats are nothing new. As researchers have noted, even this recent round of attacks began well before May. We don’t even know if White Gladis is actually leading an army of angry orcas or if it’s just a temporary cetacean fad.  Once, in 1987, a female orca wore a dead salmon on her head; weeks later, two other pods of orcas were all wearing salmon as hats! But it doesn’t matter. Not really. Because these orcas have captured the American cultural imagination. This is the summer of the whale. And popular sentiment favors the whales.

In Slate, environmental historian Anna Guasco speculated about why this moment in whale violence feels different. “Part of what makes these boat-sinking whales into anti-capitalist allies is their choice of targets,” Guasco wrote. “Much of the coverage and response focuses on the whales’ attacking yachts in a popular European vacationing location. These yachts symbolize excesses of wealth under capitalism. This story simply wouldn’t have the same appeal or political resonance if the whales weren’t targeting symbols of wealth, waste, and opulence.”

Americans’ wages remain stagnant even as corporate profits hit record highs and inflation keeps rising, and support for labor unions is at an all-time high. America has the largest income and wealth inequality gap of all the developed nations. America also has a gender pay gap that hasn’t budged for 20 years — a pay gap that’s even greater when race is taken into account. And none of these gaps are closing. 100 million people in America have medical debt — debt they acquired for having the audacity to stay alive. America is a country where the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and in response, workers are told they aren’t working hard enough.

Additionally, it’s been one year since the Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion, putting what were once protected rights into absolute chaos. People are dying because of this decision. And two of the men who were part of reversing Roe have been caught taking large undisclosed financial gifts from billionaires.   

It’s not shocking that Americans are gripped by pro-whale sentiment, given that most of us have more in common with an orca than with someone who can afford a yacht.

But it’s not just the money. Recently, I went to a dinner party where a woman who was in the process of getting a divorce told me that she was Gladis and that Gladis is all of us. She showed me some whale memes and talked about getting an orca tattoo. “The whales haven’t forgiven us for Sea World,” she said, “and honestly, neither have I. I was raised on Free Willy.”

Every day there’s fresh news about attacks on Americans’ autonomy — transgender kids, drag queens, women seeking healthcare. Living in a system that is killing us slowly and deliberately, that daily assaults our lives and our livelihoods, gives many of us a feeling of common cause with sea creatures, whose homes and families we have done so much to destroy. 

It doesn’t feel like an accident that this summer the seas, and the land are teeming with a darker sense of schadenfreude — angry Americans memeifying the deaths of the wealthy, and orcas ramming into the boats.

Writing in the Boston Review, Alexis Pauline Grumbs notes that “a deadly system doesn’t have to seem like it’s targeting you directly to kill you consistently.” She describes one whale who survived a propeller wound as a baby only to die of that wound many years later when it was reopened during her pregnancy. And another who “had given birth eight times, survived entanglement five different times, and had scars from multiple boat strikes and propellers. And at least three of her children died from entanglement before she died. Maybe you know something about what it means to bear the constant wounding of a system that says it’s about something else entirely.”

We, too, are being wounded and killed by the larger structure in which we’re all embedded. Directly and indirectly, we are drowning.

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Further Reading:

In 2021, I wrote a summer manifesto that remains one of my most popular newsletters.