Pace conservatives who are scratching their heads, the outrage—indeed, the hysteria—over the killing of Cecil the lion by American dentist, Walter Palmer, isn’t all that difficult to understand.

Given that Cecil was in a designated safe zone, most of us on the right have condemned the actions of the dentist responsible for killing him. However, unlike Palmer’s leftist detractors—those agents of tolerance and compassion—we have not called for the man’s death.

In spite of the cutesy name that human beings assigned to him, Cecil was, after all, a wild beast, a carnivore of the first order. If we are to maintain our belief in human dignity, then we must as well maintain the belief that the human being is fundamentally different in kind from all other living things.

As soon as Cecil’s story began gaining the coverage that it did, I began to suspect that it actually had little, if anything at all, to do with Cecil—or lions, or animals.

It doesn’t even have much at all to do with Walter Palmer.

Like virtually every other issue in the universe of contemporary politics, it had to do with race.

And my suspicion was confirmed when a colleague shared with me a meme that had been making the rounds in the “Black Lives Matter” movement (a movement, incidentally, with which he sympathizes). The meme features a cartoon lion adorned with all of the stereotypical trappings of a black male from “the ‘hood.’” The caption reads: “What if Cecil the Lion were an African-American man?”

To be sure, the left-wing moral imagination being what it is, the murderous rage being directed against Palmer stems from the fact that he is an affluent, white, Western man that hunted and killed an inhabitant from Africa.

Had Cecil’s hunter been, say, a black African, or even a black American, Cecil would be as unknown to the world today as he was unknown just a couple of weeks ago.

Moreover, had the animal in question killed not been an African animal; had it been, say, an American coyote or wolf or mountain lion, and maybe even one that lived in a conservatory, then even if it was killed by a rich white guy, odds are overwhelmingly better than not that this wouldn’t be the story that it is.

Cecil is a proxy for the African blacks who were hunted, enslaved, and later colonized. And Palmer is proxy for the white, Western imperialists who hunted, enslaved, and later colonized them.

This is how leftists view this situation.

From the time of Plato and Aristotle on through the middle Ages, philosophers and theologians assumed that reality, or “being,” is hierarchical: Some beings have more “reality” and, hence, more “perfection” or “goodness” than others. This metaphysical scheme has been called “the Great Chain of Being.”

For example, the medieval thinkers placed God at the apex of the chain: God is both most real and most good. Angels are beneath God, humans are beneath angels, animals are beneath humans, and so forth. Near the bottom of the Great Chain is the Devil, and at the very bottom, or, more precisely, outside of it altogether, is nothingness, no being.

Leftist ideology is a metaphysical, moral scheme with its own Great Chain of Being. Only here, non-whites are at the top, and among these, blacks occupy pride of place. Whites rank near the bottom, if they don’t fall off the chart entirely.

But when we get to whites, discriminations on gender, sexuality, and socio-economic grounds come into play (this really isn’t the case so much when it comes to non-whites): white women rank higher than men, white homosexuals higher than white heterosexuals, the white poor higher than the non-poor.

The lowest of the low are affluent, white heterosexual, masculine (Christian) men.

I don’t know whether Palmer is a Christian. He is definitely white, a man, and, given his practice in dentistry, affluent. Supposedly, he used a photograph of himself and a dead Cecil to impress a woman who he tried to woo. So he is a heterosexual.

And the sheer fact that he not only hunted, but hunted big, dangerous game in “darkest” Africa for purposes of collecting trophies make him, to the left’s collective mind, the embodiment of raw evil: John Wayne come alive again!

The story of Cecil the lion is but another episode in the left’s narrative of perpetual White Oppression and Black Suffering, of the West’s “raping” of Africa.

Only if we understand this, can we understand the left’s response to the slaying of a lion thousands of miles away in Africa.